Jack Tame: South Africa - The Promise and the Pain

<p>We came around a corner and he was lying there, dead.</p> <p>A white rhinoceros, transformed from his trotting magnificence into a big grey heap.</p> <p>The bullet wound in his side was fresh. The blood had poured out of him but clearly he’d stayed upright for a bit before falling into the dirt. And as he lay there before us, turning to rot in the summer heat, that beautiful creature suffered one final indignity. Evidently, the poachers had taken his big horn, but they’d fled before collecting his smaller one. And before anyone could come back, the park rangers hacked it off with an axe.</p> <p>We arrived in Johannesburg and spent the first couple of days in the city. We were warned not to drive at night and so we didn’t. But we drove through Soweto. We visited the apartheid museum. And we left. It was a green city, Jacaranda trees everywhere, but you wouldn’t call it beautiful or welcoming. All around Jozi are massive dusty tailing heaps from the gold mines that made Johannesburg an economic powerhouse. I’m not sure I’ve never been to a place with such a stark difference between the rich and the poor.</p> <p>We hired a Hilux and drove south, taking off road tracks whenever possible. We spent days in the Drakensberg ranges, with some of the best hiking of my life. We drove up the Sani Pass into Lesotho, and then north from Durban along elephant coast.</p> <p>It’s the unexpected little moments that always stick with me when I travel. One day, in the middle of Zulu country, we stopped for coffee in a white gated township designed as a perfect English village. You know the kind - the streets had names like Elderberry Lane and Badger’s Hollow. Almost every house had carefully manicured primroses out the front. It felt like an episode out of Midsummer Murders. But just five minutes down the road, Zulu women were carrying baskets on their heads.</p> <p>All up, we did 3000km in the Hilux. We did three or four days of Safari, with rhinos, hippos, giraffes, and mighty, graceful African elephants. We crossed into