We came around a corner and he was lying there, dead.

A white rhinoceros, transformed from his trotting magnificence into a big grey heap.

The bullet wound in his side was fresh. The blood had poured out of him but clearly he’d stayed upright for a bit before falling into the dirt. And as he lay there before us, turning to rot in the summer heat, that beautiful creature suffered one final indignity. Evidently, the poachers had taken his big horn, but they’d fled before collecting his smaller one. And before anyone could come back, the park rangers hacked it off with an axe.

We arrived in Johannesburg and spent the first couple of days in the city. We were warned not to drive at night and so we didn’t. But we drove through Soweto. We visited the apartheid museum. And we left. It was a green city, Jacaranda trees everywhere, but you wouldn’t call it beautiful or welcoming. All around Jozi are massive dusty tailing heaps from the gold mines that made Johannesburg an economic powerhouse. I’m not sure I’ve never been to a place with such a stark difference between the rich and the poor.

We hired a Hilux and drove south, taking off road tracks whenever possible. We spent days in the Drakensberg ranges, with some of the best hiking of my life. We drove up the Sani Pass into Lesotho, and then north from Durban along elephant coast.

It’s the unexpected little moments that always stick with me when I travel. One day, in the middle of Zulu country, we stopped for coffee in a white gated township designed as a perfect English village. You know the kind - the streets had names like Elderberry Lane and Badger’s Hollow. Almost every house had carefully manicured primroses out the front. It felt like an episode out of Midsummer Murders. But just five minutes down the road, Zulu women were carrying baskets on their heads.

All up, we did 3000km in the Hilux. We did three or four days of Safari, with rhinos, hippos, giraffes, and mighty, graceful African elephants. We crossed into southern Mozambique. I scuba dived with bull and tiger sharks. We spent a few days in the Kingdom of Eswatini, and we flew to Cape Town, which is a truly astonishing place. Sitting there on the Cape on a white sand beach, watching some of the World’s best kite surfers launching themselves off waves, in the shadow of Table Mountain was an experience I will treasure. I reckon only Rio could maybe challenge Cape Town as the most spectacular city in the World.

I was away for three weeks. It was fantastic. I didn’t get robbed and I didn’t get sick. And we were lucky with that kind of time, to get a good sense of the place.

When I think back to my trip, I reckon that rhino was South Africa. In a way, it represented the promise and the pain of the place. A country with more wonder.. more diversity... of culture, language, landscapes, wildlife than almost anywhere on Earth. But a country shackled with such significant problems that it cannot fulfil its potential. A country with 70% of the World’s rhinos that can’t stop its citizens from shooting them dead.

The thing that surprised me most about the whole experience was the way in which our guide reacted. He wasn’t surprised when we came across that scene. He didn’t even seem that sad. He seemed resigned to it, normalised even. Consumers in China and Vietnam maintain an insatiable demand for rhino horn. South Africa loses a rhino to poachers roughly every 36 hours.

We finished our day in the game reserve. A few hours after first coming across him, we drove past that rhino’s massive grey corpse once more. The wardens had moved on. The sun beat down. We left him to the hyenas and the birds.