Death in the Delta

Our delta camp...

...and the leopard tracks nearby.

Also, hippo tracks.

Our trail through the delta. We never saw lions, but we heard them at night. 

Chibuku break in Boro Village.

Mushrooms growning out of elephant dung. Every turd is a little ecosystem.

BORO VILLAGE, Botswana - The hippo became the mythical swamp monster emblem of our trip to the Okavango Delta by dugout canoe. Its heavy, four-toed imprint crisscrossed our campsite on arrival and we were warned sternly to steer clear perpetually smiling, obese water horses whenever they lumber onto shore.

When the clear cool delta night descended on our bush camp (population: 3), the tell-tale crash of brush and almost feline growls sounded just steps away from our flimsy tent (and, as the spoor showed the next day, they were).

The hippopotamus is infamous in Africa as the deadliest beast this side of the mosquito. Its roly poly dimensions belie a dangerous aggression in the water and, when grazing on land, a need to trample anything and everything between it and the water.

Upon heading off to camp rough in the delta, the territory of lions, leopards and hyenas, all we heard were the hippo warnings.

These horror stories proved to be true just two days before we set out on the delta: two men drowned after their canoe was capsized by a hippo, not far from our riverside hostel.

But despite the warnings, our proximity to the animals, and the clear evidence of their fondness for our camp we still hadn't caught sight of a hippo nearing the end of our three day journey into the delta.

For the first two days they lurked, they foraged, and they grunted, but they never appeared.

I started imagining a b-list Jaws knock-off starring Lou Diamond Phillips - 'Hippo! Death in the Delta.'

This hippo paranoia (Could they be under the canoe, waiting to tip us?) was made worse by my unfortunate decision to buy our guide, Martin, a Chibuku (the ubiquitous, dangerously cheap fermented sorghum beer of southern Africa). It seems Martin had more of a taste for the sauce than I realized and instead of just stopping at one Chibuku, he took my offer as license to drink on the job as much as he wanted. I even caught him singing, 'Shake, shake, Chibuku,' (the drink's motto) while he made the campfire.

On the plus side, we got to tour his village on our Chibuku run, meet his family, and get bitten by the Boro Village ants (an important cultural experience). The downside was that our guide/poler/protector-from-wild-beasts was from time to time pushing us through croc- and hippo-filled waters with a fresh liter of swill in his belly.

I finally had to draw the line and cut off the booze during the day-time, when we headed away from the camp. He seemed disappointed.

One night, Martin came back from a fishing expedition with five wriggling tilapia and an excited look on his face.

"There are hippos in the hippo pools. Do you want to see?" (Hippos in the hippo pools seems a no-brainer, but we had passed through three times already and seen nothing but lilly pads).

"Is it safe," I asked.

"Exactly," Martin replied.

Martin had a funny way of using "exactly" as a catch-all response. It meant 'yes,' 'good,' 'sort of' and, most confusingly, 'exactly.'

A converstaion would go something like this:

'Has tourism been good for your village?'

'Exactly.'

'But I see a lot of people drinking Chibuku in the morning.'

'Exactly.'

'And how has the government taken care of your people, in terms of drinking water, medical care, that sort of thing?'

'Exactly.'

'And how many people live in Boro Village?'

'600.'

'Exactly?'

'Exactly.'

I took this most recent, hippo-related 'exactly' to mean, 'Well, you're in a dugout canoe in the water with angry one-ton animals, pal, so I can't exactly guarantee anything but, at the same time, I'm not risking my life so a couple of sunburned tourists can tell their friends they canoed with hippos. So are you getting in or not?'

So, under darkening rainy season clouds, we coasted through the water to a wide expanse of water lilies cut out of the reed-choked swamp prairie. As Martin poled us through the open water in our wobbly vessel, I got the same unsettling feeling I get in the ocean – something is beneath me and, because I can’t see it, it is very large.

At first we saw nothing. We scanned the water for any sign – a twitching ear, a barely visible pair of eyes – but nothing. I was okay with this, as by this time I had gone over and over in my head the unpleasantness of a hippo-caused death. The gnashing of massive teeth, the water filling the lungs, the awesome story I would not live to tell.

Then,100 meters away, a mighty spray, like a whale surfacing, but still actual hippo. I was getting a little nervous.

“Do they see us, Martin?”

“Exactly.”

So Martin did exactly what I didn’t want him to do. He pounded the water with his pole to agitate them enough to surface.

A massive set of jaws came out of the water, then nearby a set of eyes, the two beasts grunted, blew anther cloud of vapor skywards, and sunk back into the depths.

Swamp monster spotted, get the hell back to camp.