Hippopotamus

Notes:

We set up camp on the banks of the Katavi River in far western Tanzania, we were a little alarmed to find we were sharing it with around 200 hippos who spent their day only 100 meters away, lazing in the fetid water. During the heat of the day, they are rather placid, but as the afternoon cools down they become more active, eventually emerging from the river after dark to graze on surrounding grasslands and river banks. We had a wooden fence around our camp, but it had been trampled in a few places, and wasn’t going to stop anything the size of a hippo. So each evening, with our flimsy nylon tents clustered protectively around our vehicle, we would lie listening to the sound of heavy footfalls and grass being chomped around us, all accompanied by the bellowing and roaring of these cantankerous animals. We didn’t get much sleep for a week!