Day 96 Apr 12 Richards Bay, South Africa
We got to our first of four South African ports early in the morning then sat offshore. The Cruise Director advised that the Pilot boat had broken down and they were trying to source another. Two hours late the pilot arrived on a naval vessel so off we went on the sail into Richards Bay. The pilot was, for the first time in my experience, a woman.
Richards Bay is a fast growing very industrial port with a lot of industry and, by the look of it, not too many air pollution controls. It didn’t affect us too much as we were planning a tour to the St Lucia National Park to see, in their extensive wetlands, hippos. As well, there would be Nile crocodiles and birdlife though this had been diminished greatly in the very bad drought last year.
As we’ve done safaris before, and loved them, we decided that this would be our only animal adventure this trip.
It was about an hour from the port heading north. We arrived to an amazing sight. There, grazing on the grass verge was a mature juvenile male hippo apparently oblivious to the growing number of people taking pictures. At the same time, a wetland barge, which we were to go on, was discharging people so that soon there were well over a hundred people there.
The guides were starting to get apoplectic as the beast decided to walk into the carpark and were shouting at the crowd to move away slowly, not to run. Apparently, after mosquitos, hippos kill more people in Africa than any other animal. It’s more than 3000 a year. The preferred method, if they feel threatened or you are in their territory, is to charge and take a bite out of their target. They can run at 45kph.
We were in a potentially serious situation that could have easily got out of control. Fortunately, the hippo decided to head back to the water rather than towards the plainly insane few who seemed set on taking selfies with it despite the shouted warnings. These are wild animals people!
One of the photos we took showed leeches attached to the hippo - one on his back and one just below his eye.
The trip on the water was very interesting. We saw a couple of basking Nile Crocodiles, about 2-3 metres in length. They can grow up to 7 metres. Wesaw literally hundreds of hippos. I will be able to now answer any Trivia question about hippos or crocs. We ended with the almost compulsory visit to a mini-market selling fruit and knick-knacks.