Real Survival Stories - Swallowed by a Hippo: Zambezi River Safari

Episode Date: November 23, 2023

Paul Templer has one of the most wholesome jobs imaginable: paddling entranced visitors along Africa’s beautiful Zambezi River to the majestic Victoria Falls. But one day, his tour party is attacked… by a ferocious bull hippopotamus. As panic descends, Paul must do his utmost to ensure no man is left behind… A Noiser production, written by Susan Allott. For more on Paul’s story, read Marked for Life: Finding Grace and Grit Where You Least Expect It. For ad-free listening, bonus material and early access to new episodes, join Noiser+. Click the Noiser+ banner to get started. Or, if you’re on Spotify or Android, go to noiser.com/subscriptions If you have an amazing survival story of your own that you’d like to put forward for the show, let us know. Drop us an email at [e-mail] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. March the 9th, 1996. It's just after 5pm in Zimbabwe. 28-year-old guide Paul Templer floats happily along the Zambezi River. He's leading a safari group on a sunset trip. He watches from his canoe as the sky in the

west turns pink. Paul dips his paddle into the water, pointing at the passing wildlife to the tourists. Not that a photo could ever truly capture the spectacular natural beauty that surrounds them. The Zambezi River, Wazen, is just the most incredible place. There's elephant and buffalo and hippos and crocodiles and impala and water bug and kudu and lion and if you're really lucky cheetah and leopard the bird life is just prolific it's almost like a divinely inspired painting every day you go

down the river paul checks his watch they're about 45 minutes from the journey's end. The three-canoe convoy enters a narrowing in the river channel. A pod of hippos emerges from the tall grasses lining the bank. Paul plots a course around them. As they drift by, he taps the pole of his paddle against the side of his canoe. It's a little trick that guides use to bring hippos to the surface. The passengers gasp and reach for their cameras as several more appear. Just then, Paul notices that one of the canoes has fallen slightly behind. It's the boat led by an apprentice guide called Evans.

Paul slows down to give them a chance to catch up. But at that moment, he hears a sound that he knows only too well. It was the sound of a hippo hitting the back of a canoe. And so I turned fully just in time to see Evans' boat up at about a 45 degree angle with a hippo at the back. Evans being catapulted out of the back, flying through the air. And the canoe somehow still upright. The hippo went down, the canoe fell onto the water and remained upright. Evans, however, was fell onto the water and remained upright.

Evans, however, was now in the water. And this was not good. Paul needs to get Evans out of there now. As the hippo dives back underwater, he leaps into action, paddling towards his colleague with all his might. I was now really close to Evans. There was that moment where I'm leaning over with my arm outstretched, he's leaning up with his arm outstretched, and our fingers almost touched. Then the water between us just erupted. Ever wondered what you would do when disaster strikes?

If your life depended on your next decision, could you make the right choice? Welcome to Real Survival Stories. These are the astonishing tales of ordinary people thrown into extraordinary situations. People suddenly forced to fight for their lives. In this episode, we meet safari guide Paul Templer, a man whose tour party becomes the target of a ferocious animal attack. Paul must remain calm to navigate his own boat to safety, but self-preservation alone won't cut it he must do his utmost to leave no man behind i knew we were sitting on a cluster of rocks in the middle of the zambesi it was going to be dark soon i knew that there were a lot of really large crocodiles

in the water all around us ben i mean looked at me, he had that look of, are you kidding me? You want to get back on this river with this crazy hippo still lurking? And then he took a deep breath and I can remember him just like nodding. And he was like, okay, let's do this. I'm John Hopkins from Noisa.

This is Real Survival Stories. It's 1996 and Paul Templer has been working as a guide on the Zambezi for around six years. He knows this landscape like the back of his hand, and nothing brings him greater pleasure than sharing the natural wonders of his homeland with others i was living on the zambesi river in zimbabwe and i was working as a safari guide leading photographic safaris down and around the Zambezi River. And it was about as blissful a life, as blissful an experience as I could imagine. I got to spend my days and nights in the great outdoors, surrounded by all this amazing wildlife, getting to share it with people from all around the world.

