Rhino weekend, Part 2

Our second day at Khama was more eventful than the first one. (Think the Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times!") After we found the cache, we went driving around. I took a LOT of pictures. A few are really good. Eventually we found some rhinos. Man, did we find them. It must have been Mike's rhino call ("Here, rhino, rhino, rhino!") The first two we saw through a bunch of bushes well off the road (road is being generous, it was just a sand path through the bushes and trees). The third one got too close for comfort. We went around a corner, and BAM! There she was about 20 feet in front of us. We stopped the car and started taking pictures of her. When she turned to the side I could see she was injured (two pictures of her to follow). She had a huge gaping gash going 3/4 of the way up her side. I could see blood and what I thought was fat. She came towards us the first time and we took more pictures. Then she stood there for a minute. Then she turned back towards the bushes. When she had her front two legs off the road, she turned around and started trotting back towards us. The rhino did this a couple more times, while we just sat there. She seemed to turn back towards us when the other woman in our car zoomed in or out with her camera. The second time she stopped about 8 feet in front of us! That got my heart going! We stopped taking pictures after the second time she charged us. Eventually she went off into the bush. Once she got about 10 feet past the road, Mike zoomed out of there! A few minutes later we turned another corner and about 30 feet in front of us were three rhinos even bigger than the last one. Two were in the road and the other was right next to it. They ignored us, luckily. We just sat there as they ate their way into the bush. Those were the last rhinos we saw in the park. Believe me, none of us were too upset by that fact.

Once we left the road where we saw the rhinos, Mike found a perfect place to bury our cache. After we did that, we drove around for a while longer. No other sights got my heart pumping like the injured rhino, though. When we got back our squaredeval there was a good fire going underneath the water barrel for showers. I actually had to keep turning off the water during my shower, as it was too hot! There was one "ablutions" building (two toilets and two showers) for the three squaredevals at our camp. Of course, there was no electricity, so I went to bed about 7:30.

The next morning, we told the person at the front desk about the injured rhino while we were checking out. She told us the rhino was a mother, and that one of the other rhinos caused her injury. One of the guides was standing outside the office and he told us we should have backed out of there as soon as she started coming towards us. I had thought about backing up when she charged us, but rejected the idea, because our car makes a loud, annoying noise when we back up. (It doesn't now, though, because Mike found and disconnected that speaker. Now if we could just figure out where the beeping when you go over 105 kph is coming from :)

Overall, it was a great weekend. It was the first time I got out of Gabs and got to see some of Botswana.