By Ken Wells

     Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal

     4 August 1998

     Copyright 1998, Dow Jones & Company

     MTONDO CAMP, Zambia -- The Zambezi River slides quietly by, a moving watercolor under a diminishing sun. From a thatched-roof hut high on the riverbank, seven British and American travelers and their two Zimbabwean river guides sip drinks, admiring this African postcard. Then a deep grumble comes from midriver, scattering the silence.

      It sounds like a bullfrog on steroids, amplified over a loudspeaker.

It is actually a hippo. Hippos are everywhere here. Hippos by the dozens.

     You know: those pudgy, cute, Porky Pig-like behemoths that lounge, snuggled together in the water, in big groups. Their likeness is a favorite for stuffed toys and cartoons. Scores of children's books feature friendly hippos as the main character. One of them is even called "The Happy Hippo."

     But in the distance now is a real hippo, a 3-ton bull. He is not a happy hippo, however. A line of canoeists has swung in too close for his comfort and he has mounted a sand bar, mouth agape, tusks primed, bellowing in rage. The canoes slide by on a five-knot current, narrowly avoiding a confrontation.

     From the safety of the hut, guide Murray Chalibamba shakes his head in awe. He has seen this behavior before. "Man, look at that guy! I just love it when they bite the water!" He tosses his head violently, in a jawing, slashing motion, mimicking this early warning sign of a hippo attack.

     Mr. Chalibamba's clients have spent a day in canoes paddling down this very same river. With two more days to go, and perhaps hundreds more hippos to dodge, they have a hard time sharing his admiration. Later, Lloyd Shambira, the second of the guides, says somberly: "You do not crowd the hippo. This is an animal you must respect."

     If you think the lion or cape buffalo is the most dangerous animal in Africa, think again. Cuddly reputation notwithstanding, it's the hippopotamus, a name that literally means river horse. Though no one tracks exact numbers, hippos by far account for more deaths on this wild continent than any other beast. Ask any guide, game ranger or river-dwelling villager to name Africa's most perilous place and they all name the same spot: "Between a hippo and its route to the water."

     Next perhaps is between a hippo mother and her calf. Or in a canoe that foolishly, or inadvertently, floats atop a sleeping hippo. "The hippo is very territorial and can be quite aggressive when challenged or surprised," says Riley Tolmay, Mtondo Camp's manager and a one-time river guide himself. Mr. Shambira, who has been taking canoe safaris down this stretch of the river for years, puts it more graphically: "A mad hippo can bite a crocodile in two. And a canoe to pieces."

     For the skeptical, consider this: A New Zealand canoeist who floated into a submerged sleeping hippo on the river near here last year was rammed from his boat and mauled to death after the animal startled awake, according to river guides familiar with the incident. The year before, just 300 yards from where the Zambezi tumbles into Victoria Falls, an American river guide and his Zimbabwean partner were attacked by a male hippo as they tried to paddle around a female hippo and her calf. The American, in the widely reported incident, lost an arm but miraculously survived after the hippo literally swallowed him to the neck, then spit him out; the Zimbabwean was killed.

      Even when a hippo encounter isn't fatal, it leaves an impression. Just ask Scott Wesley and Rob Callaway, two Australian college students who were recently fishing from an 18-foot pontoon boat on the Zambezi's Zambian side. Drifting quietly into a bay, they surprised a male hippo, which hammered their broad, three-quarter-ton craft with such force that it nearly knocked them over a rail. "The power of that thing. Amazing," says an incredulous Mr. Callaway.

      Rural Africans, who take the brunt of attacks by the ubiquitous hippo, know that power well; at any remote settlement where hippos and humans coexist, stories of entanglements are common. One told to a visitor not long ago: In a village near South Africa's Kruger National Park, a woman returning home just after dark stumbled onto a hippo that had just moved into a nearby irrigation pond. The animal, caught off guard, made a mad dash for the pond -- trampling her to death.

     If all this is true, then why would anyone hop into a canoe and wittingly go paddling among them?

