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Sindabezi, Zambia

I first met Horace as I sat by a campfire watching the sun set fire to the Zambezi River. I heard a thrashing noise from the bushes and out he shambled, walking gingerly for his bulk, stepping as though his feet were tender.

He stopped when he noticed me, swinging around to stare with small-eyed intensity. I returned his stare, perhaps as horrified by his presence as he was nonchalant about mine. He minced off, leaving me with a gin and tonic frozen halfway to my lips. I would find him later, snoring like a bum outside my hut.

It so happened that Sindabezi, an island in the middle of the mighty Zambezi River and location of the safari camp where I was staying, was Horace the hippo's home. Apparently, I was the only guest unaware that we were sharing the 3-acre island with a fully grown male hippo.

It would be foolish to say Horace was a pet hippo -- hippos are responsible for more human deaths in Africa than any other wild animal -- but there was something, well, different about Horace. For starters, he is a lily-livered chicken. Orphaned when he was a mere slip of a 600-pound baby (at 5 months old), Horace was the target of local bullies. The island, he discovered, was the only place they dared not tread, because they were wary of humans. And so Horace, now 15, had grown up around the people who staff and stay in the island's five thatched cottages, part of the small guest camp belonging to Tongabezi, a luxury safari lodge on the Zambezi's Zambian shores.

Despite knowing that Horace could cut me in half with one bite, sleeping with a hippo snoring outside my open-sided bedroom was one of those enchanting, surreal experiences to be had only in Africa.

NO FENCES

I was in Zambia with 22 friends -- 13 adults and nine children ages 8 to 20 -- on a fundraising trip for Direct Relief International, a Californian nonprofit medical aid organization. After several days of visiting remote health clinics, we headed for the more romantic side of Africa, the domain of the wildlife. The plan was to spend 10 days on safari, the first few at Sindabezi, and then the rest farther northeast in North and South Luangwa, two of Zambia's 11 national parks.

Zambia, in southern Africa, is the real deal, frequent visitors say. It's one of the last African nations where exotic animals roam without fences, where walking rather than driving safaris are the norm and where tourists are scarcer than in Tanzania, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Malawi and Namibia.

I chose to stay on Sindabezi, less luxurious but certainly more adventurous than its parent, Tongabezi. The island, accessible by boat, with nothing else around for several miles, was basic but delightful. My room was open to metallic dusks and mist-clad dawns, with only a mosquito-net-shrouded bed under a thatched roof. Most memorable, though, was Horace.

STARING BABOONS

Leaving Sindabezi, our group flew to Mfuwe (Em-FOO-ee), the jumping off spot for North and South Luangwa national parks. From the tiny, one-room Mfuwe airport, we drove 40 minutes to the Mfuwe Lodge through dusty, thatched villages and exhausted crop fields.

Women walked the roads dressed in brilliant, mismatched fabrics, their babies tied to their backs, firewood or immense jugs balanced on their heads. In the narrow road, small boys pushed toys made from old telephone wire or scrimmaged over an improvised soccer ball, crafted from paper balled up with string. Small girls carried their even smaller siblings on their hips. Men sat under mango trees and old women spread maize in the sun to dry, preparing it to pound into mealy-meal, the staple village diet.

Barefoot children waved and danced as we passed, yelling "Muzungu!" (White people!), and "Sweet, sweet!" as if they expected us, like some passing parade float, to scatter candy from above.

Checking in at Mfuwe Lodge, I saw a photo of an enormous male elephant standing at the desk, staring at the reception staff as if he were trying to obtain a room key.

"Ha! How'd you get him to do that?" I asked naively.

The woman glanced at me wearily. "We have a mango tree," she said patiently. "The elephants walk through the lobby to get to the mangoes. Therefore you must never go to, or leave, your room without being accompanied by a guard. We have hippo here too." (I learned later of some incidents involving hippos and tourists being medically airlifted to England.)

The sun was in the scarlet throes of setting when I reached my room, a two-storied, wooden tree house on stilts above a lagoon. I drew a bath, got in and watched through the screened window as hippo mothers and their diminutive calves walked out of the water, snorting obscenely.

Statuesque egrets picked their way through the gilded water, and a herd of elephants stood stock-still, as if they too were admiring the sunset. Directly outside my screen, eight baboons sat on the deck railing gawking at my pale body in the water. I could have sworn I saw a tittering mother hold her baby up for a better look.

The Luangwa Valley is in east Zambia, near the border with Malawi. An ecological masterpiece, it is the tail end of the Great Rift Valley, although much greener than the Africa we associate with Disney movies and Hemingway novels.

Instead of flaxen savanna and flat-topped acacia trees, Luangwa has comical sausage trees with elongated calabashes and elephantine baobabs with pumped-up trunks and curling branches.

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