Life truly was about as good as it could get. Born in 1968 in Zimbabwe, known then as Southern Rhodesia, Paul was raised in the bush. He went on to spend several years abroad, serving in the British Army and later traveling the world. But he always longed to return home. I'd spent a lot of years searching the globe for somewhere to feel at home, somewhere to feel comfortable, somewhere to be at peace.

And I found it. It was sitting in a canoe on the Zambezi River. If ever there was a place that I truly felt at home, that would be it. The training to qualify as a guide here is rigorous, given the myriad dangers that one can encounter out on the water. But it's a privilege to traverse the river day after day. Especially at sunset, paddling towards Africa's biggest waterfall and one of the seven wonders of the natural world, Victoria Falls. We would be out in the sunshine, we would be in amongst all this incredible flora and fauna.

And I had the pleasure and the privilege of each day it would be something new. And the show that would unfold before us would be unique. It would be glorious. And life was just really great. But on March the 9th, as Paul prepares to head out, he feels unusually nervous. He puts his jitters down to the fact that he's been asked to step in at the last minute. The colleague who should have been guiding this particular group has just come down with malaria. And even for someone as experienced as Paul, the Zambezi River Safari, known as the Royal Drift, is never entirely straightforward. I had led many, many Royal Drifts, and so there definitely was a degree of familiarity.

But by the same token, there was a little bit of anticipation. There was always a little bit of anticipation. There was always a little bit of nerves. I knew that complacency wasn't an option because the one thing that I tried to convey in the safety talk was that we were the intruders. We were the ones coming in and visiting with the wildlife. And there was always a chance that things could go horribly wrong. Paul always conducts a safety talk with those taking part. Today there are six tourists who will be carried in three canoes. They are four Air France airline crew who are on leave and a couple on holiday from

Germany. He does his best to put them at ease, but he talks honestly about the dangers posed by the mighty waterway. Strong currents, waterborne illnesses, and of course, the wildlife. Whilst they are inside the canoes, they'll be safe from lions, cheetahs, and elephants. Even the crocodiles shouldn't pose a threat. The biggest hazard by far is the hippopotamus. Responsible for around 500 deaths in Africa every year, hippos are the continent's most dangerous mammal,

fiercely territorial. Their sharp tusks and powerful jaws can easily snap a canoe in two. So hippos pose their own unique danger just because of how big they are. They're about the size of a car, only they weigh twice as much. And they have really big tusks.

And if you get bitten by them, typically you don't fare so well. Additionally, when they do attack, it's usually because they're defending their territory, which brings another level of gusto to it. And their attacking style is to try to destroy whatever it is that they're fighting against. Hippos are generally fine if you keep your distance. They're herbivores after all.

Humans aren't on the menu. They'll leave you alone, Paul reiterates to the tourists, if you leave them alone. The truth is, there's one particular creature he has in mind, a hippo he'd very much like to avoid. There was a little red flag in the back of my mind. About six months earlier, I'd been leading a similar canoe safari on the river. And that trip, my canoe had been hit by a hippopotamus. And it was a very large hippopotamus. It was a cranky old male and I'd been his first attack and over the six months he had attacked another six canoes. There'd been seven attacks so far and his attacks had been getting a little more confrontational. Paul and the other guides always keep tabs on the local animals,

charting their movements and behavior. And this old bull is on their watch list. In hippo society, if you like, the structure is there's a dominant male in a pod. And when a new dominant male comes to challenge for dominance, there's a fight and usually it's a fight to the death but occasionally the hippo who loses doesn't die, he goes away and he sulks and then becomes a cranky old male

