We arrive at the gate to Matopo National Park, just south of Bulawayo, where the  Black and White Rhino are to be found. While I take care of the permit, Jim goes over the craft shop with the ground nuts in hand to get local advice. The proprietor laughs and informs him they are “round nuts” not ground nuts. Duh. She says this is real African food – “you must boil them for at least two hours – or you will be sorry” she tells him. “Then they will pop out of the shell and you have them with coffee”. We leave her with half the kilo, we can’t eat so many. I boil them in the DO, leaving them overnight in the slow cooker. Mashed with avocado on toast, they make a delicious breakfast.

Today Jim is riding shotgun – with an actual rifle across his lap. Shelton the guide is on top of the truck looking for rhino. I am driving, well aware that Shelton could fall off the truck, or the gun could go off. Or both. And while we don’t find the rhino after driving and hiking through the bushveld for hours, we do collect a mass of seed heads and sticky weeds in our socks. Some of these will come home with us no doubt. We’d spotted White Rhino the day before, so we are not getting skunked. There were two adults and a baby, the baby running around just out of camera view and we watched them all by ourselves until they wandered off. Rhinos in the wild, amazing. Matopo Park has another feature – fabulous dolomite rock formations, granite boulders balanced against the sky. These are much easier to spot, believe me.

The hills of the park were sacred long before Cecil Rhodes, who is buried here, bequeathed the land to the government. The landscape is remarkable for its early and middle stone age archaeological finds and for its exquisite cave paintings. Drawings created by San peoples dot the park; they are spectacular, transcending time and place in their beauty and simplicity. San people were hunter/gatherers, moving with the seasons and sheltering in the many rock overhangs and caves. Their artwork was first thought to be “art for art’s sake” but through research and interviews with the remaining San people, it is now believed that the painting were used to teach. At the Pomongwe Cave a small museum contains representations of paintings from some of the inaccessible caves – a brilliant collection. Thembe, the docent, gives us a tour and we stand in awe of giraffes and rhinos and buffalo who seem to race across the cave walls. “These artists were compelled” he says. “They were geniuses in their talent”. To walk to caves and see the drawings is a profound moment on our trip and we see no other people.

We are also the only people camping at the main site for the first two days. There is a solar water heater that works and an entertaining troop of baboons as well as a pair of fish eagles that scream at each other across the lake. I watched as a Giant Kingfisher bashed a small catfish against a tree trunk. I did not know kingfishers did that. A couple from Holland show up late one afternoon as well as a single older white man. Next morning, the Dutch couple take off for Bulawayo and the single guy leaves his tent and table set up and drives away. He never returns. What happened to him? Who knows? We leave word at the park exit, and on we go.