iStockphoto / CarlFourie
The whole point of going on a safari in South Africa is to get as close to the wild animals as possible but there’s a fine line between ‘memorable experience’ and ‘too close for comfort’ and that line was crossed in this video below. at the Manyoni Private Game Reserve in South Africa a crew had to flee from a hippo attack as the large and in charge creature charged the vehicle and took a bite.
First up, I don’t think we are giving hippos enough street cred for how powerful and alpha they are. This massive semi-aquatic mammal is so confident in its ability to take down anything in its way that it tried to take a bite out of a metal vehicle. That’s bananas.
The Manyoni Private Game Reserve is home to Africa’s ‘Big Five’ so while hippo sightings are par for the course when visiting an encounter like this might be once-in-a-lifetime and it could have gone south in a hurry if the vehicle had any trouble starting.
I know I’m not alone in saying that over half of what I know about hippos I learned from that wild scene 1995’s Congo where the hippos attack their rafts as they are seeking out the lost city of Zinj. That movie made a particularly deep impression on me because I won a free Congo movie t-shirt from the cap of an iced tea bottle, I forget if it Lipton or Nestea, and to this day I’m still waiting on my free t-shirt.
They never sent it or if they did it got lost in the mail. It’s probably due to their skulduggery that I lost faith in winning anything for free in life. That is until we started running giveaways over a decade ago on BroBible and I got to hook someone up with an Xbox 360 and the bro was so stoked we’re still Instagram friends to this day and he responds to my stories like we’re old friends.
Anyway, this hippo scene from Congo stuck with me to this day:
I’ll leave you all with this… The name hippopotamus comes from the Greek word ‘hippos’ which means ‘horse’ and ‘potamos’ which means ‘river.’ It directly translates to ‘river horse.’