who gets to sit and watch his former pod and the new dominant male enjoy life. And those hippos, they are responsible for quite a few attacks so as guides because hippos are fairly territorial we all stayed in fairly constant contact this is where he is this is where this part is so i had an inkling of what was going on with him but i also moving around a lot. So that was my little just, let's pay extra special attention here. From the director of The Greatest Showman comes the most original musical ever. I want to prove I can make it. Prove to who? Everyone. So the story starts. Better Man, now playing in select theaters. You're a podcast listener, and this is a podcast ad heard only in Canada. Reach great Canadian listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements,

or run a pre-produced ad like this one across thousands of shows to reach your target audience with Libsyn Ads. Email bob at libsyn.com to learn more. That's b-o-b at l-i-b-s-y-n dot com. It's mid-afternoon when the canoes hit the water. After cruising down to the falls, the plan is to rendezvous with the extraction team, as they're known, who will drive the group back to camp. Today, Paul is also responsible for three apprentice guides. Ben and Evans will each take a canoe containing two tourists, while the third apprentice, Mac, will bring up the rear in a one-person kayak. All three of them were great guys, and we'd known each other for years.

And in a few months' time, they were going to be leading their own clients on their own safaris. But on that day, I was the guide in charge. I was responsible. It's 3.30pm. As the convoy wends its way downstream, the German couple in Paul's canoe are blown away. The kilometer-wide expanse of crystal clear water, the dense vegetation teeming with birds. They can scarcely believe it

when a buffalo comes to the river's edge, watching them as they slide past. The design of the trip was the clients would sit in the front two seats, the guide or one of the apprentice guides would sit in the back with a cooler box in front of him or her, and we'd have a choice of snacks and drinks, and the idea was to drift down the Zambezi River into the sunset that was sitting below Victoria Falls and just soak in the magnificence of the afternoon. His clients listen intently as Paul gives commentary in his easy, relaxed tone.

They barely notice that he's keeping a beady eye on the horizon, alert to what might lie ahead. The part of the river that we started on when we put our canoes in was probably a little less than a mile wide, but dotted with islands which created these narrow channels that you would canoe through. And as you pass through these narrow channels, there would be trees overhanging, there would be dense vegetation right up to your sides. There was always the unknown.

You'd go around a corner and what would be waiting for you? Would it be a pod of hippos? Would it be an elephant? Would it be a pot of hippos would it be an elephant would it be a tree that had fallen over with a profusion of spiders on it or what would come next it was like this constant unfolding by 4 30 pm halfway through the trip all is going well excitement is building for the grand finale. In the background, you can hear the roar of Victoria Falls, and you can see the mist rising up above it.

And as it's late afternoon and the sun is setting, it has that unique, that beautiful light that seems to both soften and highlight everything. I mean, I remember at one point, this big old bull elephant came down and was just standing there watching us as we all drifted by. The bird life was out and putting on a show. And the hippos, the hippos were everywhere.

As they paddle along, Paul is constantly making snap decisions about which section of the river to follow. Are we in deep water? Are we in shallow water? Where are the hippos relative to that? How close do we get to this animal? How far away do we stay from that animal?

So as the guide, I would be setting the path, navigating our way through. And it was the responsibility of the apprentices to follow me. Only the heads of the hippos bob above the surface. The bristly, grey domes pop up here and there, large, dark eyes blinking. But hiding below each one is a mass of muscle and flesh there's at least a dozen of them including a female with her calf possibly more lurking in deeper water paul taps the side of his canoe with his paddle an old trick that brings several more to the surface curious to see where

the noise is coming from so we all huddled up and we had a chance to look at the hippos and we could see the female on the calf, cute as a button. Then there was this pod of hippos and then there were a couple of outliers, younger males. And it got a chance for everyone just to soak up the moment. As the tourists chatter, Paul continues assessing the course ahead. A rocky island in the middle of the river

gives him two possible routes, a wider open course on the right or a shallower narrow channel on the left. It was time for me to choose a path. I had to go with my gut. I'd been doing this for years. And my choice was to pick our way through the channels. So my instruction to my apprentices and to the group was, okay, follow me.

