Wet & Wild African Canoe Safari

Anza-Borrego Desert State Park Wildflowers Photo Gallery

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John's thick accent (somewhere between Australian, British and mumbling), combined with the distance between our canoes, made for interesting animal spotting.

"That's a Stripe-Necked Heron," John would try to tell me in his whispered speech.

"What kind?" Chris would shout from the canoe behind.

"A Hype-Necked Bherron!" I'd yell to the others, unsure of my pronunciation but unable to clarify without an animal ID book.

"It's a High-Pecked Barron!" I'd hear Chris tell the Dutch couple.

Throughout the trip, I think we inadvertently renamed nearly every animal we saw. It took quite a while—basically the whole trip—to get used to sharing the river with large, wild animals, mostly hippos. Despite the fact that hippos look like waterlogged cows, they are responsible for more human deaths than any other animal in Africa. I quickly learned that you don't just paddle past hippos. You have to get past them.

The first part of hippo avoidance is locating them. Many hippos were floating in large groups that, from a distance, looked like partially submerged mines. Those were easy to spot. The trick was to find the ones underwater. Hippos are not fond of surprise visitors and if we didn't know where they were, there was a good chance they would surface under our canoe and bite us into anchovy-size pieces, which John reminded us, "is not a good thing."

To avoid death, we banged the sides of our canoes with the paddles every 30 seconds or so to let the hippos know where we were—a bit like a courtesy knock when entering a neighbor's house. The sound traveled through the water and a few hundred meters downstream a few hippos would pop their heads up and give us a quick glare before disappearing again.

Once we knew their location, we headed for the opposite shore, except in the smaller channels where the river was barely wide enough for a hippo and a canoe. Here we stuck to the shallower of the two banks because—under the Survival Rule of Canoeing with Hippos—when disturbed, they usually flee to deeper water. Unfortunately, some of the hippos who had not been briefed on this point, ran straight at us. To be more precise, they charged at me in the lead canoe.

There are not many ways to stop a charging hippo while maneuvering a canoe. If John shot the animal with his revolver, which was sitting somewhere at the bottom of his waterproof bag, it would just make the hippo angry. If we stepped out of our canoes, we were crocodile bait. And if we paddled up onto land, we'd have to fend off the buffaloes and elephants waiting to stomp us into Zambezi pizza toppings. The only option left was to slap our paddles against the water. This doesn't sound like much of a defense against an angry, three-ton hippo, but it did the trick. One particularly ticked-off hippo did get within two yards of me before he was deterred by my impressive display of paddle-slapping.