It was humid. Very humid. The outer walls of the tents were soaking wet and we were standing in a wall of fog. That meant, according to Dylan, it was going to be very hot today.
It was the last day at Trails Camp and there was only a longer hike planned for the morning, because in the evening we would sleep under the stars! The troop was conspicuously quiet and visibly exhausted today. Probably also because almost everyone was coughing and sniffing around.
It was only at 6:40 a.m. that we set off, but after only 400 metres of walking on the dirt route, Dylan stopped, stopped on a green area just before the undergrowth, and looked around reverently. The white fog had covered the entire backdrop and visibility was only a few metres.
‘It makes sense to stop and sharpen your senses before entering an area with limited visibility,” Dylan explains, and we remained still for a few minutes before we reverently set ourselves in motion and the train snaked into the damp undergrowth.
It was a weird, mystical and surreal atmosphere! The fog lay heavily on the ground and enveloped the bush in a misty garment. The countless drops on the branches, leaves and spider webs glistened like golden-steel-blue, life-giving diamonds and the rising sun, trying to break through the wet wall of fog, conjured up magical plays of light in the room, on the ground, the bushes and spider webs. The dry bushes and gnarled trees created an almost eerie, yet beautiful atmosphere and everything smelled wonderfully intense. Slowly, the first birds began to sing and the higher the sun rose, the more golden the clouds of mist became.
When we emerged from the undergrowth onto an open space at around 7:20 a.m., we were suddenly completely enveloped by the golden sea of fog. The glowing fireball was already providing some warmth, and isolated tree silhouettes were silhouetted black on the horizon. It was like a scene from a fever dream or from the end-time film ‘Mad Max’, only not so dry.
The higher we climbed, the more this surreal atmosphere dissipated and the view became clearer again. The sun was now gently warming us and had already freed the surrounding grasses and bushes from the dew. Below us, the valleys, forests and plains still lay peacefully under a mystical, white, damp blanket. It suddenly got very warm. I took off my cap, stowed my fleece jacket in my backpack and even zipped up my trouser legs. ‘Yes, it is going to be very, very warm today.’
We took off our rucksacks and stayed up on the hill for a while to enjoy the atmosphere. I used the time to get my body more flexible again with a few yoga exercises and to stretch properly with epic views.
I felt good! I didn’t have any muscle soreness and my shoulders and neck didn’t hurt or feel stiff. I had expected otherwise, but of course I was very happy. Apparently my body had already adjusted to the strain – despite the cold.
And mentally? Did I want to go back? To camp or even to Germany?
No. As far as I was concerned, I could have continued in this way for a while. Every day, walks in the bush, encounters with animals and enjoying the wonderful blaze of colour in nature. But I would have liked to take more time at each of the stops and go into more detail.
For example, I had discovered strange, soft, wooden structures on a branch and only learned from Njabulo, when I asked, that these were the excrement of a bark worm. Or a strangely shiny tree stump, a ‘rhino rubbing pole’. Rhinos use such stumps for years to rub off insects and dirt and have made the surface of this stump completely smooth and shiny. There was so much more to discover!
But what I could have done with was a fresh pair of trousers. Generally, a fresh set of clothes would be nice after a week. I would also like to repair my air mattress, because it lost some air over night and I was slowly starting to crave a decent, freshly brewed coffee from a portafilter machine. I would also like to be completely free of colds again, but otherwise I would much rather stay here than go back to Kuleni, back to Bhejane Camp and all the bloodsuckers. Strangely enough, there were far fewer bloodsuckers here – apart from the small ticks.
‘Pack your things, we have to go back to the foggy valley,’ Dylan suddenly shouted, pulling me out of my thoughts. After a few hundred metres, the train stopped at a midden and we stood in front of a fresh, still steaming pile of rhino dung. The rhino was still very close!
The sun had now conquered the last strips of fog, but the rhino remained gone, despite further fresh tracks. The tracks always led far away from the camp. Unfortunately, we didn’t have any provisions for lunch, so we broke off and walked back in a wide arc towards Trails Camp.
At 9:30 am, we still had no new countable animal encounters, but one of our fellow students had lost the sole of her shoe, so she was now walking barefoot. This significantly reduced the group’s hiking speed, and Dylan led us out of the thorny undergrowth onto a largely thorn-free path. It was now almost 25 degrees and the sun was beating down on my calves when Dylan stopped again and picked up something long and black from the ground.
It was a kind of ‘shorting cable’ as used by technicians to partially de-energise electric fences when they have to work on them – ‘Or by poachers when they want to climb over the fence,’ Dylan explains, stowing the cable in his backpack.
We reached Trail Camp at around 10:15 am without a single encounter. I was a little disappointed, so I packed my things for the night under the stars. It was supposed to get up to 36 degrees, and I didn’t feel like putting everything away in the tent when it got hot at midday.
