A Visit From the Easter Hippo

Happy Easter!!! I'm writing this while trying to scrape all the soot from the fire pit out from under my nails, and realizing that some tasks are too hard to accomplish simultaneously! Instead of the usual Easter we're used to back home -they don't have egg hunts here in Namibia- my family and I used the holiday to travel up in the Caprivi region. Sure, there weren't any bunnies or baskets. But who needs them when you have crocs and hippos? 

It was a two day's drive into the "pan-handle" section of Namibia. On the second day, we got stuck while trying to get across a flooded section of road in our 2x4, and had to get taken across in a safari truck!

 But it was well worth it. We stayed at a place called Ngepi Camp, and got to sleep in tree houses that were literally on the Okovango river. Ngepi also had a pool that was floating in the river, some pretty funny toilets, and a huge fire pit where we sat and talked with people until way past late. We got to hear hippos at night as they meandered through the swamp around the camp, and saw families of them when we went out on boats down the river, as well as crocs! Crazy part is? That's not even the best part!

On our third day in the Caprivi region, my family and I had been talking around our own little fire pit near one of our tree houses when we heard rustling in the swamp. We looked over to see a giant grey mass of a hippo who was munching away at the grass! To our disappointment, it ended up making its way back into the thick of the brush when we tried to get in close enough for a picture. 

Later that evening, the hippo came back! I had been walking back from grabbing water from the other tree house, and had heard some familiar noises of hippo.  When I walked back to our fire pit, my suspicions were confirmed! My whole family was up on the deck because the same hippo was ten yards away! This time it was munching grass on land, and was a formidable dark mass in the evening light! To get an even better view, we followed the hippo and snuck around a bush hut to look at it from a better angle. We got close... But a bit too close. 

When a hippo gets irritated or feels threatened, especially a bull (male), it can turn ugly real fast. They are quite unpredictable animals, and have killed more people than elephants or lions: one second your calmly watching, and the next a hippo is mauling everyone. 

No one got killed. But the hippo gave a mock charge towards us all as a once off warning. It is quite the same as a bull's mock charge, except over 1,000 pounds scarier! It definetly got our adrenalin going!!! They might be big animals, but when they want to, they really can move! We got to see an example of this later at dinner by the main lodge, when the hippo bolted across the grass to the swamp!

This was by far the best and most memorable Easter ever. Even though there weren't any eggs to be found, the last morning I discovered owl pellets in my sink! Hope your Easters were all great, and filled with plenty of owl pellets and hippos too! ;-)