Last Chance to See. Mark Carwardine

said Batian, starting to whisper. ‘But there’s nothing to worry about.’

      Anyone can walk in lion country, of course, but the professionals do it without being eaten. I remember going on a survival course in South Africa many years ago, and the game ranger in charge gave us this nugget of advice: ‘If we stumble upon a lion,’ he said, ‘we’ll get out of the area by moving slowly backwards. We will not run. If we run, we have a hundred per cent chance of being killed.’

      I told Stephen, but he just glared at me.

      We slipped out of the car as quietly as possible, closing the doors without shutting them properly, and started creeping towards the rhino.

      ‘Just listen to Dixon and the other rangers,’ said Batian. ‘Do what they say. If something happens, don’t suddenly bolt or you will leave somebody in the … in the … you know what.’

      ‘It looks remarkably prehistoric,’ whispered Stephen, who was suddenly rising to the occasion. ‘It wouldn’t look out of place wandering alongside a woolly mammoth or a sabre-toothed tiger.’

       We crept forward, very quietly, very slowly, constantly stopping, crouching and shifting our position. Gently cropping the grass, the rhino seemed to be completely undisturbed by our approach. But then it stopped eating and looked up. We froze. It started to chew a little more thoughtfully (it was hard to tell if it was regarding us with grave suspicion or without a care in the world) and then resumed the eating position.

      ‘This is insanity,’ said Stephen. ‘I’ve been brought up all my life to believe that rhinos are amongst the most dangerous and bad-tempered animals on the face of the earth and here we are closer to one than I’d normally get to a German Shepherd.’

      Nervously, we set off again. At last we made it to a small clump of trees about 20 metres (66 feet) away and watched quietly from there. The rhino was so big it was like stalking a Cherokee Jeep.

      The rhino looked up again. This time it lifted its head, clearly sniffing the air. Its tubular ears swivelled, like mini parabolic reflectors, trying to pick up the slightest sound. We hardly dared to breathe. Rhinos have poor eyesight, but this one was definitely looking at us with one eye, and then swung its head to the side to look at us with the other.

      We stepped out from behind the clump.

      ‘Should we be going any closer?’ asked Stephen.

      The rhino turned and walked straight towards us.

      ‘Oh my God!’ said Stephen. ‘It’s coming.’

      The ranger signalled that it was okay and stood in front of us like a Secret Service bodyguard diving in front of the President to take the full force of an assassin’s bullet.

      ‘Oh my God!’ said Stephen again, as the rhino came nearly to within touching distance. ‘Surely, this isn’t right?’

      I heard chuckling and turned around to see Dixon and the other rangers doubled-up with laughter.

      ‘Good grief!’ chuckled Stephen. ‘You swines!’

       We’d been tricked. It turned out to be a bottle-fed, hand-reared rhino, called Max. The three-and-a-half-year-old male southern white must have been the tamest rhino in Africa.

      ‘That was a complete con,’ said Stephen. ‘There we were, tiptoeing around, the most frightened people in Africa, and all the time it was tamer than a labrador!’

      We patted Max on the head, introduced ourselves, and took some photographs. A storm was gathering and the sky was a threatening, dark blue. A rainbow appeared above Max’s head. It was an incredible, once-in-a-lifetime photo opportunity.

      So there I was, lying on the ground no more than 3 metres (10 feet) away from a two-tonne southern white rhino, photographing it with a wide-angle lens, when my mobile phone rang (reception in much of the developing world is considerably better than, for example, along the M4 into London).

      It was the moment I’d been waiting for and dreaming about for years. I’d imagined all the possible scenarios:

      ‘Hello, I can’t talk right now, I’m kayaking with a humpback whale … Hello, I can’t talk right now, I’m getting ready to snorkel with a whale shark … Hello, I can’t talk right now, I’m stalking an Alaskan brown bear … Hello, I can’t talk right now, I’m climbing a Scot’s pine to look inside an eagle’s nest’… etc.

      Mark with several tonnes of the tamest rhino in Africa.

      Anyway, it actually happened. The phone rang. Max snapped to attention and listened intently to my ringtone (which happened to be the vocalisations of a pod of killer whales in British Columbia – something he probably hadn’t heard many times before). He was still watching me suspiciously as I answered the call.

      A baboon not showing its bottom.

      ‘Hello, I can’t talk right now, I’m lying on the ground next to a two-tonne rhino.’

      ‘That’s nice,’ said John, a globe-trotting friend from the BBC Natural History Unit in Bristol. ‘I just wondered if you can remember the name of that Asian restaurant we went to in Clifton the other day.’

      We said goodbye to Max, walked back to the Land Rover without being eaten by lions, and headed out across the savannah towards a specially built enclosure called a boma.

      And here’s a picture of a tree-climbing lion.

      Going on safari with Stephen is like going to the Grand Prix with Murray Walker. He gives a running commentary.

      We drove past some Grant’s gazelles (‘or are they Thompson’s gazelles?’ asked Stephen), past some giraffes (‘with their heads in the clouds’), past some warthogs (‘I like warthogs’), past an enormous troop of baboons (‘baboons have blue bottoms, you know’) and past an ostrich (‘with knobbly knees like that I’m not surprised they bury their heads in the sand’).

      And so the commentary continued until we arrived at the boma.

      We were with a lady who has done more for the last surviving northern white rhinos than anyone else on the planet. I first met Kes Hillman-Smith when Douglas and I visited Garamba National Park in 1989. Douglas described her at the time as: ‘a formidable woman, who looks as if she has just walked off the screen of a slightly naughty adventure movie.’ Twenty years later, she hadn’t changed a bit.

      Kes used to live with her husband, Fraser, and their two young children, in a house they built themselves on the banks of the Garamba River. The house was largely open to the elements – when it rained they simply lowered tarpaulins over the spaces where windows weren’t. It was regularly full of animals, including a young hippo that used to chew on the pot plants in the living room, rats that used to eat the soap in the bathroom and termites that were gradually nibbling away at the support poles of the entire house. The garden was a veritable menagerie – having survived all the snakes and elephants, their pet dog was eventually eaten by a crocodile.

      I asked Kes if her children were still alive.

      ‘Yes, of course they are!’ she said, laughing. ‘They still love the bush. One is working in northern Kenya and the other is a pilot flying for safari lodges.’

      Kes and the family were forced to leave their home in Garamba, because of all the troubles. It was getting too dangerous even for them. They hadn’t been back since 2006.

      We walked around the boma and there, standing on