The Rhino that climbed Kilimanjaro
By Douglas Adams

"Great wumps of equatorial heat are coming up at me from off the tarmac. It's the short rainy season in Kenya, but the sun burned off the morning dampness in minutes. I'm slathered in sunblock, the road strecthes off into the distant heat haze and my legs are settling in nicely. Dotted along the road in front of me are other walkers, some striding vigorously, others appearing just to amble, but all in fact moving at the same speed. One of them is wearing a large sculptural edifice, made out of a painted woven plastic fabric stretched over a metal frame. A large horn bobs along in front of it. The thing is a grotesque but odly beautiful caricature of a rhinoceros moving along with swift, busy strides. Lopsided lorries grind their way dangerously past us. The drivers shout and grin at our rhinoceros. When we pass, as we frequently do, lorries that have clearly just rolled over and collapsed on the side of the road, we wonder if it was anything to do with us...

The other walkers have been walking for several days now, from the shore at Mombasa... I joined them last night, rattling in by LandRover from Nairobi with my sister Jane who has been doing some work for Save the Rhino International... Over the (Tanzanian) border lies Mount Kilimanjaro, base to apex the tallest mountain in the world. It is to the peak of Kilimanjaro that the expedition is intending to climb - a small bunch of Englishmen out walking miles a day in the midday sun and taking turns wearing a large rhino costume. Mad dogs have thrown in the towel long ago.

This crackpot idea was first put to me months earlier by the founders of Save the Rhino International, David Stirling and Johnny Roberts, and I did'nt realize at first that they meant it. They raved on for a bit about having acquired a whole set of rhino costumes that Gerald Scarfe had designed for an opera and they would be just the thing for making the ascent of Kilimanjaro in. They had already been used, David told me by way of reassurance, for running in the New York marathon. "It'll have anourmous impact," they said, "Believe me. Really... "

I began to realize the truth of this as we approached our first village of the day, and perhaps now would be a good point to explain what the purpose of the whole exhibition was. It was not, in fact, to raise funds directly for rhino conservation.

Rhinos, which used to be plentiful on the plains if East Africa, are now hideously rare, but in Kenya they are about as well conserved as they can be anywhere in Kenya. Richard Leakey's Kenya Wildlife Service consists of 8,000 well-trained, well-equiped, well-armed, highly motivated soldiers, a formidable force... Poaching in Kenya is, officially, "no longer a problem". But conservation is a continually evolving business and we have begun to realize that just wading in to Africa and telling the local people that they mus'nt do to their wildlife what we've done to ours and that we are there to make sure they don't, is an attitude that, to say the least, needs a little refining.

The communities that live along the margins of the great national parks have a tough time. They are poor, undernourished, their lands are restricted by the parks, and when from time to time the odd lion or elephant breaks out of the park, they are the ones to suffer. Arguments about preserving the genetic diversity of the planet can seen a little abstract to someone who has just lost the crops he needs to feed his family, or worse, just lost one of his family. In the long run, conservation can't be imposed by outsiders, overriding the needs of local people. If anyone is going to take care of the wildlife then, in the end, it must be the local people - and someone must take care of them.

Now the rhino, with Todd Jones inside it was in the lead. All the walkers took turns wearing the thing for one hour, and you quickly learned to tell who was in it at any moment from the way in which it moved...

If the rhino sauntered, then it was Giles inside. Giles was an ex-Gordonstown Hugh Grant lookalike who had spent the last few years hitchiling languidly around Africa with his own parachute. His technique was to turn up at airfields with this parachute, find someone who was flying in the general direction he wanted to go, hitch a lift and then, when the fancy took him, just jump out of the plane. Apparently his girlfriend was a top supermodel who, every few months, would find out where he was, fly out there, then (I'm guessing here) have him washed and sent up to her hotelroom...

If the rhino ambled along in a genial way, then it was Tom inside. Tom was a tall Woodhousian man with exactly the wrong complexion for Africa. He had the amiable air of the landed gentry, and when I asked him where he lived he said, in a vague kind of way, "Shropshire."

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 enourmously heavy sopranos on his back. He had told me that he had originally wanted to be a vet but had ended up instead being a succession of animals. Anytime you see a film or TV show or an ad which features someone dressed up as an animal it's probably Todd inside... 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 - done up, very convincingly, as a bright blue centaur.

As Todd/rhino bustled along, suddenly huge crowds of children erupted on to the road ahead of us and hurried towards us 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... 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 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.

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 more like a giant prawn tempura than a rhinoceros. Inside, the heat and the stench of stale sweat and old Dettol are almost overpowering until you get into the swing of things...

I stop for a moment to pour some water onto and over my face and catch a glimpse of myself in the window of the Landrover. I look unimaginably stupid, and I reflect that there is something very odd about this sponsored walking business. ... the deal seems to be this:"OK, you are trying to raise funds for this very worthwhile cause, and I can see that it is an importnat and crucial matter and that... 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 speant a week on the walk... 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 survival: 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."

Douglas Adams (1952 - 2001)