Close (enough) encounters

A safari in Africa earns awesome respect for hippos, crocodiles - and ever 'Dirty Harry'

Author: By Phyllis Meras, Globe Correspondent

Date: SUNDAY, November 2, 1997

Page: M1

Section: Travel

I came back considerably better informed, obviously, but also nervously fond of Zimbabwe, after close encounters with elephants and Cape buffalo and black mamba snakes.

Of course, I tend to let my imagination run away with me, so when I suggest ``close encounters,'' they probably weren't that close, but they were close enough to make me aware that the wild animals of Africa are well worth viewing, but mustn't be trifled with. That was tragically emphasized when a guide lost an arm to a hippopotamus in Zimbabwe's Zambesi River soon after I returned. My very first evening in Zimbabwe, I had gone hippo- and crocodile- and elephant-viewing by boat.

Unaccustomed as I am to seeing hippos, I had no idea that the gray ``rocks'' we were motoring by in our little open boat weren't rocks at all, but a pod of hippopotamuses that the captain took great pains to avoid. More people are killed annually by hippos, I had learned, than by London buses.

Along the shore, we saw giant red earth termite hills as tall as a man. A baby crocodile sunned on the Lake Kariba bank, and a monitor lizard slithered between rocks. The largest of the African lizards -- sometimes more than 2 yards long -- a fully grown monitor can eat a baby crocodile with ease, the boat captain said.

There were white herons and guinea fowl, cormorants, and egrets feeding, and a long-necked snake bird was perched on a tree. Pink clouds against an aqua sky were reflected in the still water. A fisherman stood ankle-deep fishing for bream, raising the question, of course, of why a croc (as crocodiles are affectionately called in Zimbabwe) didn't snap off a foot. (The question never was answered.)

In the game parks of Zimbabwe, walking safaris are widely advertised, and before breakfast our second day, we guests at the Bumi Hills Safari Lodge were invited to go on one. To reassure us that going walking among wild animals with a guide was relatively safe, we were told that, to be licensed, guides must have three years' experience and must have shot an elephant -- not to decimate the elephant population but to prove their ability to protect the people they are guiding.

We had not been out long before elephant tracks were spotted -- the back tracks egg-shaped; the front ones rounded. We were told that the elephant moves its trunk like a radar -- to sense what is around it, and we were warned that if we met a rogue elephant (a bull by himself), we should crouch down and move backward. (I found that prospect slightly dismaying, since we had just been warned not to step into clumps of grass because venomous puff adders hid in them.)

We came on an elephant's bedroom, too -- a sandy trench with grass compressed in it where the elephant had lain, and scuff marks beside it where he had ``gotten out of bed.'' And there, suddenly, 100 feet away from us, was a 4-ton elephant swinging his trunk. His ears extended. We had been told that elephants flap their ears primarily to keep their bodies cool, but we had not been told what extended ears might portend.

``That's Dirty Harry,'' our guide whispered. ``He's about 18 years old -- an adolescent -- and he likes to chase Land Rovers and occasionally people on foot. We're 99.9 percent safe, since he seems to be busy eating, but he may have picked up our scent, or heard us. He pretty surely hasn't seen us because elephants have notoriously poor eyesight. As I said, though, if he comes toward us, act like a tortoise and crawl backward.'' Meanwhile, we noticed that our guide had readied his rifle to reassure us, just in case.

But Dirty Harry did not charge. After a few minutes, he went back to munching his leaf and bark breakfast. Since a grown elephant needs about a ton of food a day, he can't waste much time daydreaming.

We got up from our crouch position and moved on. In the distance, a kudu, one of the shyest of the antelope family, leapt through the grass. We stopped at a towering termite hill and were told that there might be as many as 2 million termites living inside. The cicadas were singing.

Not looking at where I was going, I just missed falling into a warthog hole. The warthog slides backward into it so he can pop out quickly ``like a jack-in-the-box,'' we were told. Since a warthog has two tusks, I was glad I had been caught before I fell.

But it was just outside Hwange National Park in the western part of the country that I had my really closest nose-to-tusk encounter with African animals. That was a likely place to have it, since Hwange, which is about the size of Wales, is one of the largest national parks in Africa.

Two photgraphers and I went down into a hide, a dugout for animal-viewing beside a waterhole at the Hide Safari Lodge at 3 one afternoon. The promise was that, as the day cooled off, animals would come down for a drink and a splash.

We sat there for half an hour before any showed up. Then a troop of baboons arrived. Four of them took a drink, then sprawled like old men spending the afternoon in a park. Other squatted as if they were picnickers at the seaside. Next, a half-dozen Cape buffalo rumbled up, along with four zebras and a mongoose. After all these had left, two grown giraffes and a baby came to the watering hole, spread their long legs apart to reach the water more easily, and seemed to drink endlessly. I was glad to have learned that to prevent all the blood rushing to their heads, they have valves in their circulatory system.

Though I was entranced by this passing parade, the photographers felt the animals were too far away to get quality pictures and were just toying with leaving the hide when an elephant appeared; then a second; then a third; then a fourth, until some 70 elephants had assembled around the watering hole, wallowing in it and drinking from it and spraying themselves with the water.

One of them, however, didn't seem much interested in the water. He had heard or smelled us. Like the one we had seen earlier, he was big, a full six-tonner, my companions estimated. One step of his foot on our dugout and we would have been done for. Back and forth he tramped, doing his ear-flapping and tail-swishing.

It was almost dusk by then -- the time when a Land Rover from the lodge was scheduled to pick us up. Suddenly we heard its engine, and there was a rap-tap-tapping of its driver on the dugout's metal roof.

He called down that it was time for us to leave. We mumbled about the bull elephant who had his eye on us. The driver said he'd parked as far away from him as he could and urged us to make a run for the jeep while he tried to distract the bull.

None of us was too happy at the prospect of clambering out of our hole with clanking camera paraphernalia while the bull looked on -- maybe calmly. Maybe not so calmly. But we were told we had little choice. Once it was dark, there would be more elephants at the watering hole and more Cape buffalo. And they, the driver said, are perhaps the most dangerous to humans of all the animals when angered.

So, tentatively, one by one, we began to clamber out. (The driver called to us just before we began to emerge from the dugout to say we should stand firm and shout at the bull if he looked as if he were going to charge. Of course, that was just the opposite from the directive we had been given on our morning walk.) But the most important thing for us to do was to get into the Land Rover as fast as possible.

And we did, scrambling over each other as we saw the elephant's ears flapping faster -- a warning signal -- and his hoofs beginning to kick up sand. Back safely at the lodge, the three of us downed two gins and tonics apiece fast.

The last near miss I had before I left Zimbabwe was when I unwittingly used a snake's tree perch to steady myself as I climbed a bare rock one morning. Although, happily, I did not see him, a fellow-traveler did. I do not know if he was a black mamba, a short-tempered snake that can move at more than 10 miles an hour and whose bite is lethal if not treated quickly.

I did, finally, see Victoria Falls' hurtling waters appearing and disappearing in the ``smoke'' that rises from them, and found out that they are 1 1/2 times as wide and two times as high as Niagara Falls.

And I saw the dramatic rocktop burial place of Cecil John Rhodes, the English entrepreneur who, in the 1890s, established the Rhodesia of which Zimbabwe was then a part.

But everything in Zimbabwe was anticlimatic after the animals.

Visitors planning a trip at any time, however, should check with a doctor on advised inoculations and preventive medicines.

Further information is available from the Zimbabwe Tourist Office, 1270 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020; telephone 1-212-332-1090.