I have
arrived in the Matopos Hills which is lovely picturesque district with lots of
small granite outcroppings and boulders balanced about the place… Really quite
a nice area and there were virtually no other tourists around at all J And Im actually staying at a rather up=market
lodge called Big Cave Lodge… Well, Im in their camp site though so not really
at the lodge.
Anyway,
while Im here I decided Id go for a drive with one of their guides and say
hello to some of the local rhinos.
It’s a
small park and any native rhinos were long ago killed off by hunters, so the
current populations of both Black and White rhinos have been reintroduced more
recently (mostly from South Africa as I understand it) as part of the wider
rhino preservation efforts. So, one of the activities offered by the local
lodges is to go out with a guide and track down a rhino or two on foot and sort
of sit and watch from quite close quarters for a while… And then back to the
lodge for a few drinks at the bar as the sun goes down J
They
claim to have about a 90%+ success ratio with finding the animals, so I thought
Id give it a go…
Turns out
Im part of that remaining 10% !
I must have
walked about with the guide for 10Km or more and we saw quite a lot of recent
rhino tracks but we didn’t see anything else except for a few individual
antelope of assorted types. Half the trouble is that while the guides can see
and follow the rhino tracks, I don’t think they can really tell accurately how
old the tracks are and so we could have been looking at tracks from last night
or (as it turns out more likely) from 2-3 nights ago. And the guides are not
working alone here… The amusing thing is that all the guides from all the local
lodges share the information of where the rhinos were last seen. And more than
that, the park has several groups of rangers who’s sole job is to protect the
rhinos from poachers, and they are all armed with AK47s and are camped out in
the park in the vicinity of the animals all the time… keeping an eye on them…
And the lodge guides are in regular communication (cell phones work fine
throughout the park) with those rangers and so its pretty easy to see how that
90% success ratio is achieved with tourist trips to “track the rhinos” J
But in my
case, neither the guides nor the rangers seem to have any clue where the rhinos
actually are! I went out twice and walked everywhere that was suggested with
guides and rangers and they all swore there “was fresh spoor this morning” or
they were seen just a couple of Km in that direction yesterday” etc… But when
it comes down to it the fact is that they are all blatantly wrong!
Now I
have to say here that those guard rangers are in fact extremely poorly equipped
and have virtually nothing in the way of boots or warm clothing, and I expect
food is pretty poor and pay rather negligible, so I can completely understand
that they may succumb to the temptation of staying at their camp site for
several days in a row rather than going hiking about in the spikey grass to
find Rhinos that are pretty much in the same place as they were the last time
they checked… But its different this time! The rhinos have all moved off within
the last week to somewhere else!
Now if
the “alleged poachers” are just a bunch of thugs with guns then I suspect the
rhinos are fine because if their guards are doing the same as usual, presumably
the rhinos would be doing the same as usual and you have to guess that the poachers
would be watching the guard behavior… so in that case all is OK. But, if the
“alleged poachers” are actually any good at what they do and actually have some
insight into the rhino behavior and can actually read the tracks and determine
how long ago they were made, then I think the rhinos are in some serious
trouble at the moment… cos none of their protectors have a clue!
Its all a
bit “Keystone Cops” from my perspective, and Ive said to the guide that Im not
going out to walk around in the sun collecting grass seeds with my socks for
hours at a time again until you have personally spoken to someone on the phone
who is standing there looking at a live rhino as they speak!... Even then Im
gonna be sceptical till I actually see a rhino with my own eyes… For all I
know, the park has no rhinos at all, they just have a couple of guys that they
send out to walk around once a week with rhino prints on the soles of their
boots… J
…Well if
they didn’t used to then after this recent fiasco that may well be what they
are left with for the future!
