The family went to visit our friend, Fred who works for Concern in Tanzania. It took three flights over two days to get to Dar Es Salaam. I am not a great traveller and I think airports are the armpit of the world: too warm, uncomfortable and nothing decent to eat. But we got there in good spirits and then set off the next day for another day and half’s drive to get to Ruaha Safari park in central Tanzania. Driving through the bush, the roads were so battered; it was like driving on corrugated iron. The kids, all five of them, were thrown around in the back of the jeep and they loved it. Several hours into the journey, my husband delicately asked the driver, Rogerino for a pit stop. Rogerino, so named by the Italian nuns who ran the orphanage he was raised in, picked his spot carefully, first pulling across the empty road and back over again until he was satisfied that he found the shadiest spot. Men and boys are lucky, they can go anywhere. I would have to walk a mile before I had decent cover and then you wouldn’t know what or who you might meet: this was Masai tribe and lion territory. Two hours later and we arrived at the park gates and I could see a single hut up a hill marked ‘Ladies’. While Rogerino played eenie meenie mo with his parking options, I opened the door with the car still moving and hit the ground running, past the sentry and several tourists to that gleaming hut on the hill. Sanity restored, I strolled back down to find the children standing on a bridge gawping down at several crocodiles and hippos in the river. We were to see lots of animals over the next three days but my favourite became the hippo. It is hard not to attribute human characteristics to animals; if it is fat then you assume that it must be cuddly until Fred told us that they actually kill more people than crocodiles. Hippos are defensive, cranky and paranoid. They are herbivores but if the mood takes them, they will overturn a boat and take a chomp out of you and then the crocodiles move in. No wonder they hang out together. When we moved into our house on stilts over looking the river, there were two hippos submerged in the water before us. They act like badly behaved old ladies who have had too much to drink. They sit submerged in the water all day long with only their nostrils and enormous rumps showing. Every now then they emit loud honking noises and burps and occasionally they come to the riverbank to bask in the sun like great big brown slugs. The boys renamed them Hippo-butt-am-I. The dining room was in a separate building about 500 yards from the houses. After dark, it was not advised to walk around alone and so every night after dinner, a Masai warrior escorted us home. The warrior was real: I felt his spear and it was as sharp as Gillette. The first night, my eight year old and I were walking back to our house when the warrior spotted a fully grown hippo under our stilts. We became worried: it was a possibility that the hippo could head butt the stilts and send the whole thing crashing into the river. My son was afraid that the hippo might come into the house during the night. I reassured him with, “He’s so fat that he won’t be able to get up stairs and even if he did, the stairs would collapse under his weight.” He nodded vigorously in agreement and said, “Anyway, he doesn’t have a key!”