I had opened the two tent windows completely and soaked my shirt, trousers and bush hat with water. Now a light breeze was blowing through my tent and the damp clothes provided a pleasant temperature. ‘It’s quite bearable like this,’ I thought, and tried to get some sleep.
When we stood in front of the trail camp with our backpacks at around 2:30 pm, it was still scorching hot. Some utensils, such as a shovel or a cooking stand for the fire, still had to be distributed, so I stood at the edge with an aluminium jug in my hand and looked with interest at the equipment of the other participants. It really was a motley crew! One guy simply tied his thick mattress to his small 20-litre school backpack, while others were fully equipped with huge trekking backpacks – including Dylan. A large sleeping mat hung under his backpack and he even had a cuddly toy with him. So much for ‘only take the bare essentials’ and ‘we’ll sleep in our sleeping bags on the bare ground,’ I thought.
As we trudged the four kilometres to the striking green Shepherd Tree, the sun slowly dipped towards the horizon, painting the sky in beautiful shades of yellow, orange and purple once more. I inflated my air mattress, unrolled my sleeping bag and looked forward to spending the night under the stars, when I noticed what the others were doing: most of them were actually preparing their sleeping places under the stars, like me. Dylan, on the other hand, not only had a large camping mat and his favourite cuddly toy with him, but also a French-Press coffee pot, a small camping chair, and he was in the process of erecting a real, small tent. I was amazed.
Chicken curry with lentils
I poured the ‘Trail Food’ out of the shiny packaging into my Tupperware box and added hot water from my thermos. It was chicken curry with lentils. It now had to steep and absorb moisture. So I called my friend Franzi on video call to share the phenomenal view with her. Yes, the network was so good here too that it was sufficient for video telephony. I really wanted to share my experience, because the whole undertaking, the whole situation here on the hill, was very surreal and simply beautiful! The open fire, the position high above the water, the almost full, bright moon and the stars above the horizon, the sounds of the animals of the night and the crackling of the fire. But above all: no traffic noise. It was simply wonderful!
The food was surprisingly good. I knew this type of meal as (MRE, German military food) and was really surprised. You could actually eat it like that! But it probably also took a bit of luck, because the alternatives ‘beef’ or ‘mushroom’ didn’t seem to be that popular, judging by the faces of the others.
After dinner, we gathered for a short meeting and the shifts for the night watch were distributed. I got the shift from midnight to 1:00 a.m., and Dylan told us that there probably wouldn’t be much activity today. ‘When there is a full moon, predators rarely hunt because they can be spotted so easily. The only window of opportunity opens during the hour when the moon has set and the sun has not yet risen.’ Then everyone spread out to their sleeping places and it quickly became very quiet in the camp.
I flicked another of the huge ticks off my air mattress, snuggled up in my sleeping bag and shut out the crawling outside world with the fly net of my sleeping bag. ‘Good night, see you in five hours.’
The White Giant
I woke up on Friday morning around 11:40 p.m. on my own, listened to the night a little longer and watched the stars, so that I spotted a shooting star that hissed across the sky. Then I got up, put on my wool cardigan and fleece cap and went to relieve Becky and her friend Ross from their shift a little earlier. Now everything was under my watch!
I looked around and took in the whole situation. Everyone was sleeping peacefully and relaxed. The moon shone bright white and enveloped the whole scene in its cool, white, peaceful light. Otherwise, only the soft crackling of the camp fire and the gentle rustling of the bushes in the wind could be heard. I squatted down next to the small fire and fed it a little with small pieces of wood. Not too much, just to keep it going.
‘CRACK!!!’
‘What was that? Wasn’t there a noise?’
I got up, switched on my head torch and shone it in the direction from which the noise had come. Not 40 metres away, a large, white-grey ‘lump’ slowly emerged from the undergrowth and stepped onto the grass. A rhino! A GIANT rhino!!
My adrenaline level shot up as the rhino, visibly unimpressed by my head torch, continued to approach me and, with only about 20 metres between us, I switched on my 200-lumen torch. The rhino jumped, grumbled loudly and then quickly ran back into the undergrowth, which was now cracking. I breathed a sigh of relief and looked at my watch: 0:11. It hadn’t taken 15 minutes for me to have my first contact on the night shift. ‘This could be something!’
But nothing more happened. At 00:55 I woke up Chomp, gave him my torch, as the poor guy didn’t have one of his own, and then snuggled back into my sleeping bag. ‘Good night, once more’.
When I woke up again around 05:40, I felt really well rested! It was now completely dark, as the moon had set. ‘Predator time,’ I thought with a grin, joined Otter, Chey and Kyle at the fire and made myself a hot redbush tea. Twenty minutes later, the other sleeping bags also slowly began to stir, and by 6:30 a.m., everyone was busy packing up and clearing out. Breakfast was cancelled today, but brunch would be provided later when we returned to the trail camp.
