Stalking hippos
Central African Republic, Febuary1984
We drove into the night. Our headlights fingered across shrubs and gnarled tree stumps which formed ghostly shadows in the dark. The air was still and oppressive, as if we were already in the jungle.
After a while we came to some ruined barracks which dated from the French colonial area. Reinhold knew of a lake in the vicinity and we were low on water, so we decided to make camp.
Soon after we had put up the tents and were relaxing with a cup of coffee before dinner– when there was a sound from the bush, somewhere between a grunt and the blow on a child’s toy trumpet. We held our breath. The sound came again.
“Hippos,” Reinhold said: “Don’t worry. They are far off.”
We resumed our conversation. Another sound came from much nearer by. There was rustling in the impenetrable darkness. Annette jumped up from her chair.
“That’s it! I’m going to take down the tent!” Her pale face darkening with fury, she turned on Reinhold: ” I’ll tell you what is far off! Its your damned head!! If you would listen to me just the once…”
“Ooops,” someone quipped: “domestic…”
“Trust me, ” Reinhold soothed: “The hippos are far away. At first I always used to jump too, but you’ll get used to it. The sound carries, especially in the dark.”
We calmed down and spent an uneventful night. It would have been madness to strike camp in the pitch-black darkness. Where exactly would we go?
“Hippos!”
The shout woke me up in an instant. But it was just Uschi who was waiting with Walter and Keith, cameras at the ready: “Come on you lazy bugger, we want to go see the hippos!”
It did not take long before we came across traces of their nightly activities, a few hundred metres from the camp. But hippos stick to their paths so we had been safe, if close. A little further on we reached the lake formed from the last remnant of a dried-out river. In the middle of what amounted to a giant puddle, the heads and backs of more than twenty hippos protruded from the shallow water. There was an occasional snorting and yawning but little activity otherwise.
Keith and I decided to walk around the lake to try and get a closer look, moving against the wind. We felt our way through giant elephant grass. After a while Keith wanted to turn back. He did not have propper footwear, his sandals giving scant protection on the harsh terrain. I continued on my own.
I was heading to a group of trees I had spotted on the opposite bank of the lake when I noticed a group of impalas nearby. I froze.
The animals were looking my way, large ears pricked, mostly females with young calves. I did not make a sound and the wind blew in my direction. After a while, the antelopes resumed grazing, slowly moving forwards. There was a sizeable herd not fifty metres from me. Gripped by some ancient hunting instinct I followed the herd for a good half an hour, all thoughts about the others in the camp forgotten. I managed to get a picture of a large male at most 20m away, but through the objective of my little pocked camera he was just a dot.
I resumed my search for the hippos. I reached the group of trees but could not see the lake. Convinced that I had not walked far enough, I kept in a westerly direction and then turned north towards a hill which I knew to be on the opposite bank. I crossed another dried river bed and came to a sandy track, then stumbled across stony ground and through thorny bushes for another half an hour, flushing out three warthogs in the process. I reached the foot of the hill without finding the lake. It was time to concede that I was lost.
The sun crept across the sky and started to burn with the first fierce heat of the day. From the hill I looked over endless bushland and savannah beyond, but could see neither lake nor camp which were hidden in the bush. I decided to navigate by the sun straight north-east in order to retrace my steps. I found the sandy track again and hoped to find the riverbed soon.
I pondered whether the others would have finished their breakfast by now, my stomach began to grumble furiously. There was still no sign of the riverbed. I was about to discard my survival training and just go walkabout when I noticed a glint among the shrubs. I crept closer. — There were the barracks, the lorry, Norbert and Matt’s tent, and the silver, heat-reflecting dome of Reinhold and Annette’s tent which I had noticed glistening in the sun.
The others still hadn’t finished breakfast, nor missed me yet. It was only eight o’clock. It turned out that I had lost my orientation when chasing after the impalas and headed too far north, walking in a great circle around the entire lake with the hippos right at the centre.
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Denni