Hippo Day - Okavango

River by Mokoro

We started the day with a gentle ride down the river in a Mokoro poled by our guide, K.K. At first, I felt we would tip over, but it just took some getting use to the shift of the weight as he poled. K.K. has 2 daughters, age 4 and 10, but is not formally married. A marriage is too expensive, paying for gifts of cattle to the bride's parents as well as paying for the wedding feast itself. All of the guides and camp workers work for 3 months at a time and then have a month off. K.K. spends 2 weeks of his month fishing in a Mokoro with his family if school is out. We had a dramatic showing of day lilies, all closed up as we started, but on the return, they were all open. The water in the delta used to flow to the Indian ocean, but a fault now blocks its flow. 96% of the water is lost to evaporation, 2% gets used, and 2% leaves as a river which dries up a few hundred kilometers away. The water is trapped in the delta by an impermeable layer of rock below. An interesting fact is how islands get formed in the delta. Round islands get formed by termite mounds, they start them in the dry season between the flooding, and they gradually form over the decades. Longitudinal islands form in the water channels by vegetation building up and capturing soil, if the channels aren't cleared by the hippos.
We stopped for a break near a pod of 19-20 hippos. As we watched, there were times when they were all underwater and other times when we could count 19 of them including at least 2 babies. An interesting note, the mother often leaves the pod with a male baby because the bull could kill the baby to protect his dominance of the pod. We waited patiently for a hippo yawn (smile) but it never came.
In the afternoon, we took a short drive along the river and saw a variety of shore birds: yellow-billed stork, African spoonbill, Marabou storks (which poops on its legs to control their temperature) and the beautiful Saddle-billed stork. We discovered a pod of hippos spread out in the river and here we finally got that smile both from the adults and the babies.


In the evening, the staff sang welcoming songs and we had a traditional dinner with beef, bread, spinach, butternut squash, pallenta, and corn on the cob. The women had to serve their husbands and we ate with our fingers again. Another wonderful day!