Read Online Red Nile: The Biography of the World’s Greatest River by Robert Twigger - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Robert Twigger
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if the craft is upset midstream the hippo is quite capable of taking enraged chunks out of your splashing body. And unlike the crocodile the hippo can chew.
In a strange couple of incidents, Diana Tilden-Davis, a South African former beauty queen, was attacked by a hippo in the Okuvango swamp in 2007 only two weeks after another woman (on her honeymoon) had been killed. Ms Tilden-Davis survived but was still on crutches two years later. Both these attacks took place at the end of the dry season when water levels were low and food scarce. This is when males traditionally are most aggressive. If one sticks to deeper water and wetter conditions an attack is less likely.
Hippos often skulk in thickets during the day, and get aggressive if surprised, so it’s best to avoid such places. The oxpecker bird has a distinctive alarm call – if you hear it there may well be hippos about.
If a hippo does attack, making a noise or clapping your hands is of no use at all. This is a creature that can break a crocodile’s back in one bite. It has no fear. Your best bet is to climb a tree or hide behind a termite mound. A big termite mound.
8 • The biggest killer
Fighting a leopard is learned by watching the person who deals with them most: an owner of goats . Sudanese proverb
So you avoid the baboons and the hippos, which, despite everyone saying are so dangerous, you always thought were just a trifle overrated . Now, at last, you’re facing the real killer. The land-going equivalent of the great white shark: Nilus crocodilus . Dolphins may be more efficient killers than sharks (and certainly sharks fear dolphin attacks), but there is something deadly and primeval about a shark that hits the fear button in a way a dolphin never could. It’s the same with crocs.
The first croc I saw I thought was a stick, a six-inch stick with two bumps, the bumps being where further sticks may have sprouted from.I didn’t know, I wasn’t watching, I didn’t really care – I was admiring the shimmering width of the river as I passed the Sobat tributary in Sudan. But I knew enough not to be trailing my fingers in the water. The stick was drawn to my attention – it was going upstream, against the current, raising the tiniest of ripples in front of it. And it was drifting broadside on – unusual, to say the least. Then the head appeared, not slowly, but all at once, as shocking as something being born, some memory long buried in the oldest parts of the human brain. I’ve seen a lot of crocs since then, even eaten them at a restaurant (fishy tasting), but I still remain cautious. Something to do with their eyes.
Hendri Coetzee, killed by a crocodile at thirty-five, had already achieved what no other explorer had: a complete descent of the Nile river from its furthest source, the Kagera river, to the Mediterranean Sea. He had traversed the famed Murchison Falls area which has the highest concentration of massive Nile crocodiles anywhere on the planet. He had had years of experience paddling African waters. I first heard about him when I was rafting the Zambezi for a travel magazine. A kayaker making a video of the descent was a friend of Coetzee and spoke of his efficiency, helpfulness and coolness under pressure in awed terms. It was something that rang a strange bell down through the ages, reminding me of what people said about another explorer dead before his time – Arctic explorer Gino Watkins, who also died in a kayak but in the frozen north, not in the steaming jungles of central Africa.
Hendri Coetzee said that ‘If I wanted surf I would never leave home. The nature of the beast is risk.’ The beast was exploring uncharted rivers in the Nile/Congo headwaters in tiny creekboats – eight-foot-long kayaks with more space than a playboat for food and gear, balancing the risk of greater weight against the need for supplies in such a remote spot. Like Watkins, who died at twenty-seven when his kayak was sunk by a freak calving ice floe
In a strange couple of incidents, Diana Tilden-Davis, a South African former beauty queen, was attacked by a hippo in the Okuvango swamp in 2007 only two weeks after another woman (on her honeymoon) had been killed. Ms Tilden-Davis survived but was still on crutches two years later. Both these attacks took place at the end of the dry season when water levels were low and food scarce. This is when males traditionally are most aggressive. If one sticks to deeper water and wetter conditions an attack is less likely.
Hippos often skulk in thickets during the day, and get aggressive if surprised, so it’s best to avoid such places. The oxpecker bird has a distinctive alarm call – if you hear it there may well be hippos about.
If a hippo does attack, making a noise or clapping your hands is of no use at all. This is a creature that can break a crocodile’s back in one bite. It has no fear. Your best bet is to climb a tree or hide behind a termite mound. A big termite mound.
8 • The biggest killer
Fighting a leopard is learned by watching the person who deals with them most: an owner of goats . Sudanese proverb
So you avoid the baboons and the hippos, which, despite everyone saying are so dangerous, you always thought were just a trifle overrated . Now, at last, you’re facing the real killer. The land-going equivalent of the great white shark: Nilus crocodilus . Dolphins may be more efficient killers than sharks (and certainly sharks fear dolphin attacks), but there is something deadly and primeval about a shark that hits the fear button in a way a dolphin never could. It’s the same with crocs.
The first croc I saw I thought was a stick, a six-inch stick with two bumps, the bumps being where further sticks may have sprouted from.I didn’t know, I wasn’t watching, I didn’t really care – I was admiring the shimmering width of the river as I passed the Sobat tributary in Sudan. But I knew enough not to be trailing my fingers in the water. The stick was drawn to my attention – it was going upstream, against the current, raising the tiniest of ripples in front of it. And it was drifting broadside on – unusual, to say the least. Then the head appeared, not slowly, but all at once, as shocking as something being born, some memory long buried in the oldest parts of the human brain. I’ve seen a lot of crocs since then, even eaten them at a restaurant (fishy tasting), but I still remain cautious. Something to do with their eyes.
Hendri Coetzee, killed by a crocodile at thirty-five, had already achieved what no other explorer had: a complete descent of the Nile river from its furthest source, the Kagera river, to the Mediterranean Sea. He had traversed the famed Murchison Falls area which has the highest concentration of massive Nile crocodiles anywhere on the planet. He had had years of experience paddling African waters. I first heard about him when I was rafting the Zambezi for a travel magazine. A kayaker making a video of the descent was a friend of Coetzee and spoke of his efficiency, helpfulness and coolness under pressure in awed terms. It was something that rang a strange bell down through the ages, reminding me of what people said about another explorer dead before his time – Arctic explorer Gino Watkins, who also died in a kayak but in the frozen north, not in the steaming jungles of central Africa.
Hendri Coetzee said that ‘If I wanted surf I would never leave home. The nature of the beast is risk.’ The beast was exploring uncharted rivers in the Nile/Congo headwaters in tiny creekboats – eight-foot-long kayaks with more space than a playboat for food and gear, balancing the risk of greater weight against the need for supplies in such a remote spot. Like Watkins, who died at twenty-seven when his kayak was sunk by a freak calving ice floe
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