We're going to follow the shallow water. We're going to go around the hippos. We're going to make our way to the channel. We'll drift through and come out just above Victoria Falls. It's going to be beautiful. So I led the way, the canoe right behind me with Ben in control, stayed just behind my tail. Evans was right behind him. Mac was paddling alongside Ben and everything seemed to go the way it was supposed to. They're about 40 minutes from the end of the safari,

about around 5pm, with the sun beginning to set, when Paul notices that Evans has fallen slightly behind. I just put my paddle down and just drifted, waiting for the others to catch up. Ben was maybe 20 feet behind me, Evans maybe another 30, 40 feet behind him. He had, I guess in guiding call you'd call it, lost his angle. The current was pushing down, he was following the shallow water,

and he ended up in some deep water. That's what I imagine happened, because as I turned, there was this loud, this crash. Paul turns just in time to see the source of the noise. An enormous hippo is bursting from the water. A battered-looking two-ton bull, the cranky old male they'd been hoping to avoid. He surfaces right underneath Evan's canoe,

lifting at 45 degrees into the air, along with the helpless apprentice guide and his two passengers. With a crash, the boat comes slamming back down, rocking violently in the water. Remarkably, it stays upright, with the terrified tourists still on board. But Evans has been flung through the air. Evans, however, was now in the water. And this was not good because I could see the scene in front of me unfolding.

There was the female hippo in a calf. There was a pod of hippos. I knew there were a lot of crocodiles in the area. What I did know was we needed to get the clients out of there and I needed to get Evans out of there. Fortunately, there was this rocky outcrop just at the head of the channel, which was pretty safe. So I told Ben he needs to get a hold of the clients who were in the upright canoe. I knew that he and Mac would be able to take care of that. I needed to focus my attention on getting Evans out.

And I didn't have the luxury of time. Evans is floundering. Paul starts paddling furiously in his direction. He's drawing close when he sees something that sends a chill down his spine. A bow wave tearing down the middle of the river heading directly for them just like those old movies where you see the torpedo going towards the ship and there's that telltale wave and i knew right away that wasn't good That was either a hippo or a big crocodile, and it was coming towards me at a fairly high rate. I also knew old guide's trick.

If you slap the water with the blade of your paddle really hard, that would make a really loud noise, and more often than not would turn the hippo. So I did that. Slapped the water, and the wave dissipated, and my canoe didn't get hit. Whew! Relief! Paul's passengers, the German holidaymakers, are still in the boat with him.

It's far from ideal, but there's no time to waste. Doing his best to reassure them, Paul keeps paddling. It seems like the bull has disappeared now. All is quiet. As the canoe draws alongside Evans, Paul reaches out a hand. I'm leaning over with my arm outstretched. He's leaning up with his arm outstretched.

And our fingers almost touched. Then the water between us just erupted. All of a sudden my world went dark and strangely quiet. Paul is shrouded in darkness. He's not unconscious, but there's no light and no sound, just the awful sulfurous stench of rotten eggs. He tries to work out where he is and why he can't move. A few seconds tick by and I try to figure out what was going on. From my waist up, I wasn't wet, but I wasn't dry either.

And from my waist down, I could feel the water against my legs. My arms were jammed to my side. I tried to move around, and the only thing I could move was my wrist and my one hand and feeling around I felt the bristles on a hippo's snout So at least now I knew where I was I was headfirst up to my waist down a hippo's throat Paul twists and struggles doing his utmost to break free I don't know if it was a gag reflex or intentional, but it started, like, choking, spitting me out,

and I managed to grab a hold of the tusks, pull myself out, burst to the surface, sucked in some air, and I came face to face with Evans, the guy who I'd been trying to rescue. I'm like, we've got to get out of here. Yelling at the apprentice to follow him, Paul starts swimming back towards the rocky outcrop in the middle of the river,

where Ben and Mac have safely gathered all the tourists. But he can see them all waving, pointing and shouting at the water behind him, back towards Evans. Sure enough, Evans wasn't going anywhere. He was right where I'd left him. Only now his eyes were like saucers as he really struggled to stay afloat. He was thrashing around a little.

