When the truck floodlamps were switched on at 1am and passengers came running, exclaiming “It’s Agnes! She’s had a brush with a hippo and her tent’s been flattened!” my first reaction was disbelief.

Agnes was unflappable. At 78 years old I thought she was doing pretty well to join our eleven week safari from Nairobi to Cape Town, but she didn’t just sit at the back of the truck under a blanket, she got her false teeth into everything that was on offer. From the Serengeti dawn balloon safari to challenging the Masai in a spear-throwing contest, Agnes was first to volunteer and last to give in. She went white-water rafting on the Zambezi and as if that wasn’t enough, she decided to claim the title of “oldest woman to have bungee-jumped at Victoria Falls”. After her jump I asked her how it had been, and she answered, “Yeah, it was OK!” with the nonchalance of one who steps into 100m abysses on a daily basis.

I pulled myself out of my sleeping bag and, grabbing my headtorch, made towards the commotion. I immediately saw the tent, squashed in the middle and with its poles askew. Desperately trying to right it was a dishevelled Agnes, red with rage and, as it turned out, embarrassment. She was protesting loudly that everything was under control and that we should all just “bugger off” and leave her to sort things out. There was no sign of any marauding hippo.

It took some persuasion but she finally allowed me to help as she straightened the aluminium poles across her knee, and once everyone else had drifted back to bed she sheepishly told me what had happened. She’d chosen to ignore my advice to take a torch on any night-time toilet excursions, and had apparently marched smack-bang into a grazing hippo’s backside. In a blind panic, Agnes had turned and run so fast back to her tent that she’d missed the entrance flap and had tumbled in between the lining and the flysheet. Unable to find her sleeping bag and pulling the whole construction down around her in the process, she’d managed to wake most of the campsite.

At this point, she caught me grinning and (thankfully) saw the amusing side of the story. She promised to use a torch in future and I think I managed to restore her pride by saying that I thought the hippo would have had as big a fright as she did. But in truth I suspect the hippo (if there was one) didn’t look up from its midnight meal.

Edition 36: Autumn 2006