     "Well, it's a beautiful way to see the river," says John Berry, director of Zambezi Safari & Travel Co. His is among a half-dozen or so Zimbabwe-based outfitters who book popular overnight canoe safaris along this 60-mile, hippo-thick stretch of the Lower Zambezi as it flows between Zimbabwe and Zambia eastward to the sea in Mozambique. Three vast game parks, including Zimbabwe's renowned Mana Pools, line this route; navigating their shores from the tranquillity of a canoe often offers spectacularly close encounters with game -- elephant and buffalo, particularly, that conventional driving safaris don't. Such animals usually pay little mind to canoes, and even if annoyed won't, without provocation, plunge into the river after them.

     Mr. Berry and other outfitters also note that canoeing among hippos, assuming it's done under the watchful eye of an expert guide, is probably less dangerous than some of the other pursuits that tourists undertake in these parts: bungee-jumping 350 feet off the Victoria Falls bridge, for example, or hunting the unpredictable cape buffalo in brushy savanna.

     In fact, among the hippo's virtues, and the one that makes these paddling expeditions possible, is that the hippo is usually quite predictable. "Hippos like the deep water. They stake out their territory there and they stay there during the day. That means we stay out of deep water and out of their way."

     The speaker is the 20-something Mr. Shambira, a man with an easygoing manner and a sharp eye for river hazards. He's been down this river so many times that he's memorized all the hippo holes, and given names to the big territorial males living in them. The deep-voiced "Pavarotti" draws laughs when he bellows at a distance. Only later does Mr. Shambira reveal less-whimsically named others: "Mad Max" and "Psycho Sam."

     And his admonition to avoid hippo contact by staying in shallow water turns out to be easier said than done when, on a cloudless morning, with the river a mirror of calm, he maneuvers his canoe into a slow-moving eddy and instructs the four other canoes in his charge to follow, in a single line, close to the bank.

     By day, hippos tend to congregate, in pods of up to 20 animals, near deep midriver pools. They laze about, heads exposed, staying out of the sun that can blister their sensitive skin while keeping an eye out for predators -- notably crocodiles and lions that want to eat their young, and humans who sometimes hunt them. It is there that, undisturbed, hippos do indeed often exhibit endearing behavior -- grooming each other or snuggling, one hippo resting its head upon another.

     They generally only leave the water at night to forage, sometimes roaming miles inland. But "generally" is the problematic word. Hippos do now and then invade the shallows by day, even climbing out on banks to feed; they also stake out territory in deep river pockets just off the river bank. So sticking close to shore isn't a panacea for avoiding contact with them.

     This is driven home when, at one sharp bend, several hippos cascade off the bank about 30 yards ahead of Mr. Shambira's canoe. They disappear; then heads pop up -- squarely in his path. He barks an order to the other canoes to hug the bank and observe the single-file rule -- no use giving hippos a wide target. He then stands, to make himself more visible, rapping the side of his canoe with his paddle.

     This is his warning to the hippos: We're here and we're coming through.

     A tense minute later, the canoeists float past the point where the hippos submerged. They breathe a collective sigh of relief when the hippos pop up, one at a time, well out in the river. Before the trip is over, there will be at least a half dozen of these adrenaline-filled encounters.

     And what if a hippo had attacked? Mr. Shambira shrugs. Guides here are unarmed and the defense is three-prong: shouting, slapping the water with a paddle, then paddling away as fast as possible.

     Later, sipping tea on high ground, two of the canoeists, David and Cynthia Onions, a middle-aged British couple who live on a farm, are happy to have made the trip and seem happy, too, to be off the river and out of the hippos' way. "I have to say, well, there were apprehensive moments," says Mrs. Onions. Agrees Mr. Onions: "There was certainly an element of risk. If you didn't have someone with you who knew what they were doing, you could find yourself in trouble quickly."

     Mr. Shambira admits that all he thinks about is staying out of trouble. In fact, he confides that he pulled the group off the river about two miles above a stopping point he sometimes uses. Below that is a place he calls "Hippo City," a treacherously narrow meander with one of the highest concentrations of hippos in the world -- and little room to avoid them.

     "I only take two kinds of people there," he says, only half-jokingly. "The young, and the foolish."

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