The Wilds: When the Distance Disappeared

A giraffe watches from across the open landscape of The Wilds.

The first thing that struck me about The Wilds was its scale.

The landscape was far more expansive than I expected, stretching into broad fields and distant hills. Yet it still felt familiar. When our Wildside Tour first left the pavement and began its off-road journey, I found myself a little disappointed. The first animals we encountered had come from other parts of the world, but to my eyes, they still looked like deer and donkeys I had seen before.

For a moment, I wondered whether the experience would live up to what I had imagined.

Then the zebras appeared.

Inside Their World

Because the Wildside Tour could leave the gravel road, we weren’t limited to watching the animals from a distant overlook. The truck carried us into their surroundings, and the distance between observer and animal began to disappear.

The zebras came close enough that their stripes overlapped, turning several bodies into one shifting pattern. I wasn’t waiting for one zebra to stand perfectly between the others, but I was waiting for him to look toward me.

When he finally did, the composition came together for an instant—one face meeting the camera from within all those moving lines.

One quiet gaze emerging from a shifting pattern of stripes.

Camels followed, approaching the truck with the same easy familiarity. But the most personal encounter came when a giraffe leaned toward me in search of romaine lettuce.

His face came within an inch of mine.

I wasn’t nervous. If anything, I was waiting for him to lick me. I smiled, kept my mouth firmly closed, and looked into the one eye I could see, trying to appear as unassuming—and as unappetizing—as possible.

For a moment, there was almost no distance between us: just curiosity, romaine lettuce, and a very large face peering into mine.

A Quiet Giant

The rhinoceros offered a different kind of encounter.

He was moving beside the person seated behind me, and I had only a moment to lean out from the side of the truck and make the photograph. His eye isn’t as sharp as I had hoped, but the image preserves the immediacy of that brief opportunity—the rough, ancient texture of his skin surrounding one small, watchful eye.

Everything about him felt immense. His body was massive, and his skin appeared dry, leathery, and deeply textured.

Yet there was no tension in him.

He remained calm beside the truck, carrying himself with the ease of an animal familiar with these visits. Up close, his size was astonishing, but so was his quietness.

Later, Tracey had the opportunity to feed a white rhinoceros while I continued photographing. He calmly accepted pieces of apple and sweet potato from the bucket. There was no rush or agitation. When he realized the bucket was empty, he seemed to accept the news with a simple “Oh well,” then turned and quietly walked away.

Watching an animal of that size behave with such calm gentleness was one of the most memorable moments of the day.

A fleeting close encounter—massive, textured, and unexpectedly calm.

A Tree, a Cloud, and Open Space

In the white rhinoceros area, the landscape briefly became the subject.

A small tree stood beneath a solitary cloud, and I loved the visual relationship between them. There wasn’t a grand meaning behind the photograph. The two shapes simply belonged together—and against the openness of the infrared sky, they looked wonderfully strange.

That image holds something different from the close animal encounters. It preserves the scale of The Wilds: the open land, the enormous sky, and the feeling that something unexpected could appear just beyond the frame.

A solitary tree and cloud beneath the immense infrared sky.

Leaving With the Distance Gone

By the end of the Wildside Tour, my early disappointment had disappeared.

The experience was fun, surprising, and far more intimate than I had expected. These were animals I might otherwise see only across a barrier or from a great distance. Here, they stood beside the truck, looked directly toward us, accepted treats, and then calmly continued through their world.

The photographs became less about documenting which animals we saw and more about preserving the feeling of proximity—the patterns, textures, expressions, and small moments that only become visible when the distance disappears.

The photographs featured in this journal entry are available for acquisition. For print sizes, presentation options, or other questions, please contact me at dan@dreamworldimages.com.

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