The Kruger to Jessica Hippo

Even though we could have had a lie in we were up at 5:30am. I’ve had a cold for days now and now it’s in my chest. I had hardly slept since we got here and an overnight temperature of 30°c didn’t help.
We had a 2.5 hr journey to our next location but we weren’t booked in until 1:45pm so we had hours to kill. At 7:30am we slowly started taking the tent down but by 8:30am we were ready to leave so we popped to the cattle barón take away and got a coffee each and drank it watching over the watering hole. Then we payed our last visit to the shop getting some more food supplies and water and I even managed to get some Vicks for my chest and some cough medicine. And we finally left at 10:30am.
We were driving the Satara to Orpen road again and we just trundled along at 30kph in third gear the whole of the 48km treating it as a game drive. Obviously we got held up in an African roadblock. Of Wilderbeast with their babies on the way.
Once we got to Orpen camp we followed the exit signs a road we had never taken before and a few hundred meters later we checked out of the Kruger.
We got to our next destination with 45 minutes to kill and it was already 40°c outside and after waiting at the side of a dirt road some brits pulled up next to us and said they were here for the same thing to.
Just before 1:45pm we crossed over a low lying bridge that had waterfalls all around it and then we pulled up to the gate just as it opened.
We were here to see Jessica the Hippo. She is a real wild hippo who had been found washed up in the floods with her umbilical cord still attached in the garden of an ex game warden called Tony 25 years ago and she has been there ever since. He hasn’t trained her. She is free to come and go whenever she pleases and she even has access to his house. He bottle fed her from a baby and she has broken 5 beds but never harmed him or any guests. She is world famous because she can go but always chooses to come back, and last year she had a baby called Loki.
After a brief chat and watching an old news story about Tony, his wife who has since passed away, and Jessica we were introduced to Jessica and Loki.
The remarkable thing is that Jessica was nowhere to be seen when we arrived and Tony called her in Afrikaans and she chuckled back and came trundling down the river with Loki. Then we fed her sweet potatoes while rubbing her nose and then bottle fed her sweet tea.
Hippos kill more people in Africa than any other animal so the relationship between Tony and Jessica is amazing and the fact she lets us anywhere near her baby is incredible.Read more