Safari Day 9 - Tracking Rhinos

Highlight of the day: being about 30 feet from a huge white rhino

Today we spent a full day in Matobo National Park, just outside of Bulawayo. We loaded up into 2 open-sided jeeps and drove around the park (which is really just an area of land where the rhinos are protected from poachers) and started tracking rhinos. Luck was with us as our guide spotted prints (also called 'spores') and then the rhino off in the shade of some trees. We got out of the jeeps and walked up close to it. He didn't seem to mind us there at all, so we got even closer. We stood about 30 feet from him, just watching. White rhinos are not really white, they're gray. Just like black rhinos. The difference is that white rhinos are grazers, eating mainly grass, so they have a wide mouth. Black rhinos are browsers and eat trees, so they have a hooked mouth for pulling off leaves. White rhinos got their name as a misunderstanding of the Afrikaans term for "wide mouth." The Africans say that they're just like people, since the white rhinos keep their babies in the front of the mother, like a white woman pushing her baby in a pram, and black rhinos keep their babies in the back of the mother, like a black woman with her baby tied up in a blanket on her back. Black rhinos are extremely aggressive and will attack humans. White rhinos will attack too, but they'd rather just walk away. Rhinos have very poor eyesight, so if they attack you, they're likely to not see you if you stand behind a tree. We were all instructed to find our own trees nearby in case the rhino decided to have a go at us.

But as it was, we were able to just stand there and watch this huge, magnificent animal. They really are cute in their own way. After about 20 minutes, he had enough of us staring and started to move away. We got back in the jeeps and drove some more before finding another rhino in the shade of some trees. Same story with this one. We snuck up close to him and were able to watch him lounging for a while. After driving around more, looking for tracks, we stopped for lunch at a lake. There were hippos in it as well as a crocodile. This is thought to be the very crocodile that attacked a guy a year or so ago. There was a wedding held next to the lake, and two of the guests decided to take a little dip, after much alcohol was consumed. The crocodile attacked one of them. He didn't die but was mauled. At least it wasn't the groom.

After lunch we spent the rest of the day hiking around the sights of the park. It is filled with gorgeous rock formations as the weather and rain have eroded away huge chunks of granite over thousands and thousands of years. There are many ancient cave paintings, proving that people lived here 40,000 years ago. Cecil Rhodes is also buried here, which has bred some controversy since he kicked out all of the local tribes so he could mine diamonds (he founded De Beers in 1880). Before heading back to camp, we ended the day by climbing to the top of a massive granite mountain for a fantastic view of the entire park.