When we arrived at Camp Xakanaxa we were given the standard safety talk which included the warning: don’t leave your tent at night without getting an escort from a staff member. I was fine with the warning. It seemed perfectly reasonable. (When we were in Northern Tanzania a few years ago, we were escorted at night by Maasai armed with spears to protect us against lions.) At Xakanaxa they didn’t even need to explain their reasoning to me, but they went on to say that they had a resident male hippo, named Oscar, who got kicked out of his family group by his father several years ago. Oscar routinely moved around the camp munching on the grass around the lodge grounds, usually at night. For safety reasons, our tents were not on the ground. They were on elevated platforms a few steps above ground level. We didn’t have to worry about him crashing into our space. The stairs were too narrow for a hippo to climb. The baboons were not afraid to come up the stairs, but they seemed to respect social distancing. (Though one did jump from a tree to the roof of the tent while I was in the shower, giving me a bit of a scare.)
One evening, I heard from other guests at dinner that Oscar was foraging near their tent. When we finished, one of the staff members walked me over to try to take a photo, but it was too dark, and it wasn’t possible to get a good photo. The next night, Oscar woke me up in the middle of the night, making a lot of noise right next to the tent. I didn’t get out of bed, but in the morning there was clear evidence that he had been there: footprints on the path next to the steps, a few stakes (that marked the path) kicked out of the ground, and a depression in the ground where it looked like he might have taken a nap lying on the ground. Maybe my snoring was music to his ears.
The following day, while my wife was hanging out on the deck next to the river, Oscar came out of the water right next to where she was lounging. After she took a short video on her cell phone (with some camera help from the bartender) to send to the grandchildren back in the States, she came to me excited, but trying to remain calm, asking me to grab my camera and come take some photos of the big boy. The photo above is one of those photos. For a few more, click here.
In second grade, before a field trip to the National Zoo, we were asked to write a paper—admittedly there weren’t many words written on that handwriting paper with one-inch lines and a dotted midline, common in those days in elementary schools—on the two animals that we wanted to see. I picked kangaroos and hippopotamuses. Unfortunately, they didn’t have either of those two animals at the zoo then. Oscar made up for it in Botswana. It’s never too late for a hippo to make your day!
By the way, like me, my wife doesn’t like having her photo on publicly available web pages, that is why her face is edited out on the lead image. She has a Facebook account (I still don’t) but even there you will not see photos of her. Eventually, I will post family photos in the Members Only section.