I think just all the terror and the panic of the moment had overwhelmed him. Paul pauses for a moment, treading water. The hippo must still be nearby, even if he can't see it right now. But he doesn't hesitate for long. He swims back over to Evans. Paul tries to calm him. If he doesn't stop thrashing about, he could pull them both under. He is just maneuvering himself into a lifesaver hold when he senses something surging up from beneath.

Suddenly, wham! I was hit from below. The hippo bursts back out into the air. Jaws open, its chipped tusks and broken, peg-like teeth slam shut on Paul's lower half. In a frenzy, the bull flings him from side to side like a ragdoll. Paul grabs for the gun he keeps in his belt, but it's no use. The hippo's tusks are crushing his waist. The hippo just was shaking me all around. I was still fighting, trying to get away. It was, it was mayhem.

The hippo dives below the surface again and again, holding Paul under until his lungs are burning. But just as he thinks he'll drown, the hippo resurfaces and spits him out. Paul swims for his life. He can't see Evans in the water. Maybe he made it to the rocks. Halfway there, he glances up.

The hippo is coming back round again. He zeroed in and scored a direct hit and his tusks going through my chest through my stomach and this time my legs were sticking out of one side of his mouth and my arm, head and shoulders

outside the other. And I remember the game slowed down. It was here we go again. This time the hippo has him skewered. And this attack is even more frenzied than before. But amidst the carnage, a profound change comes over Paul. A sudden presence of mind. At some point I figured out that stop fighting, you need to conserve your energy.

And I figured out if you hold on to the tusk, that way when you're getting thrashed around, you're not tearing as much. And if when you're underwater, you hold your breath, and when you come to the surface, if you can suck in some air, and everything broke down into slow motion. He feels no pain, no panic, just a detached acceptance as the hippo throws him up into the air and catches him again in its open jaws. There was this surreal level of calmness to it.

It was like, OK, OK. I can remember at one point his tusk crushed my left arm and tore it. And I can remember just watching it and being like, oh, that's not good. And then the hippo dove for relatively deep water. When I say deep water, it was probably 10 feet deep at the deepest. But I remember laying in his mouth and looking up. I was pinned inside his mouth, his tusks boring through me. And I could see the different hues of like green and yellow.

And I could see the sunshine on the water's surface. And I could see my blood mingling with the water. And very rationally, just wondering if I'd bleed to death or if I'd drown. And then wondering, huh, I wonder if he can hold their breath the longest between the hippo and I.

But suddenly, as if having a change of heart, the hippo rises to the surface again. Once more, it spits Paul out into the water. He sucks in air and opens his eyes. This time when I pulled my head up, I came face to face with Mac and his safety kayak. Mac had paddled into the fray and was giving me a chance at survival. I managed, I had enough left in me that I was able just to grab a hold of the little handle on the nose of the kayak and I don't know where Mac found the strength or the courage but he hung in there and with the hippo thrashing all around us, was able

to drag me up to the rocks and the relative safety where the clients were. The attack lasted for what felt like an eternity. In fact, it was all over in just three and a half minutes. So, as we get to the rocks, I know I'm in pretty bad shape, but I don't really know how bad a shape I'm in. So, I try to reassure the clients. I'm like, all right, folks, stay calm. Everything's going to be okay.

