Life on the Galena River

My tent is on a small wooden platform overlooking the Galena River. At night snorts from hippos and whooping calls of hyena punctuate the blackness. The dawn is a golden time when the light shimmers on the water and life on the river awakens.

   

The water is low before the rains and elephants can wander through the shallow waters to the other side where there is a sandy beach. There they have dug a mud-bath and take turns to wallow, blowing trunkfuls over their backs. They emerge with the dark pinkish copper glow of the mud - the 'pink elephants' of Tsavo are famous. 

After the elephants a colony of baboons lope down the beach. They are followed by bush buck who drink deeply.  Beach life on the other side of the river is an endless and unfolding scene.

Further downstream the river widens out and the water gurgles and plunges over flat water-smoothed rocks.  Long tawny crocodiles sun themselves on the rocks by pools, with one amber colored eye keeping a watchful eye for morsels. In the deeper water hippos are submerged with ears, eyes above the water. They also watch.

The palm-fringed wide sandy beach below my tent has fine golden sand. It would be a perfect idyllic cover shot for a glossy travel magazine.  It is also enticing.   But this beach is deserted.  The camp’s resident elephant, Mugabe, occasionally checks it out and he is not good at sharing.  The downstream  crocodiles and upstream hippos are similarly not user-friendly. I decide not to tempt fate.

The river is at its lowest.  Rains are expected in about three weeks, the water will rise and cover the rocks where crocodiles now bask. Throughout the year a major source of water for the Galena River is snow-melt and water from the shrinking glacier on Mount Kilimanjaro.  If these two sources disappear no one is sure how this will affect the river and its wild life.  But for now the banks and the river belong to elephants, bushbuck, baboons, crocodiles and hippos. 

TTFN