1. The Search
2. The Sounds
3. Walk at Sunrise
4. Chamilandu Camp
5. Stalking
6. Chindeni Camp - The Senses
7. Snorting
8. Tastes
9. The Sighting and a Bush Breakfast

Snorting

Now I don't like hippos. They snort, they grunt and wheeze and hurrumph. They blow jets of water from their bulbous noses. They have cavernous mouths and sword-like incisors. And they are ugly.
Most wildlife stories from Africa are about lions. But little did you know, the true act of valor is surviving the hippo. More people are killed in Africa by hippopotamuses than any other animal. Grown hippos weigh 1,000 to 2,000 kilograms - that's a lot of hippo. They are territorial and get scared very easily at day and charge. At night, reddish-brown in color, the hippo melds surprisingly well into the dark, especially before the moon is up or before your flashlight catches the greeny pink glint of its little round eye. That is why the guides escort you back to your tent or your chalet at night. Why at night you may wonder should one worry about hippos? Because they graze on the land at night, lumbering out of the water that they wallowed in all day and that African picture books always show them wallowing in. Yet in the cool of the night, these thin-skinned animals waddle around your campsite covering over 20 kilometers before sunrise, munching and chomping on whatever green thing looks good. SLURP, munch, munch, SLURP, chomp. That's the hippo nighttime snacking. Even industrial strength earplugs wont block that out. Try a 5:30 a.m. wakeup call after that.

But in the end of it all, you start getting affectionate toward the hippos. I began looking at mementos of them after we had left the bushcamps. Salad forks with hippos on, little carved hippo knickknacks, hippos as doorstops, textiles with hippos painted on them. I would think of the hippo wallowing in mud that we disturbed on an evening walk at Chindeni, a red blazing sun setting behind, how frightened it was and it backed into the lagoon only to get into a huge fight with a territorial hippo -- a huge, splashing, gnashing, roaring fight. We are the visitors here, after all.


[continued...Tastes]