And they're just looking at me like, like I'm dead man walking. When I did a self-assessment of my body, I could see my left foot had been crushed to a pulp. I knew my left arm from the elbow down. The medical term is degloved. The bones had been broken in so many places and most of the skin had been ripped off and from the elbow up I could see it was pretty crushed too. So I knew we needed to do something with that. So Mac rolled down my sleeve as best he could and buttoned it up and so we could at least keep the arm attached. And as I

was speaking to Mac, blood was bubbling out of my mouth and we knew that just because we were fortunate to have some really good medic first aid training that one of my lungs had been punctured so Mac took a look and assessed the situation and let me know that I was right well we were right and just he's really smart he took the saran wrap with a plate of snacks and used that to seal the wound the wound was a tension pneumothorax. And it did the trick. It stopped my lung from collapsing and me from dying on the spot. Despite his horrific injuries and the shock,

Paul somehow manages to keep his head and take stock of the situation. I knew we were sitting on a cluster of rocks in the middle of the Zambezi. It was dusk. It was going to be dark soon. I knew that there were a lot of really large crocod middle of the Zambezi. It was dusk, it was gonna be dark soon. I knew that there were a lot of really large crocodiles in the water all around us. I knew the hippo that attacked me was still there because he was sitting there doing his threat displays. They watch on as the hippo shakes its head,

bellows and grunts. It opens its mouth wide, then bellows again. They're still in danger, and as Paul does a head count, he suddenly realizes something. Evans is nowhere to be seen. I knew Evans was somewhere nearby, either maybe in the same condition I was in, but without anyone to help him. And I knew our extraction team was waiting for us, but it would be hours before they would get really alarmed. So my plan was, I asked Mac and Ben to load me into the remaining canoe. And Ben, I asked him if he would paddle it. And if we could somehow figure a way to get past this hippo, if we made it that far, our plan was to follow the current, see if we could find Evans and rescue him.

And we would make our way to the extraction point. Ben can't quite believe that Paul wants to go back out onto the river, with the hippo still there, stomping and bellowing. But they have no choice. They need to get Paul to a medic. They need to get the tourists off the river. And, first and foremost, they need to find Evans. The first little bit of getting from the rock to the shore and the search for Evans involved getting past the hippo.

And the hippo would come and knock, bump, swim around the canoe. And I can remember at that point feeling very real terror. If this hippo knocks this canoe over, I don't have any gas left in the tank. I'm done. Like, whether or not it goes for me, I'm done.

With immense care and skill, Ben edges away from the old bull, steering the kayak downriver. All Paul can do is lie flat on his back, looking up at the darkening sky. The crash of water from Victoria Falls echoes in the distance. The safety of the shore feels a long way away. And it was strange.

It was this moment of complete clarity where it was, should I stay or should I go? Should I close my eyes and drift off? Should I just call it a day or am I going to stick around? people some say it was a neurochemical response to stress and all the chemicals that were going through my body some say it was a psychological response was complete over while but there to me it was more than that to me it was this profoundly spiritual experience where there was this deep profound peace at the time my niece Nicole had she was she was she's a real little girl but she was she was something and I felt really close to my family and I had this moment of I wanted to stick around swiftly followed with the most extreme agony that I thought I could possibly handle.

In fact, it was so beyond anything I thought I could handle, I kind of wished I'd chosen to die. But by that stage, I was on another path. The grunting of the hippo is receding now. The rumble of the falls is getting closer. And then Paul becomes distantly aware of voices, friendly voices calling out to him, telling him to hold on.

A friend of mine had been on a stroll down the banks of the Zambezi when he saw my paddle drifting by and a canoe drifting by. And so had known something was up. He was pretty close to the extraction team when I arrived. They put in a call. There was a medical air rescue team with a shock trauma specialist, an army guy working

with them on exercise really close by. The extraction team left Paul out of the canoe and onto the riverbank. Some of them head straight back upriver to continue the search for the missing apprentice and to retrieve the others still stranded on the outcrop. Paul meanwhile receives urgent medical attention. Paul Lester, Head of Research, University of New Zealand Helicopters were able to get put in the air. There was this orchestration of a solution

that you couldn't have made up. It came together so incredibly well. From my perspective, I was in the stage where I just wanted it to be over. There was a lot of pain. There was huge relief seeing the medical air rescue team. Even with such a swift mobilization, even with the rescue team scouring the water and the riverbanks,

it'll take three days for them to find Evans. Tragically, he didn't make it. All sorts of forces were mobilized both to go and rescue Mac and the clients who were still on the rocks and to search for Evans. And they found his body three days later. There wasn't a scratch on him. Apparently he drowned. Right now, Paul is oblivious as he's spirited away from the falls.

