He only realised the next day that he was a true miracle worker.
Andrea Corini, a 42-year-old from Brescia, crossed the Tsavo East National Park on foot, alone, after his off-road vehicle had become bogged down.
He is alive by a miracle and calls his saviours angels.
They are the park rangers who found him when total darkness had already fallen in the savannah. But Andrea is still convinced he did the right thing.

'The car got stuck in an area near the Galana river where there was no signal for the mobile phone,' the Brescia-based shopkeeper tells Malindikenya.net. 'I panicked and thought I had no other choice, that they would never recover me there and that, being close to the river, it was an area full of dangerous animals. Thanks to the GPS, however, I knew that by walking fast I could reach the Manyani exit in four hours'.
What Andrea may not have known, or what the adrenaline of the adventure made him forget, is that in those 4 hours of walking he could have encountered lions and other dangerous animals, that hyenas and wild dogs happily attack humans and that as darkness falls the leopard is a tireless hunter.
And that the KWS absolutely forbids anyone visiting the park to go on foot, even in extreme cases. Andrea was not aware of this and above all did not assess the real danger of being mauled by a predator or attacked by an elephant or buffalo that felt disturbed by the unusual presence of a human being on foot.
'I thought of going in search of a signal,' Andrea recounts, 'so that I could call my friends in Malindi and my partner in Italy and alert the authorities to pick me up. But the sun was beginning to set and the park exit was still far away. I prayed, I prayed a lot. I am a believing man and I believe someone listened to me. During the walk in the dark I had moments of discouragement, the mobile phone whose torch I was using was running out of power and no one had appeared yet. At one point a gazelle cut me off and in the bushes I saw two cat's eyes, small and close.
The leopard, indeed. The Brescian tourist began to feel the dread of being easy prey.

'The words of the Italian honorary ranger Adriano Ghirardello, who called me to find out exactly where I was,' he recounts, 'were very helpful and reassuring, telling me that there were no lions in that area'.
Soon afterwards, fortunately, rangers from the Kenya Wildlife Service, led by senior warden Wilson Njue, appeared and found him. They report that he cried like a baby and would not stop thanking them.

"They are my heroes," confirmed the unfortunate tourist, "they saved my life. We went back to my car with them, and they pulled it out after getting bogged down themselves. I will thank them for the rest of my life. They could have arrested me for what I did, but instead they comforted me, apologised for not arriving sooner and showed great humanity'.
Corini's rescue happened much earlier and thanks to Italian institutions. Friends from Malindi, from the Asante Sana children's centre, which he had visited in the previous days, after arriving in Malindi by car and alone from Nairobi, through Amboseli and Tsavo West, called the emergency number of the Italian Embassy in Nairobi, which contacted the KWS office in Voi through the honorary consul in Malindi. From here the search started and was, fortunately, successful.
"I realise only now how lucky I was," the tourist explains to malindikenya.net, "but this does not change my thoughts on Kenya, a wonderful place full of humble, dignified and smiling people who brightened up a trip I had dreamed of taking for so long. I will return to these places and to the savannah, with the appropriate precautions and with my 7 and 11 year old daughters'.