By By JOHN EBY / Dowagiac Daily News
Herb and Eve Phillipson had seen Victoria Falls before – and good thing, because the flow rate kicked up enough mist to obscure it from view.
On this sojourn, the Zambezi River between Zambia and Zimbabwe in southern Africa was their last stop.
Named by Scottish explorer Dr. David Livingstone, Victoria Falls is neither the highest or the widest waterfall.
It's claim as the largest waterfall in the world emanates from it being a mile wide and 360 feet fall, forming the largest sheet of falling water.
"We had to cross the river on one occasion on a rickety ferry," Phillipson told fellow Dowagiac Rotarians Thursday noon at Elks Lodge 889. "It was the first time I've seen it with any real amount of water – and it was coming over" in a torrent. He has also glimpsed it from the air in a helicopter.
Phillipson's travelogue-quality look at African animal and avian inhabitants shot during a three-week camping trip through Namibia and Botswana in June-July 2007 contained by his count 18, plus 10 kinds of birds.
Phillipson said he never felt his life was in danger," though he allowed that, "When an elephant puts its trunk in the air with its tusks up and trumpets a dozen feet from you, which happened, it's frightening.
"But for some reason, to my knowledge, they have never charged. In Africa, they say automobiles – maybe its scent – wards them off, although I've had lions lie under the car until you had to rock it to get out of there and to get them to move before running them over. In one instance, a woman stuck her head out of a minivan, watching the lions, when one came and took her head off. None of these are tame animals."
Much of his footage featured Etosha National Park and captured giraffes with splayed legs and using their long necks to imitate a sword swallower, herds of zebras, packs of pachyderms crossing paved highways, male and female lions together, moving around, black sable antelope, their horns curved like rocking chair runners, cape buffalo and tsessebes.
A blue wildebeest is "different than the ones you see in Tanzania and Kenya," said the retired judge as that image gave way to black back jackals and oryx, or gemsbok, "one of the prettiest animals in Africa. These animals are so gorgeous you wonder what the Lord had in mind when He set these animals up." Their coloration makes it look like they're wearing knee pads.
Bushbucks somewhat resemble Michigan deer.
"The most common animal in Namibia is the springbok," said Phillipson. "They are a little bigger than a collie" and posed beside a warthog.
"This fellow is a great deal bigger than that. (Black rhinoceros) are famous for charging people. They are rare. When they look at you, they look like they're smiling because they have prehensile lips to eat brush. A white rhino is much bigger, but has a straight lip and grazes."
Elephants congregating at a water hole below their campground appear illuminated by a flickering campfire, but that's because Phillipson's camera captured them at night by available light.
"Except when they're growing up," he explained, "bull elephants never go with female elephants, so these you see here are either young males or mature females. They have long periods of gestation, so elephants don't multiply very quickly. Three black rhinos is the most I've ever seen together. They may have been a female with two children only a mother could love."
One rhino waded right into the water. Their eyesight is so poor they have been known to charge trains, although hippopotamus is considered the most dangerous creature, capable of biting a boy in half.
The Phillipsons traveled in a van with a compartment on back like a pickup truck. Guides pitched tents for their group of 12, including Eve's brother and his wife.
"It's been a long time since I've slept on the ground," said Phillipson, 85, let alone in temperatures in the 40s.
They kept warm with blankets in addition to sleeping bags.
"It's not a park like we know. There are no fences. I don't know of any poaching" in the national park," but "there's poaching everywhere in Africa because people are hungry. We have never seen evidence of poaching anywhere we've been. They've got tremendously big parks," Phillipson said.
Herb's favorite scene is an unusually large herd of zebras.
Eve's favorite animal is the greater Kudu with curlicue horns.
"A great number of (elephants) have broken tusks," he pointed out, "from jostling with each other, from uprooting trees – the travails of everyday life." At least they won't be slaughtered for their ivory.
Two impalas meet up with greater Kudu.
Phillipson's camera briefly dips into Botswana, where they traversed the flooded delta in plastic dugout canoes which don't look like much protection against hippos or 12-foot crocodiles.
Birds depicted include lilac-breasted rollers (some turquoise, too), vultures, red-headed ground hornbills, ostriches, Kori bustards, African starlings and common weaver birds.
Cape buffalo "are very dangerous animals," Eve said. "One of our guide's brothers was killed by one. They're very cunning."
Mud-covered hippos lolling in shallow water from a distance look like Cass County hogs.