Dan's Adventure

We could see hippos as soon as we arrived at the river close to the point where the Masai Mara meets the Serengeti,, some on the banks and others submerged in the water. I tried to get a closer look by climbing down the rocks, but I was soon shouted at by an armed guard to get back up. Bubbles appeared close to the rocks I was standing on and I immediately realised why the guard had made me move when a hippo resurfaced. Hippos are a lot bigger than I imagined, some of them were massive.

One of the guards took a few of us for a walk further along the river to try and see some crocodiles. It obviously isn’t safe to walk alone in the bush hence the armed guards. Apparently the do carry live ammunition, but they aren’t allowed to shoot the animals. The guns are just used to scare them away by shooting into the air. The hippos were fortunately all coming onto land on the other side of the river, so for now we were safe. They might be large, but they can run fast when they charge. I hope I never experience that!

Further down the river our guard stops and points out what looks like a rock on the other side of the river. He tells us that its a crocodile’s head, from a distance its hard to tell and my camera zoom failed to get a decent close up. Just down from it was another floating in the river with its mouth fully open, looking like it was just waiting for its lunch to land right in there. On the way back we spotted another, this time swimming up towards the rocks I was standing on earlier!