Charging Rhinos, Hitchhiking and Khama Persuasion

June 7, 2009
My second weekend in country, and it’s time to get out of the capital for a couple of days. What could be more fun than going on safari to Khama Rhino Sanctuary! I am in Africa, after all.

Here are some pictures from the weekend. Read more about it below!



My roommate, Lauren (another intern at the UNDP), and I woke up early Saturday to throw on some clothes for the bus ride. We had called the taxi the night before, telling the driver to arrive at 6:30. Our thinking was that he would actually arrive at 6:40, which would still be enough time to get us to the bus station by 7, so we could sort out our tickets and get good seats on the 8 am bus. Imagine our surprise when taxi man called us at 6:25, from only two blocks away. Since when was anything in Botswana ever on time, much less early? Breakfast would have to happen on the road.

Further surprises were in store for us at the bus station, as a 7 o’clock bus happened to be in existence for our desired destination. Only problem was that we were still waiting on the third UNDP intern, Ian, as well as our co-worker/resident guide, Kefi, to show up to the bus station. We explained our dilemma to the bus conductor who, as the bus began to pull away from the station, told us to have them meet us at the Shell petrol station on the road. More and more people began boarding the bus as we made slow progress toward the Shell, and my confidence that there would be any seats remaining (if they even made the bus) began to wane. The conductor was starting to lose patience, Lauren and I were both on the phone describing the location of the bus to Ian and Kefi. As the bus started to pick up speed, we saw both of them jump on board, slightly out of breath, but able to take the last two remaining seats. Whew. Perfect timing.

Four and a half hours later, we pulled up to the rhino sanctuary outside Serowe, and took a pickup truck to our little chalet. The driver picked us up a little while later to take us to lunch (luckily, since it was several kilometers to the lodge, and we almost certainly would have gotten lost walking the maze of roadways), and after a satisfying meal and an uber-light Botswana beer, we relaxed by what would have been the pool, had it been open. As I walked back to the others after taking some pictures of funny-looking birds, Kefi asked me if I’d taken a picture of the rhino.

“Rhino? Here? Haha, very funny.”
“No really, look.”
“Holy @#%!”

Apparently, the park’s only male black rhino likes to drink from the pool, but is satisfied with the nearby watering hole when that’s not an option. He also runs into the lodge’s sliding glass doors when he sees his reflection and wants to “kiss” it (“kiss” is a term the lodge employees use). I don’t think I’d like to have been eating lunch by those windows when he decided to do that. As the rhino came closer to us, it began to paw the ground. We wondered briefly if he was going to charge, and if we should move to get out of his way. Then we realized he had just been pawing the ground in preparation for taking a dump…double whew.

The surreal sense one gets when observing animals in this context can be incredibly misleading—you have to make a conscious effort to remind yourself just how dangerous they can be, because you initially just think they’re cute and fun. Ian had heard that since rhinos have poor eyesight, you should stand still when rhinos charge, and hope they will become confused, think you are a tree, and decide to stop. I told him, as an experiment, he should act like a tree, and we would observe to test the hypothesis. In the end, to test the shaky theory, we asked our safari guide what he did when he was charged by rhinos (which has happened to him three times while working at the sanctuary). He laughed as he told us he “climbed a tree and was glad if the rhino missed the tree”. So much for pretending to act like a baobab.

After an afternoon safari full of more rhinos, zebras, giraffe, wildebeest, kudu, springbok, and ostriches (which are so weird—I guess ostriches come from Africa, but they seem like they should come from another planet), and a stunning sunset, we had dinner at the lodge before turning in for the evening. In the morning, our driver dropped us off back at the park entrance, and we had to hitchhike into Serowe. Kefi told us (half jokingly) that the way to get a ride in this region of the world, if you are a woman, is not to stick out your thumb, but to stick out your bum. This may be true for the truly booty-licious women of Botswana (I know Sir Mix-A-Lot had them in mind when he wrote “Baby Got Back”), but my butt, while certainly not flat, I do not think was up to the task of getting us a ride. Since a bus with plenty of empty seats happened past us after only 9 minutes of waiting, and flagging it down with our hands was enough, I’m afraid I will never know.

We stopped in Serowe on the way back to Gabs; our only goal was to see the grave of Seretse Khama, chief of the local tribe, and first president of an independent Botswana. Luckily, Kefi is from Serowe, and knew where the police station was, where we had to ask permission to gain access to the hilltop cemetery. Unluckily, the two bored-looking policemen said that we should have called in advance to ask the current chief for permission (since Seretse Khama’s son is the newly-elected president as well as the heir to the local cheiftainship, I guess this means we needed the president’s permission-—yay, bureaucracy). But Kefi was a brilliant negotiator (I could tell this without understanding a word of what she was saying), and Lauren, Ian and I played our parts of dejected-looking students from America quite well. We sighed, lamenting how close we were to seeing this piece of Botswana history, and how far we’d come. The result was that the policemen gave in, and allowed us to go to the cemetery, provided that one of them accompanied us, and we took no pictures. This worked out quite well, as the policeman gave us a full history of the Khama family, the story of each of the four generations of chiefs and their wives buried in the cemetery, and the family’s important role in Botswana’s history—Lonely Planet can’t come close to giving us the wealth of information this guy had.

As I reflected on the trip on the bus ride back to Gabs, I took stock of three important pieces of wisdom the weekend had gleaned: bored policemen can almost always be persuaded to see your point of view, your booty is a powerful weapon, and while hugging a tree is just fine, you should never ever pretend to be one—especially when a rhino is still pacing after he finishes taking a dump.

Pictures to come soon...