If the rhino bustled along busily, it was Todd inside. Todd was not a mad Englishman because he was Welsh. He was in charge of the rhino costumes, had worn them originally in the opera for which they had been designed, during which he had had to carry enormously heavy sopranos on his back. He told me that he had originally wanted to be a vet, but had ended up being a succession of animals instead. Any time you see a film or TV show or a commercial that features someone dressed up as an animal, it’s probably Todd inside. “I was in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,” he told me. “Guess,” he added, “which one I was.” One evening he showed me pictures of his family. Here was a beautiful picture of his wife, another of his young daughter, a sweet picture of his baby son, and here was one of Todd himself. Todd was done up, very convincingly, as a bright blue centaur.

As Todd/rhino bustled along, suddenly huge crowds of children erupted onto the road ahead of us, and hurried toward us, singing and dancing and chanting, “Rhino! Rhino! Rhino!” We were quickly surrounded and escorted the last few hundred yards to where they had prepared a reception for us in the village square. The whole village had turned out to greet us with enormous enthusiasm. We sat and watched, panting in the heat and sluicing ourselves down with bottled water, as the children of the village put on a display of dancing and choral singing that was, frankly, amazing. When I say children, I’m not just talking about seven-year-olds, I’m talking about seventeen-year-olds as well. It’s odd that we don’t anymore have a comfortable word that covers the whole range. “Youngsters”? Patronising. “Kids”? No. “Youths”? Sounds as if they’ve just broken into a warehouse and stolen something. Children, then. The children had written a song about rhinos, which they then sang for us. In the background Giles had quietly taken over from Todd in the rhino suit, and after a while he joined in the dancing, lolloping, and swaying around, chasing and playing with the children before finally dodging off behind a tree for a quick ciggy. We then, with slightly less enthusiasm, sat through a series of speeches that some local dignitaries had turned up to deliver. Wherever we went, there were local dignitaries keen to be seen to be associated with us.