Hyenas may knock on your door

Africa has been in my heart like a dream, beating for a very long time to the rhythm of Mbube. The cold water of the sea in uThukela awakened me from that dream, radiating the light of dawn from my heart to the last capillary of my body.

Mark, with whom I explore the secrets of this young marine protected area and the many benefits it offers to the local community, is far away among the immense dunes, without knowing how grateful I am to him for bringing me from my tropical home to this distant world to better understand how we are all intertwined on a planet that knows no borders. Ubuntu at its finest.

After a week of losing ourselves in the left hemisphere of our brains to try to help the community better protect this coastal paradise, we shed our scientists' attire and donned the clothes of South African explorers. We traveled more than 150 km from Mtunzini to the Kube Yini Reserve with the spirit of a child at Christmas, eager to receive all the gifts of the soul that these grasslands can offer.

We parked Mark's old safari Land Cruiser on a hill where we could see the landscape stretching to the infinite. Mark brought a thermos with coffee; I admired his natural spirit of service, which is as endangered today as the black rhinoceros, both victims of individualism, the silent pandemic of the Anthropocene.

Near where we are, we hear dry leaves and tree trunks gently breaking, and the sharp movement of high branches as if a child were pulling down her favorite fruit. It's a group of zebras accompanied by giraffes. They are now motionless, completely silent, deciding what to do about my presence. My telephoto lens doesn't help me be less visible, so I lie down on the ground among the grass and bushes, and the zebras and giraffes relax again and continue their interspecies gathering.

No long afterwards, Mark receives a report of a sighting of a white rhino with her calf. An electrifying jolt of excitement and anticipation courses through my body, culminating in a smile and a look of pure ecstasy. We're driving the open-top Land Cruiser through the vast grasslands, a strong wind in our faces carrying a mesmerizing African scent. To my left, I see a large group of giraffes running in what seems slow motion. When we arrive, the sacred silence of the place is broken only by the methodical grazing of the enormous and powerful mother rhino. Her calf was happily nursing and would continue to do so for the next 12 to 18 months, and even stay with its mother for another two or three years.

The sun sets now slowly in Kube Yini, its golden light gently touching the grasslands like a Renaissance painting. A massive male white rhino prepares for the night; I think he might be the father of the calf we saw earlier, and it fills me with hope to know that at least here these iconic animals are thriving.

The next day I headed to my final destination, the Munywana Conservancy, a 30,000-hectare private reserve in KwaZulu-Natal. For the next three nights I would be staying at the Makhasa Private Game Lodge. To my surprise, I am the only guest. The staff gives me two instructions: at night I have to be escorted to my room due to the risk of being attacked by a lion or other predators, and I also have to lock the door because hyenas might open it in the middle of the night.

One of the advantages of being the only guest is that I have the safari car and its crew all to myself, but above all, I can go wherever I want in this paradise, an unparalleled luxury that luck has given me. The first thing that comes to mind, still a little shaken by the night: let's look for hyenas. We find them in a large den, protected and shaded by trees. A huge female is the matriarch, surrounded by other females and their cubs. She has a wound on her face, it looks painful, possibly from a recent hunt or from defending her social rank in this clan.

Something particularly striking about this place is the large number of big mammals that are relatively easy to spot. This is due, among other things, mainly to the extensive grasslands, primary productivity that sustains large herbivores, which in turn support the iconic carnivores, and also to the excellent visibility afforded by these open landscapes, unlike what I find in the rainforests of my native Costa Rica. And this has led millions of tourists from all over the world to come and discover an experience like mine, generating around $2 billion each year for the South African economy.

After seeing four of the big five, only one remains on my list, and I owe it to my inner child: the lion. After hours of searching, through the tall beige grass, a rustling of the leaves finally reveals three young brother lions. I admire them through my binoculars as if watching a documentary by David Attenborough, trying to absorb every detail: their gentle yet menacing yellow eyes, their dark pink noses constantly sniffing at us, the characteristic spots of juveniles on their paws, and their manes just beginning to grow. More than an hour passed before I realized it, I’m completely absorbed in a moment that would define my vision and admiration for our shared home.

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