It could have been a place where, when rhinos still dominated the country’s bushes, pregnant females came to birth in plenty. Or it could as well have meant that they always came into the world via this space of a special place. Or the orphaned ones found solace here after their mothers had been decimated, so brutally for their horns, by greedy poachers that roamed East Africa. Everything around looked familiar but the landscape, animals, climate and the people were all unique in their respective ways. A whole brand new experience in a life -of discovering what only the wanderlusters experience. Suddenly, my body and mind wanted to be here until eternity and work for it -for the natural world -free of charge if I could. I was not going to ruin the opportunity that took long to come but which, as I then believed, had come to illuminate light at the end of a long tunnel that was, all along, filled with pitch darkness of never ever being able to move. To travel. To touch beyond where my feet stand with vision limited within the radius of my eye-power.

Ngulia Hills the untamed, made a natural rocky embankment that is one of the highest standing features of the reserve that overlooks the all-important Ngulia Rhino Sanctuary to its east. The sanctuary has given the most hunted giants a lease of life from several decades of persecution by us -human communities -that bizarrely believed that the rhinoceros carry on their heads all the answers to their medical hopelessness and economic confusion.

The excellent, distant, sharp blue views of Chyulu Hills to the right and Mt Kilimanjaro to the left from the high standing camp up subdues in a legion of a million year old geographical formations is some home for no one but graceful beasts. The place, as enchanting as it is, plants a natural love in one's heart for it that nothing could ever uproot. A cradle of some special sighting after a long chase and wait – a place where the pupils of my skittish eye had for the first time ever met the fierce-looking one of lion for the first time ever, dutifully living in drought and unapologeticaly in love with its habitat which was a home to the legendary man eaters of Tsavo.

Excerpt: The Tsavo Man-Eaters were a pair of large (and scary), maneless male lions that attacked and fed on dozens of railway construction workers across nine months in 1898. (John Henry Patterson killed them and then documented the ordeal in his 1907 book)

A large watering hole in front of the lodge attracted hundreds of animals to it every day with spectacularly unending files of buffalos, elephants, zebras and antelopes frequenting it for the refreshment that was rare to come by. Dry conditions are long term in Tsavo and, when the skies had not opened up for a while, elephants dug up empty water pans and popped the bottle for everyone else!