I had just finished tying everything to my backpack when Dylan called us over to go on a short ‘sunrise walk’ on the hill parallel to the river. The ‘sunrise walk’ was actually just about enjoying the sunrise. But when we came across three elephant bulls about 150 metres away, working their way through the reeds, the sun suddenly became secondary. We were in such a good position that we were able to get within 40 metres of them without being detected. Suddenly, we heard another loud crack in the reeds about 350 metres away, and shortly afterwards a ‘breeding herd’ of four elephants and a baby emerged from the reeds and disappeared back into the undergrowth. ‘If you want, you can stay here a little longer and really enjoy the sunrise,’ Dylan suggested. He himself wanted to go back to camp and pack up his tent. ‘Without a rifle?’ I thought, but Dylan replied as if he had heard my thoughts: ‘The elephants have moved on now. Even if they come back, it’s highly unlikely that they would run up this hill. Especially not on this stony ground. Elephants have sensitive feet, so it should be safe.’
When we came back, I wanted to sit down again on a large stone on the slope with a view of the valley, when it occurred to me that I could also take my backpack directly. I stood up again, walked the eight metres back to my backpack and was about to check the construction of my sleeping bag and air mattress when I spotted something black and elongated, about the size of a thumb, on the side of the hip belt. It was a small scorpion!
‘Look here, a scorpion!‘ I shouted, beckoning Kyle over to me. ’Uhhhh…that’s one of the bad ones,‘ said Kyle, who was his usual cheerful self. ’You don’t want to get stung by one of those. They’re potentially deadly!” * ‘I don’t want to be stung by that either!’ I replied loudly and tried to flick the little animal very carefully off my backpack. But the scorpion was more afraid than I was and tried to hide from my ‘attack’ in the small cracks of the backpack. I turned and turned the backpack carefully – and suddenly it was gone!
‘Fuck!’
Chey, who had now also joined us, searched the dry grass under the backpack with a stick.
‘Nothing,’ she said, adding to my pained expression: ‘Africa loves you, Kirk.’
‘Obviously!’
I was getting a bit nervous. ‘I’m not leaving until I’ve found this scorpion and removed it safely,’ I thought to myself, and carefully disassembled the whole sleeping bag-air mattress-backpack construction. The scorpion was sitting, huddled, under the packing tape of my sleeping bag’s outer shell. I took a small stick, approached the animal and swept it about two metres away into the dry grass with a targeted swipe.
‘Done!’
I packed my things together again in a makeshift way and dragged everything a few metres to a sandy area to put everything back together there. ‘Just get it off the grass!’ When I put on the backpack and felt the weight on my shoulders, I got a strange feeling. ‘What if there was more than one? And how did he actually get onto my stuff?’ It was exactly where I had slept. ‘Was it there the whole time? Maybe under my mattress?’
We started walking and hadn’t gone two hundred metres before Dylan stopped again and pointed to clear, fresh leopard tracks in the sand. ‘Looks like we had more visitors than just the rhino last night,’ he said with a grin, and started back the way we had come.
Leopards are not officially classified as ‘dangerous game’. Although they are predators, they are predominantly nocturnal and prefer to avoid humans. There are isolated reports of people being attacked, injured or even killed by leopards, but these are the exception rather than the rule and can often be attributed to provocative misconduct on the part of humans.
A part of the wilderness
Last week was different than expected. Less rough. Less ‘borderline’, but very educational, formative and ultimately very nice! I was looking forward to a warm shower, fresh clothes and a cold beer. But not as much as I had expected. Yes, everything was sticky. My trousers looked like they had been through a pigsty and I was secretly quite glad that I couldn’t smell anything at the moment. But I had the feeling that if it just went on like this, I wouldn’t have a problem with that either. On the contrary. I had really got the spirit of adventure.
Yes, by now there were spots all over my body that itched, and I hadn’t seen a proper shower or really clean, dust-free rooms in 21 days. But none of that bothered me anymore – it was just part of it. I didn’t just tell myself that anymore, it actually felt that way. By the end of the week, I finally felt like I wasn’t just a visitor anymore. I wasn’t lost in thought again, but felt like I was part of the whole thing here. What a week in the bush can do!
But this week really should not be underestimated. I had come here for exactly these trails, hiking in ‘dangerous game areas’ and (South) Africa’s beautiful bush landscape. This week was therefore definitely a motivation booster and, by the way, put the conditions in Bhejane Camp, which I had previously criticised, into perspective.
* The scorpion is a Highveld Lesser-Thicktail Scorpion (Uroplectes triangulifer). The sting of this species is in fact painful but not deadly and therefore of little medical importance. More information can be found here.
