Splashing happily in my bath with its glorious view of the Zambezi uninterrupted by anything so mundane as a window, or even a screen, I heard someone chuckling slowly through a tuba. 'Hunh-hunh-hunh,' he laughed, from somewhere below my verandah. 'Hunh-hunh-hunh.' I shifted uneasily and took another slug of gin and tonic. Next, the chuckler started crashing through the undergrowth, snapping and splintering the dead branches on the riverbank. I sat up sharply. What's the form for a crisis when you're in the bath? Stay put, I decided and lit a cigarette. And then I figured it out - hippopotamus. 'Hunh-hunh-hunh.'
Given what you hear and read about Africa - Aids, malaria, war, corruption, poverty - there's a level of guilt involved in staying in an exclusive and, frankly, idyllic resort like the River Club, watching hippos from your bath. But then you remember that Hoovering as much cash as possible off wealthy tourists is a better alternative to what is happening on the south bank of the Zambezi, in Zimbabwe. For the River Club is in Zambia, near the old colonial hub of Livingstone, on the unspoilt side of Victoria Falls. And people still want to come here.
On the Zimbabwean side, where tacky shopping malls and hotel complexes have sprung up alongside the overbearingly colonial Victoria Falls Hotel, things are preternaturally quiet, a direct consequence of the political upheavals and violence that have dominated the headlines. People are not booking safaris anymore. Small beer, you might think, in a country facing economic collapse and where 25 per cent of the population suffers from HIV. Who cares if a few white tourists have their holiday plans disrupted in the face of so much misery?
But Zimbabwe is also a country where sources of foreign exchange are drying up faster than its currency devalues. The crisis in tourism has been a blow to the national economy and devastating to the industry.
The streets of Harare had more than a whiff of a medium-sized English town in the mid-1970s, right down to the branch of Woolworth's with its pic'n'mix counter. The Foreign Office had warned travellers not to go to the capital, but I didn't feel particularly threatened, just hassled by the hundreds of desperate young men trying to sell cheap souvenirs to a wildly diminished number of tourists.
There could be another price to be paid by Zimbabwe's sudden fall from grace as a formerly popular long-haul destination, this time by its wildlife. A few days after my hippo encounter at the River Club, I arrived at Water Wilderness, a handful of houseboats moored on the waters of Lake Kariba inside the Matusadona National Park. This is one of the few regions of the world where you can still see black rhino. (They are not black, of course, and neither are white rhinos white. 'White' is an English corruption of the Afrikaans for 'wide', referring to its lip. Black rhinos, by contrast, have a prehensile upper lip.) Given that a kilo of black rhino horn fetches several thousand dollars, and a mature animal can yield more than three kilos, you can appreciate why there are so few of them.
Matusadona has been designated an Intensive Protection Zone by the Zimbabwean government and, soon after putting ashore near the national park headquarters where young rhinos are given round-the-clock armed protection, we saw a park warden ambling through the bush with an AK-47 across his shoulders. He did not want to be photographed and there was a wary distance as he spoke to our guides.
In the long term, a live black rhino is worth considerably more to the Zimbabwean economy than a dead one, but if political uncertainty turned into civil war, or corruption undermined the integrity of the national parks, then short-term personal gain would take over again. Rolf Neimeyer, who together with his Afrikaans wife Katinka, runs the Water Wilderness lodge, is a good-humoured and optimistic man who is proud of the fact that black rhino numbers in the Matusadona have recovered from a handful of animals to scores in the past 10 years. He stoops to rub the belly of an 18-month-old rhino called Vora, the Shona word for water. The creature's eyes close in sleepy contentment. Vora weighs 1,000kg and its snout is already worth a small fortune.
Another guide was less hopeful. 'So far the protection zone has worked,' he says, 'but you could wipe out the rhino here in a week. If they get the chance the poachers will be back. The dealers in rhino horn want to see the animal extinct. It would increase the value of their stocks.' In one attempt to thwart the poachers, rangers in Zimbabwe sawed the horns off rhino to make them commercially worthless. But poachers killed them anyway, to save themselves the trouble of tracking the same animal a second time. With tourists gone and the revenue they brought drying up, the rhino will be under more pressure than ever from such a ruthless trade.
When the rhinos in Matusadona are old enough, they are released into the wild and, despite their early contact with their handlers, seem to revert fully to an inherent distrust of human beings.
Elsewhere in the park, we stood mesmerised as a fully grown rhino, Jane, led her two-week-old baby through the thick bush. Over the years, Jane has trashed a grounded helicopter and a couple of Jeeps and watching her clomping through the trees it was easy to see how. Her baby looked impossibly vulnerable, the horn-bud on its nose like some kind of self-inflicted betrayal. Standing in the open only 30 or 40 yards from an adult rhinoceros and its young is not something you easily forget. Nor is the sight of the skulls of dead rhinos outside the park headquarters, the fronts of their faces hacked off with a machete.
'Here,' said Rolf, pointing to two deep cuts above the eye sockets. 'These blows were gratuitous. Just for fun.'
Two hundred miles to the south-west, in the Hwange National Park, there are wildlife problems of a different kind. The park, with its managed system of pumped water holes, is struggling to deal with a huge number of elephants, as many as 28,000, that are threatening to overwhelm the park's bio-diversity.
At dusk we pulled up in our Jeep at a water hole and watched as three separate families of elephants puffed towards us, kicking up clouds of dust in the evening haze, their trunks swinging into the air like periscopes to test our scent. Standing a few yards from a group of animals that appear to be arguing, joking, embracing and teasing each other like any human family, it is impossible to understand why anyone would want to shoot one of these creatures for fun. But then in the topsy-turvy world of nature conservation, such bunny-hugger attitudes are misguided. 'It's quite simple,' Chris, one of the senior guides at Makolo Plains lodge, said. 'This area can support 14,000 elephants. We have 28,000. At times of stress that kind of over-population can strip the vegetation completely. Then lots of elephants will die of starvation. And of course everything else that was relying on that vegetation will die of starvation as well.' There are Western tourists who will pay as much as £150,000 to kill an elephant - and Western tourists who will pay as much again to keep them alive. Thank goodness we really can't talk to the animals. What would we say?
Most people, I would guess, have an image of safaris that involves people sitting in vehicles being driven around, as though Africa were some documentary on an enormous television screen.
Of course, it can be like that, but walking across the grasslands of Hwange felt very different. Chris, a gun in his hand for any little emergency, would point out the most insignificant detail, the angle of broken grass or the marks left by a colony of ants, and extrapolate a whole world from them, like guessing the subject of a jigsaw from a single piece.
'Look at this buffalo skull,' he said as we paused in the middle of the vast plain under a sky so big it kept dragging my head up to look at it. 'See these deposits under the horns? Those are left by the larvae of a moth that lays its eggs on them.' Then he tossed the skull away and carried on walking.
'Is it safe?' people asked when I got back. Perfectly so, it seemed to me, for a tourist. For the people and creatures who live there and seem bedevilled by so many problems, it's a whole different question.
• Ed Douglas travelled to Zimbabwe with Air Zimbabwe, which flies daily to Harare from Gatwick. He stayed at the River Club, Livingstone, in Zambia, and at Makololo Springs, Hwange National Park, and Water Wilderness, Matusadona National Park, in Zimbabwe, courtesy of Wild Africa Safaris. Call 01483 579991 for a brochure. A week's safari with Wild Africa, including these resorts, costs £2,202 per person based on two sharing, including flights with British Airways, internal flights and full board. WWF is holding a Walk for Wildlife on 8 October to raise funds for the rhino. Call 0845 766 8860 for details.
