Hippo Dodging

When Jenn and I were small kids, Dad took us on the Jungle Cruise ride at Disneyworld. We were both so terrified by the mechanical animals that we ended up cowering under the benches. If you've been on that ride, you know that there is abolutely nothing scary about the Jungle Cruise. In fact it's really fairly sedate. But I have a theory that maybe I wasn't actually afraid of the animals. Maybe, just maybe, I was afraid of the boat...

When we went to the Okavango Delta in Botswana as part of my overland tour, we took a trip into the Delta on mokoros. A mokoro is the local transport in the Delta - it's a long, flat-bottomed boat that is just wide enough for one person to sit. They are maneuvered through the reeds and shallow water of the Delta by a poler - one guy standing at the back of the boat with a long pole that he uses to shove the boat through the water. The boats are very narrow, like I mentioned, and as the poler moves around, the mokoro tends to rock back and forth. If any of the passengers shift around, the boat rocks. So it doesn't really feel all that stable.

We started off into the Delta, leaving behind our trusty truck, Janis, with the mokoros loaded down with tents and sleeping bags and our daypacks. For one night, we were going to be truly roughing it, bush camping on a small island in the middle of the Delta. The Okavango has its fair share of African wildlife. Depending on the island, they have lions and elephants. But the most memorable animal in the Delta for me was the hippo. As we were being escorted to our camp site for the night, we maneuvered through many lillipads - and that to me immediately brings up images of hippos sticking their heads out of the water.

Hippos are not very nice animals. They are actually one of the deadliest animals in Africa. They tend to be very territorial and when they attack, they move with surprising speed. And of course, when you are in a small boat in the middle of a shallow lake, you are entirely in their territory. They have a distinct advantage.

Our first evening in the Delta, we set up camp, rested for a while, and then loaded back into the mokoros for a visit to a hippo pool. This was probably not the safest thing I have done in my life, but at the time, it seemed like it would be an adventure and very interesting to see some hippos outside of a zoo.

We could hear them in the area as we set off. They make a very distictive snorting, huffing noise that carries surprisingly far in the still air of the Delta. As we approached the pool, the snorting noises became more frequent and much louder. As we poled through the thick reeds, there were areas where a large animal had waded, pushing the reeds aside so that four-foot wide path had been created through the Delta. The hippos were close by. In my mind, I could imagine them sitting only a few feet away, hidden in the reeds, just waiting for our boat to get a little too close. My heart was in my throat the whole time. The sensation for me was similar to the tension you feel in a haunted house. You know something is about to jump out at you, but you don't know when it's coming. As we poled along, keeping a close lookout for hippos, I recalled the Jungle Cruise and fervently wished that I had a bench to hide under again...

In the end, we heard the hippos everywhere around us and we saw their tracks, but we never saw them from the boat. I was fine with that. That trip through the Delta was one of the scariest things I have ever done. I don't think I have ever been so relieved to be back on dry land, but I wouldn't trade the experience for the world!