Rhino Tracking with Save the Rhino Trust

This three-night safari is run for private groups and offers brilliant insight into the wildlife and rugged habitat of Namibia’s Damaraland region while contributing directly to a worthy conservation cause. Guests travel into the wilds of Damaraland with the Rhino Camp team and their superb trackers.

Guests will camp out in a remote part of the massive 450,000 hectare Palmwag Conservancy, enjoying the desert scenery and its wildlife. Gemsbok, Springbok, Ostrich, Hartmann’s Mountain Zebra, and the rare desert Elephant are all found in this area.  The highlight of this safari however, is tracking the Black Rhinos.

The desert adapted black rhinoceros surviving in the Kunene Region (former Damaraland and Kaokoland) in the arid north-west of Namibia are the only Rhino world-wide that have survived on communal land with no formal conservation status. In the early 1980′s in this vast, strangely beautiful and spectacular desert scenery, a savage slaughter of desert wildlife was taking place. As the Rhino numbers shrank to near extinction, a group of concerned people (scientists; geologists; community leaders; nature conservation officials; farmers; journalists; housewives and businessmen) gathered together to form a Trust fund.

Since the founding of the Save the Rhino Trust 20 years ago, poaching has drastically declined and the Rhino population has more than doubled. Initially convicted poachers were employed by the Save the Rhino Trust (as they had extensive knowledge of the habits of Rhino). The aim to stop the extermination of the endangered Black Rhino from the communal land has been enthusiastically supported by the Chiefs and headmen as well as the neighbouring farming community.

Ever since the Trust was formed, collaboration with Government and the local community has been achieved, with the aim to provide security for the rhino, to monitor the Rhino population in the region, and to bring benefit to the community through conservation and tourism.