Rhino Charge

In Kenya every year there is held a sort-of car rally. Except it’s not really a rally. It’s more of a time trial over incredibly difficult ground. The winner is the one who completes the course within the time limit with the shortest distance travelled.

Picture, if you can, incredibly modified robust and long legged 4WDs with a crew of about four ‘runners’ who not only pace out the terrain in front of the vehicle but also connect and operate the winches, both front and rear. The vehicles have to negotiate huge boulders and rough ground in ‘blind’ conditions due to thick undergrowth, as well as enter and exit deep gorges of more than 20 metres depth, scaling up and down cliffs and incredibly steep and heavily wooded slopes.

We were totally amazed at the places that they elected to travel and actually succeeded in doing so.

The enormous amounts of money raised from this outrageous event go towards conservation projects which predominately concentrate on the ‘Water Towers’, the forested mountains of Kenya.

The people that we stayed with in Nairobi have participated every year since its inception 29 years ago, and we tagged along with them as part of their support crew on their ‘Charge’.

The country that we moved amongst was bushland that we wouldn’t normally get to see and we spent five days camping, walking, eating and drinking quite a bit of booze. No doubt about it, those Kenyans don’t mind the odd drop of grog. The bush in that region varied from tall forests to thick thorny scrubland to open savannah and near-desert, with lots of deep rocky ravines to negotiate. There was even a beautiful crater lake atop one hill.

Unfortunately our crew broke an axle, the first major mechanical failure they’ve ever endured, and they were out of the ‘Charge” after completing only four of the thirteen checkpoints. Some sections, such as the ‘Gauntlet’, were simply littered with broken cars, so it was a very tough and technical endurance test. Only one of the sixty five vehicles entered actually completed the whole course.

It was a fun time, and a real eye-opener.