Tag: hippo

Give me a minute, please…

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Bit of catching up still to do after an amazing few days away.
Lots of great experiences. Lots of animals. Lots of birds. Lots of photos to share.

But…

A 20 hour day – which included a 4 o’clock start, a 4 hour game drive through Kruger Park, a 6 hour road drive through Mpumalanga and numerous encounters with its utterly mad drivers, and then a 2 hour flight back down to our little corner of Africa before we could get home – is still taking its toll.

A foolishly fast run this morning seemed like a good idea at the time, but probably wasn’t.

This hyena is me right now.

More tomorrow.

Swimming Pool Hippo Is Dead

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Just for the sake of completeness, and somewhat belatedly (I’ve been busy doing life), a quick update on the state of the hippo which got stranded in a swimming pool in Nylstroom.
Actually, the title of the post may have rather given the game away already.

The hippo is dead.

“Solly” was doomed as soon as people got all soppy over his plight and gave him a name, thus immediately humanising him and making it far more emotionally draining for all concerned when he popped his clogs. Questions have to be asked as to whether he would have survived if the vet hired to tranquilise him hadn’t arrived four hours late, but they won’t be asked, because we have far more important questions to be asked.

Questions like:

Who on earth is going to go and stay at the Monate Game Lodge near Modimolle, when their pool looks like this?

(and I’m not talking about the 1 ton of Hippopotamus amphibius therein.)

Fortunately, due to draconian export legislation, we have a surfeit of swimming pool cleaning apparatus here in South Africa and I’m quite sure they will constantly get stuck in one corner clean all that hippo crap out in no time at all.

Meanwhile, in Nylstroom…

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(…which is actually now called Modimolle): Please excuse the poor English. Yes, there is a hippopotamus trapped in a swimming pool in Limpopo. And no, this never used to happen in Sheffield. UPDATE: Not to be outdone, the DA in Cape Town has revealed that it’s not just ANC-controlled municipalities that have hippo issues:

Residents in Zeekoevlei, in Cape Town, have been asked to keep a look-out for a renagade young hippopotamus which is popping up in gardens and roads after moving into a lake there. City officials are hoping the 2-year-old calf will return back to its pod after appearing in an unfenced reserve following the theft of part of the boundary fence in the neighbouring water body where it lives.

It’s almost African…