Today I met this girl from Zimbabwe. After she told me that you can find elephants crossing the road 10 mins away from her family’s estate, I wanted to know all about her life. She told me how her family moved to Cape Town to escape the troubles of living under the new regime—the government was taking property from the old upper class. But their property wasn’t taken anyway because it’s infested with crocodiles. After asking her how many interactions shes had with crocodiles, she told me a story that sounded like this:
Yah well this one time, my mum and dad took us out on a pontoon— Do you know what a pontoon is? Well, you know those big oil barrels? It’s a flat wooden board attached to four of those with a 5 horse power motor on the end. So our parents took us out on a pontoon into the dam where all the crocodiles live. And I was standing on this rickety thing, and it was horrifying. There were crocodiles everywhere. Literally. And then we pull around a bend and there’s a hippo carcass. Yes, a hippo. And there were lions on top of the carcass, eating. Yah, lions! And then you saw all the crocodiles crouched around the carcass at the bottom. And then five of them run up the carcass and one of them runs up to where a lion is and the lion slaps the crocodile! Yah, like this, directly on top of the head. And all the crocodiles run back down and just stand at the perimeter of the carcass and wait. And when the lions have taken what they want and leave, the crocodiles run forward and de-stroy the carcass. Literally destroy. Yes, I watched it from the pontoon.

And I asked, is this your life? Is that what you do when you’re bored? Just “go see the crocodiles”?

Yah well when you hear there are lions and crocodiles taking apart a hippo carcass, how can you not go take a look?