The rapidly-expanding trend in tourism nowadays is Adventure Tourism – a great way of adding value to the tourism experience. You would think that the very business of survival in the concrete jungle would provide enough of a daily allowance of endorphins. But no, the conventional thinking is that after spending the weekend outrunning a rhino, taming a rapid and falling down a cliff, you would be so awash with adrenalin that facing down the boss on Monday morning would be no big deal. It seems to have worked. No longer do people concentrate solely on lying on beaches and surveying the scenery. They now interact with that same scenery by running up mountains and wriggling through caves. And it is not good enough to do dangerous things at home; they now travel to foreign parts in order to do them. Most of these Adventure Tours are conducted by titanium-toughened young men with sun bleached hair and flashing eyes who can manhandle a Landie out of a ditch, lash together three poles to make a sea-going yacht, whip up a three-course dinner on a beach out of coconut fronds, kick start an obstinate donkey and put up a tent before the beer gets cold.  These same creatures whip off their shirts at the drop of a hatchway, showing bronze biceps and sinewy muscles and.. and… erm, where was I? Oh, yes, Adventure Tours. One of the most exciting of these, of course, is game tracking on foot. Game viewing from an open vehicle is all very well but the real thrill is out there with nothing between you and arresting developments. The protective cocoon of a few tons of metal is taken away and you can smell the earth, listen to the silence, and see the animals from a more personal vantage point. This is when the dung beetle, the snake and the ant come into their own. But the best thrill of all is when you encounter a rhino. A rhino is a rather large grey beast and when you are standing only a few metres away from one it looks rather like the Houses of Parliament with horns. The earth shakes when it runs towards you. Putting a flimsy little tree between yourself and this behemoth-on-the-run causes your life to flash before your eyes. Rhino tracking on foot could be described as an adventure sport, although it is the rhino that has all the sport. The only place in South Africa (I think) where you can track rhino on foot is Mvubu Lodge, on the banks of Lake Jozini in Zululand. Two intrepid rangers, Shane and Mike, along with their tracker Umtelephone – no, I am not making this up, that is his name – will take curious guests on a hike to eyeball rhino. They tell you that you must keep an eye out for trees to climb in case a rhino should charge you. What they don’t tell you is that there will be six of you but only one tree. So take a small tip from me – don’t get the rhino between yourself and the back-up vehicle. White rhinos, being a bit short-sighted and a bit shy, tend to run away from large rumbling vehicles and inadvertently towards the small group of big-eyed pedestrians who are trying desperately to become arboreal.  Another axiom of rhino-tracking is that just when you need a good tree to shin up, there isn’t one. Just mingy little saplings that allow you to run up like a monkey and then slowly bend over so that your rear end is a few inches from the ground with your legs bicycling the air madly, while the rhino sniffs you with interest and then, not being a cruel beast, moves off to graze somewhere else. I’m not saying that this did happen, mind, I’m just saying that it CAN. Several heart stopping incidents can also take place while deep-sea diving on South Africa’s tropical reefs. Almost 100 000 dives are done on these reefs every year, which has led to a certain world-weariness amongst the denizens of the deep who, it is said, can spot a new diver at 50 metres and play the appropriate practical jokes. The favourite trick of a large potato bass called Monty was to follow a novice (he would always pick on a novice) extremely closely. The nervous greenhorn would feel the looming presence, turn clumsily around – and find himself an eyeball’s width away from a fish the size of a sports car. The diver would leap clean out of his wetsuit in shock. Monty would give a fishy chuckle and move off in search of the next victim. Regular divers, on the other hand, were welcomed eagerly by the fish that were not above nipping the occasional finger in search of titbits. And that’s always the nicest thing about adventure tourism – the adventure is often not quite what you expect.