Hippos in the pool

22 Nov 2008:

Saturday morning we woke up, not especially early, and headed out for the 3-4 hour drive to St Lucia, a coastal game reserve in northeastern KwaZulu Natal. As this is the part of the state that is said to be malarial, we had started taking our atovaquone-proguanil prophylaxis this past week. We had nothing on the docket until 4pm when we were going to go on a hippo and croc-spotting cruise on the St Lucia estuary. We stopped at a lovely beach with crashing surf and a strong riptide; we only waded and still felt the pull, and nobody at the beach was brave enough to swim. Everyone (else), however, did seem to be brave enough to wear a Speedo (young and old, men and women).

We then headed to Afrikhaya, a pleasant B&B run by a friendly Dutch couple; they showed us to our room and told us about the town of St Lucia. (Summary: very small.) We ate a meal at a place called “St Pizza”; despite the name, I had a calamari steak that was tasty but buttery. After that, we strolled along the main drag (all of 500 meters), browsed at some sidewalk vendors, and headed on to the boat.

The boat ride was as promised – a handful of crocs and many, many hippos, as well as some birds. The hippos were definitely the highlight. If manatees are sea cows, these suckers are definitely river cows. But dangerous river cows (“never get between a hippo and the water”, I’ve said probably 10 times this trip… hippos kill more humans than any other mammal besides humans). We saw a few young hippos playing “whose mouth is bigger”, and pushing themselves up out of the water to try to reach some tree branches, which was fun to see.

All in all, a good show. After the ride, we cased the town for all of the four minutes it may have taken to see the entire place, then stopped off near a restaurant that had a viewing area where hippos supposedly come out of the river at sunset. However, we were beaten to this viewing deck by four screaming children, one of whom was whacking a stick on a railing. On a related note, no hippos chose this particular spot to come out of the river (huh…), so instead, we drove on a circumferential road around the town that is rumored to have wildlife. We saw some kudu, which are big grey antelopes (larger than horses) with spiraling horns, and called it an early night; our game drive the next day was to leave at 5 am! Our B&B was nice, but it could have used a door to the bathroom and either an opacified door to the shower or a shower curtain… Shame! (as they say here).