Surfin’ Safari
Last weekend Bear dropped in straight from work wearing his uniform – Kenya Airways: 3 times a week from Bangkok to Nairobi. While we were talking about the Safari tours his travel agency offered I was quite happily reminded of a safari experience of long past…
Okay the honest truth is that it was not my personal experience. Rather it was my good friend and former housemate Paul’s. He was with the army and he travelled quite a fair bit on postings. One of his favourite places was in Africa, and one of his most memorable trips was when he went with a local guide and a marine biologist to one of the smaller tributaries of the Congo River on a moonless night to look for a weird breed of glow in the dark fish.
Armed with an engineless longboat, numerous specimen jars and some UV lamps the trio set out in the middle of the night, braving a legion of mosquitoes and the errant crocodile. It was pitch black, and they were slowly paddling along till they came about a swamp like area with tall grass and a little pool positively teaming with the little Day-Glo fishies. As they set to work filling the jars, the sounds of the Congo jungle suddenly went quiet.
Now if you have any experience hunting you would know that jungle sounds are good but when all suddenly goes quiet you should start to panic. And hope that your guns are loaded. With no weapons and no boat engine to make a quick getaway from only goodness knows what was coming, the trio quickly abandoned any further scientific research and started paddling as fast as they could back to base.
But before they got even more than a metre away, pandemonium broke out! Out of nowhere, BULLETS were flying from every direction and making HOLES in their boat! And to make matters worse, a STAMPEDE of about 40 odd HIPPOPOTAMUSUS of various sizes came barraging through the river trying to run away from the POACHERS that were camped out in the tall grasses, SHOOTING at everything that moved! Being at the wrong place at the wrong time never felt quite like this I bet!
In a situation like this they did all they could do to remain alive. All three of them tipped the boat over and hid underneath the chunk of wood that was rapidly getting riddled with bullet holes and being bumped in every direction as the hippos trundled by, praying that they wouldn’t be hit or trampled to death. Paul tells me the fear he felt serving the army during the war and live fire ammunition training exercises did not even come close to the terror he felt that night under the boat in the Congo River.
They got out (relatively) alive and (more or less) bullet and hippo footprint free. But it involved treading water in the Congo for over 3 hours under the remains of their sinking boat as the poachers came past to finish off the hippos that they shot. Attracting attention of these people would have been a bad idea as hippo poaching is illegal in Congo and you know the poachers will not let you get back to civilisation alive to tell the authorities about their activities. So they had to contend with the fish that were nipping at them (luckily no piranhas), insects that were eating them alive, the odd water snake and again, the errant crocodile.
Paul likes to tell me that Africa, after that little ‘safari’ would never be the same for him ever again. I like to put it another way:
Plane Ticket to Africa: USD 2500
Safari Fees: USD 300
Boat Fees: USD 50
Getting Shot by Hippo Poachers: Priceless
There’s some things in life money just can’t buy. For everything else…
