A British couple's dream holiday on a five-week camping safari in South Africa was turned upside down when a hippo capsized their canoe and nearly killed the husband in the attack.
Roland Cherry, 63, and his wife Shirley had travelled through Botswana National Parks from Johannesburg to Victoria Falls on the first two weeks of their trip in June. They were just four days into the second leg of their trip on a river safari on the Kafue River, a tributary of the Zambezi, when the attack happened. BBC Cherry described the moment the hippo attacked as “a really big accident, just like a car accident” in an interview this week.
Cherry says the canoe then “rose into the air” and threw them both into the water. Luckily, his wife was able to swim to shore, but when the boat hit her, she dislocated her shoulder and was unable to swim.
“The instructions were to swim to safety, but I couldn’t swim, so I was trying to swim with one arm, which was never going to end well. Then he grabbed me,” Cherry recalls, saying the hippo dragged him to the bottom of the river.
“I remember thinking, 'Oh my God, what a terrible turn of events… I'm not ready to die' and I thought this was the end because no one survives hippo attacks,” he continued.
The hippo briefly relented and left Cherry in the shallow water near the riverbank, but then he was caught a second time.
“We later found out from other passengers that I had been caught again and thrown into the air like a rag doll, but it was a blessing,” he explained. “I remember looking down at my legs and thinking 'this is not good'. There were pieces of flesh from my torn shorts and blood on my stomach.”
“I was on his chin and I never saw him once – there are eyewitness accounts of this happening – but I was never conscious of it,” he added.
Eventually, the hippo apparently lost interest, thankfully leaving him near the riverbank. Cherry recalled his wife calling his name and “friendly arms” pulling him to shore. He was then loaded onto a motorboat and taken by minibus to the village of Chirundu, Zambia, about 25 minutes away. When he arrived in the city, the air ambulance company had not yet arrived, so he was taken to the local hospital. Cherry said the decision “undoubtedly saved his life.”
Cherry suffered a total of 10 inches of abdominal wound and a dislocated shoulder, as well as a thigh injury. She was then taken to a hospital in Johannesburg for further treatment, where staff told her that if the wounds had been any deeper, she would not have survived. A nurse also told her that they had never met a hippo attack survivor before, as the attacks tend to be fatal.
Cherry is now hoping to raise £20,000 on a crowdfunding site. This is not to cover her medical costs but to help buy medical equipment to thank her local hospital for their “life-saving intervention”.
“As I recovered in my hospital bed, I had time to think and reflect on the incident. What touched me most about this near-death experience was the kindness of strangers,” he writes on the page. “I vowed that if I ever got home to Warwickshire, I would speak about the incident at a fundraiser for Mtendere Mission Hospital and see if we could give back to the hospital something that had almost certainly saved my life.”
And he is very lucky to be alive. Hippos are the second most dangerous land animal on Earth after disease-carrying mosquitoes, responsible for the deaths of at least 500 people a year.