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During the night I hear a horrendous, blood-curdling, roaring scream. It reverberates and echoes all up and down the Kavango River, where we are now camping. It is a hippopotamus. She sounds like she is angry or terrified or in excruciating pain. I feel terrible for her. I have never experienced anything like this before. It goes on and on for about ten minutes. I am sure she has woken up half of the Caprivi Strip with her agonized bellows.
In the morning Mike tells us it was a mating. It sounded more like rape than consensual sex to me, but I suppose that is nature’s way. Amazingly, my friends Jørn and Birthe slept through it all.
The Kavango River is in the Caprivi Strip, a narrow slice of Namibia that seems to poke its finger in between Botswana and Angola. The tip of the finger grazes Zambia and Zimbabwe. Needless to say, with so many borders so close to each other, the situation here has sometimes been a bit touchy. Not that many years ago it was necessary for tourists to drive in armed convoys into the area. Now it is nice and peaceful. Except for mating hippos.
It is magical to sit by the river in the blush of dawn and listen and watch as the world awakens to a new day. Doves coo, kingfishers dart about busily, hippos – who have moved from their nocturnal grazing on land back to their riparian day environment – bellow noisily to each other, and an owl flies by with a silent feathery whoosh. As the sun rises and colours the sky pink, the morning mist also rises, hiding the river in a mystical cloak.
It is quite a contrast to sit by a flowing river midst lush greenery after the arid landscapes that we have hitherto passed through. We go for a drive in the Mahango (Bwabata) National Park. Strangely enough, the only hippo we see is one lying in a wooded area, snoozing so soundly we think at first glance that it is dead. One rape and one death in one day, can it be so? Nature is so harsh! In actual fact it was one run-of-the-mill mating and one very sleepy hippo.
On our drive we see a wealth of wildlife, including a herd of bachelor elephants, vervet monkey, warthog, ostrich, a yellow-billed stork, reedbuck, kudu, crocodile, sable antelope, roan antelope, zebra, and over 20 bird species. The next day we take a slow cruise on the river with an admirably knowledgeable local guide. He shows us no less than an incredible 29 different species within the space of a couple of hours, including the shy and extremely well-hidden black-crowned night heron.