He's in good hands. Most of the medical team are friends of his, people he's worked with for years. But his injuries are severe, and his survival hangs in the balance. As much as they tried to hide the condition I was in, you could read it on their faces. Because of all my head, neck and spinal injuries, there was a limited amount of painkiller they could give me. They needed to keep me awake and they needed to keep me feeling things. Paul is taken by ambulance to the city of Bulaweo, a five-mile drive through the night. Because of the dark and his physical condition,

traveling by road is deemed safer than flying. Once we got to the hospital, I remember they wheeled me into this operating room and left me there below the spotlight. And I could hear people talking about what a mess I was. I could hear them talking about how the bottom of my foot and the bottom of my leg was crushed in the mess and my arms were barely attached and probably coming off. And I could feel this panic starting to show up. At 12.30am, eight hours after the attack, Paul's left arm is amputated. Remarkably, the surgeon manages to save his right arm and both his legs, as well as repairing the internal damage to his lungs and other organs. There are 38 separate injuries across his body,

and it's going to take a long time to recover from the physical and the mental trauma. But with the desperate fate that befell Evans, Paul is just grateful to be alive. Laid up in hospital, Paul has time to reflect on his life in the bush. As the days go by, an idea comes into focus for a restorative journey that he feels drawn to make. The river I'd been attacked on, the Zambezi River, had never been canoed source to sea. And it was something that I'd dreamt about and over a few beers many of us had talked about doing and dreamt about doing.

But the more we talked about it, the more we thought about it, we thought, you know what, I could get a prosthetic made. And maybe I could kayak again. And so the idea started and the idea grew in september 1997 18 months after the attack paul takes to the crystal clear waters of the zambesi once more his specially designed paddle is attached to his prosthetic arm meaning he can steer the kayak with just as much skill as he always has their epic voyage downriver is underway. And so we got a paddle made and I put a team together. It was at the time the fullest descent of the Zambezi River to date.

We paddled almost 1600 miles and it was an incredible journey. For me it was both catharticic it was getting back on the river it was terrifying at first absolutely terrifying but my teammates who were also friends who had known for years knew that if i didn't get my act together i was a liability looking back paul credits the immense bravery of his colleagues, Mac and Ben, with saving his life. He also cites his own rigorous training on the river and his experience in the British Army. They helped him to stay calm in a moment of extreme crisis. But most of all, by his own admission, he was just incredibly lucky.

There was a huge degree of luck. Just things like I had an artery severed in my arm, and the way it was severed, the hippo's tusks bit into it. It snapped it, but given the elasticity of the artery, as the artery sucked back in because it had been torn, it twisted and sealed itself. If that hadn't happened, I would have died on the moment. There was a bite through the back of my head

that there's less space than you can, if you put your fingers as close together as you could without touching, less space than that. If it had been that much lower, it would have severed a whole bunch of stuff. I would have died on the spot. The old bull hippo disappeared after the attack. Despite repeated efforts to track it down, it has never been seen again. In the next episode, we meet avid snowboarder and former professional ice hockey player Eric Lamarck. In 2004, the 34-year-old's life is spiraling out of control in more ways than one.

Hoping to escape his demons, he takes an ill-fated trip to Mammoth Mountain. Soon he finds himself lost in a sprawling alpine wilderness, where the cold isn't the only thing that bites. Equipped with just his snowboard and the clothes on his back, Eric must attempt to find his way back to civilization. But as the days drag on, he'll veer closer and closer to delirium. That's next time on Real Survival Stories.