Tracking desert rhino on foot in Namibia

Insider’s Take

Rhinos are arguably the most revelatory of Africa’s astounding animals. We grew up looking at images of the great beasts, but seeing them up close as they go about their mostly lumbering, but sometimes lightning quick business is a time-travel experience, a look into Earth’s dinosauric past.

They’re fellow mammals, of course, not the saurian creatures they resemble, but Diceros bicornis bicornis, the desert-adapted black rhino, is possibly the most intriguing of the family Rhinoce-rotidae. And northern Namibia’s Palmwag Concession is an ideal place to accompany the peaceful trackers of Save the Rhino Trust as they monitor the (happily increasing) black rhino population in Palmwag’s marvelously stark, 130-million year-old landscapes.

The concession’s uncompromising terrain, soul-enrichingly far from the madding world, is also home to desert-adapted leopards, lions, cheetahs, mountain zebras, Angolan giraffes, springbok, kudu, and bush elephants, another African animal that must be seen to be gobsmacked by.