If the rhino bustled along busily, it was Todd inside. Todd was not a mad Englishman because he was Welsh. He was in charge of the rhino costumes, had worn them originally in the opera for which they had been designed, during which he had had to carry enormously heavy sopranos on his back. He told me that he had originally wanted to be a vet, but had ended up being a succession of animals instead. Any time you see a film or TV show or a commercial that features someone dressed up as an animal, it’s probably Todd inside. “I was in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,” he told me. “Guess,” he added, “which one I was.” One evening he showed me pictures of his family. Here was a beautiful picture of his wife, another of his young daughter, a sweet picture of his baby son, and here was one of Todd himself. Todd was done up, very convincingly, as a bright blue centaur.
As Todd/rhino bustled along, suddenly huge crowds of children erupted onto the road ahead of us, and hurried toward us, singing and dancing and chanting, “Rhino! Rhino! Rhino!” We were quickly surrounded and escorted the last few hundred yards to where they had prepared a reception for us in the village square. The whole village had turned out to greet us with enormous enthusiasm. We sat and watched, panting in the heat and sluicing ourselves down with bottled water, as the children of the village put on a display of dancing and choral singing that was, frankly, amazing. When I say children, I’m not just talking about seven-year-olds, I’m talking about seventeen-year-olds as well. It’s odd that we don’t anymore have a comfortable word that covers the whole range. “Youngsters”? Patronising. “Kids”? No. “Youths”? Sounds as if they’ve just broken into a warehouse and stolen something. Children, then. The children had written a song about rhinos, which they then sang for us. In the background Giles had quietly taken over from Todd in the rhino suit, and after a while he joined in the dancing, lolloping, and swaying around, chasing and playing with the children before finally dodging off behind a tree for a quick ciggy. We then, with slightly less enthusiasm, sat through a series of speeches that some local dignitaries had turned up to deliver. Wherever we went, there were local dignitaries keen to be seen to be associated with us.
Gradually the whole point of the rhino suit was beginning to dawn on me. The arrival of the rhino and the Rhino Climb team was something that the village had been looking forward to and preparing for for months. It was the biggest event of the year, a carnival, a festival, a holiday. Being visited by a rhino was something that would be remembered by the villagers, and particularly the children, for years in a way that being visited by a bunch of English toffs in hats would not.
We were then taken to see the village school. Like most of the village, it was made of breezeblocks, and was half-finished. The doors and windows were empty holes, the furniture was just a few rickety benches and some trestle tables, and laid out on these were dozens of pictures of the local wildlife that the children had drawn, and which we were to judge, and give prizes for. The prizes were Rhino Climb baseball hats, and, whoever won the prizes, we had to make sure that every member of the village actually got a hat. And once we have collected our sponsorship money, we will be able to complete the building of their schoolroom for them.
When at last we left, the children danced along with us for several miles, laughing and singing improvised songs—one of them would start, and the others would quickly pick it up and join in.
The words seem oddly dated, don’t they? It all sounds rather naïve and sentimental to be talking about children laughing and dancing and singing together when we all know perfectly well that what children do in real life is snarl and take drugs. But these children/kids/youths, and all the ones we came across on our journey, were happy in a way that we in the West are almost embarrassed by.
The last of the children drop away from us. Our support Land Rover drives slowly past, distributing Cokes and Fantas. Jim, our photographer, is sitting on its tailgate, taking pictures of us with his Canon EOS 1, which I’ve been coveting ever since I saw it. Keis, our Dutch video cameraman, hoists his lightweight Sony three-chip up to his shoulder and pans along the line of walkers. I wonder if there’s anywhere in the West that you could find a hundred children to sing and dance like that.
The following day is my first stint in the rhino suit. I’m much too big for it, and my legs stick out absurdly from the bottom, so that I look like a giant prawn tempura. Inside, the heat and the stench of stale sweat and old Dettol are almost overpowering until you get into the swing of things. Todd walks along beside me, determinedly keeping me engaged in conversation. After a while I realise he’s monitoring me to make sure I don’t faint. Todd’s a good man and I like him a lot. He takes good care of people, and takes even better care of his beloved rhino suit.
I stop for a moment to pour some water into and over my face, and catch a glimpse of myself in the window of the Land-Rover. I look unimaginably stupid, and I reflect that there is something very odd about this sponsored walking business. It’s always undertaken for good causes: cancer research, famine relief, wildlife conservation, and so on, but the deal seems to be this: “Okay, you are trying to raise funds for this very worthwhile cause, and I can see that it’s an important and crucial matter and that lives or indeed whole species are at stake and something needs to be done as a matter of urgency, but well ... I don’t know ... Tell you what—do something really pointless and stupid and maybe a bit dangerous, then I’ll give you some money.”
I only spent a week on the walk. I didn’t get to climb Kilimanjaro, though I did get to see it. I was very sorry not to get to go up it, though, having seen it, I have to say that I wasn’t very, very sorry. I did get to see one rhino, briefly, out of the thousands that used to roam in this area, and I wondered if it had any sense at all that all was not right with its world. Human beings have been on this planet for a million years or so, and in that time we have faced all sorts of threats to our survivaclass="underline" famine, plague, warfare, AIDS. Rhinoceroses have been here for 40 million years, and just one threat has brought them to the brink of extinction: human beings. We are not the only species to have caused devastation to the rest of the world and it must be said in our favour that we are the only one that has become aware of the consequences of its behaviour and tried to do something about it. However, I reflect as I shift the costume back into a comfortable walking posture and squint forward over its bobbing plastic horn, we do go about it in some odd ways.
For Children Only
You will need to know the difference between Friday and a fried egg. It’s quite a simple difference, but an important one. Friday comes at the end of the week, whereas a fried egg comes out of a hen. Like most things, of course, it isn’t quite that simple. The fried egg isn’t properly a fried egg till it’s been put in a frying pan and fried. This is something you wouldn’t do to a Friday, of course, though you might do it on a Friday. You can also fry eggs on a Thursday, if you like, or on a cooker. It’s all rather complicated, but it makes a kind of sense if you think about it for a while.
It’s also good to know the difference between a lizard and a blizzard. This is quite an easy one. Though the two things sound very much alike, you find them in such very different parts of the world that it is a very simple matter to tell them apart. If you are somewhere inside the Arctic circle then what you are looking at is probably a blizzard, whereas if you are in a hot and dry place like Madagascar or Mexico, it’s more likely to be a lizard.