Top 10: #6 - Rhinos!

After our first week of teaching, our entire group excursioned to a rhinoceros sanctuary about three hours south-ish of Gulu. Seventeen people with overnight bags piled into a mutatu, a vehicle slightly larger than a minivan. Needless to say, the ride there – hot, crowded, bumpy – was the least enjoyable part of the trip. But boy, did the rest make up for the journey!

The sanctuary is about 18 square miles of fenced-in grassland and is home to 7 rhinos from all over the world: Four are from Kenya and other parts of Africa; 2 were shipped from Disney’s Animal Kingdom (yes, Kim!) when they were not handling the environment there well, and one was born just three weeks ago in the sanctuary. (In case you’re wondering, the ex-pat rhinos were shipped from Florida to Entebbe via plane, and then from Entebbe to the sanctuary in a very large truck.)

The place itself was truly a haven. Brit (my original roommate at Elephant Graceland) and I shacked up in a clean, quiet room in the thatched-roofed guesthouse and our Anaka group (separately) took our first (luke)warm showers in over a week.

After a late lunch, we set out to do some rhino-ing. Three park rangers armed with AK-47’s and walkie-talkies set out on bodas (little motorcycles) in different directions to track down the rhinos and report to the fourth ranger, the one with our group and a truck, the location of the herd. We piled onto/into/around two rows of benches in the back of a pickup-truck-on-steroids and set off on a (yes, you guessed it) bumpy, red clay road in search of rhinos. On the way, our driver stopped to point out several other animals that I can’t for the life of me remember what they were called… a few long-legged birds, small African deer things, larger horned African deer things, and some monkeys. Good thing I’m not a zoologist.

We drove about 2-3 miles into the bush with only two incidents of driving into ditches and thinking the truck was going to flip onto its side and squash its passengers. At the end of the roads, our armed rhino-tracking rangers met us and we climbed down from the truck. They decided to take us in two groups to see the rhinos as a group as large as ours might scare or anger the big beasts. When it was our group’s turn, we walked in single file through African grass nearly as tall as us until we were maybe 20 yards from three grazing rhinos. It was amazing. Bella, brought from Kenya (I think) is pregnant, and expecting in December. One of the other females was pregnant as well, but not as far along. The male in the group seemed significantly more interested in his food than his women, but I guess his work with them for the time being was done.

At one point, Bella raised her enormous head and started walking towards us, but gave an annoyed sigh and turned around and walked away when Robert, one of the rangers, raised his hand and said, “Back, Bella.” Apparently, before letting the rhinos loose in the compound, the rangers spend 6 months training them in a smaller, more confined area: getting them used to being around humans and then teaching them several commands – important, I suppose, if you’re going to bring groups of clueless visitors within feet of the animals and their really, really big horns.

When the rhinos had enough of our company, they lazily turned and walked away from us and disappeared into the thick African bush. Robert told us on our walk back to the truck that we were “closer to the rhinos that any group he can remember… we were dangerously close.” I’m glad he saved that piece of information for when we had made it safely back onto the truck!