Yesterday we said goodbye to Tambonette. I was sad to disembark and say farewell to Nhamu and Aleck (who makes the best bacon ever), but I wasn’t disappointed to be heading back to the Wild Heritage lodge. Once there, we weren’t greeted by our own personal elephant or zebra, but there were buffalo lounging around on the flood plane. I wasn’t as enthusiastic as I should have been. Apparently, you don’t see these often, and it wasn’t until later that I realized these were the buffalo with the big curly horns that make them look like cranky English barristers.

The non Americanized Zimbabweans were shrieking that the water in the kidney-shaped pool was too cold and insisted the bathwater-like jacuzzi was perfection. This is the single area where I was able to prove myself on the trip. It was cold, but it wasn’t freezing. Z and I have waded in the ocean off Washington coast, so we know cold. We splashed around in the water, listening to the hippos do their weird snort-gargling in the distance. There was an ominous-looking pool brush floating around the bottom of the pool that gave me a bit of a fright, but on the whole, it was a body of water that didn’t cause hyperventilation.

As we left Wild Heritage, I started to work myself into a pout because it was the only day out of the five in which I hadn’t seen an elephant. Before I could get my lips properly pout-shaped, an elephant moved at the side of the road. We quickly saw three others, flapping their ears and chewing whatever the elephant version of cud is. Further down the road, my newly trained elephant-spotting skills were put to the test and I saw a few more elephants high on a hill. They were waving goodbye with their trunks.

And now, I can say it, I miss Kariba. It was hot and made me cry. I’ve probably got scars from mosquito bites that I’ll carry the rest of my life. My sister-in-law could have been trampled by an elephant. I nearly shat myself when Mistresses was interrupted by something that went crunch in the night.

But it was something special. I’d say it was a trip of a lifetime, but I’m married to Z, so whose to say?

Bats, it turns out, are great heroes at Kariba. Even the ones who live by day in the hollow tree between the Tambonette and the crocodile slide. When the mosquitos started biting us last night, a whole colony of bats took to the air and helped themselves to a smorgasbord. I wasn’t exactly cheering along with the rest of Z’s family, but it is the first time when they’ve ever seemed like a good idea (outside of Halloween decorations).

Though I warmed easily to the other spots we harbored for the night, I can’t say the same of Crocodile Creek. After the bat festival, Z and I retired to our doorless bedroom and sat in chairs on the three foot deck, watching Mistresses on my computer. (I realize there is probably a passage in a 21^st century Girl Scout handbook about how you should not take electronic entertainment on an outdoor expedition, but since I was a Girl Scout before such things existed, I’m grandfathering myself into the “movies okay for insomniacs” clause.) So we sat  side by side, sharing a single set of earphones, enjoying the tempestuous lives of the mistresses. The problem with sharing a set of earphones, however, is that your other ear is free to hear every wave, shriek, and crunch. About halfway through, I realized that not only were we blinding ourselves by staring at the computer screen, but we were also illuminating ourselves, like a couple of dinners under in a well-lit warming tray at Golden Corral. Z was oblivious, but then there was a particularly loud crack in the brush to the right of the boat, and I leapt up and begged Z to finish the show within the safety of the mosquito net, because mosquito nets keep one safe from big game. It’s a fact.

And yes, Xanax was taken. Don’t worry—it’s prescribed. I’m going to have to ration myself or find some plant in the bush that has a similar nerve-numbing quality though.

I woke up to even more elephants. Z and his brother went out in the little boat to fish, and I did my best to not think about the log-like crocodiles or how invisible the hippos are until two seconds before they surface. Or how huge their mouths are. Though I hadn’t seen them load the boat, I pretended they were packing the big machete, just in case.

Aside from death around every bend, the lake is huge and lovely. I generally loathe man-made lakes because they give me the heebie-jeebies. They don’t look real, and I’m plagued with thoughts of the farms and houses (and I always imagine people too) at the bottom. At Kariba, though, the only thing that reminds me that it’s man made are the tops of these sticky looking trees that come out of the water in places in haunting kinds of ways. It’s so vast that it doesn’t look like the smaller reservoirs I’ve grown accustomed to seeing scattered across America.

Eventually, we left our little spot and headed towards Palm Bay, where again, we saw a whole other host of elephants, and Z’s family said again that this was unheard of, to see so many at once. Z-ma’s prayer group really outdid themselves. We docked by the shore and there was a teeny little bay with a lone hippo bobbing up and down, that we could watch from our bunk. Z sat near the foot of the bed and fished, while I read.

What I like about fishing is that Z can do it, I can sit beside him, and there is no expectation that I pay any attention. If he were a tennis player or racecar driver, I’d be screwed. (I used to feel so sorry for Ashley Judd, sitting under that hot sun in those big hats, watching Dario drive his loud racecar in circles.)

The heat situation was better in that our side of the boat was parked in shade and in that I actually listened to Z when he suggested I take a cold shower before dressing myself in my mozzie-wear. It was so refreshing I never once thought about how I was washing myself with lake water. We watched the hippo bob some more. He popped up with some regularity and looked only mildly annoyed that we were blocking his view of the larger lake. After another delicious Aleck-cooked meal, we played games and sang the praises of the breeze that kept us mosquito free. This really was the perfect night. Even with the hippo twenty feet away from us, I needed no pharmaceutical help to calm me. Nature seemed like the perfect antidote to all the worries and car horns that keep me wide awake at night in Seattle.

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little sad to leave the comfort of our Africhill bedroom at the lodge, particularly after we got lost on the way to Andora Harbor and everyone we asked for directions told us what they thought we wanted to hear instead of offering actual, helpful directions. (It’s a bit like Ireland, that, though I think the motivations are different. When you ask an Irishman for directions and he says, “Ah, sure, it’s just up the road, you can’t miss it” he spends the rest of the afternoon amused with himself for sending the tourists on a path to nowhere.)

Eventually, we arrived at the sweet little houseboat that would be our home for the next four days and three nights. The Tambonette had an open upper deck with a big table, where we’d congregate and where my brother-in-law and sister-in-law would sleep, and on the lower deck there was a kitchen, a bathroom, a small area where the nephew would either sleep or fish, and then two bedroom cabins. Z and I took one of these and Z-ma had the other. The whole port side at the foot of the bed was wide open, which was both beautiful and unnerving for a clumsy person such as myself. One misstep getting out of my mosquito net in the night, and I’d be in the drink.

My first houseboat failure was actually getting on the boat. My husband’s family were all heave-ho-ing boxes and bags like sailors, and I took two steps up the gangway with my backpack and a bag with nothing in it but a pillow, and I froze. The gangway had no sides and I have bad balance. Z gave a little bark, warning me that people were behind me with actual heavy loads, so I leapt off onto solid ground. Then he came and got my backpack, the bag of pillow, and held out his hand to walk me up the gangway as if I were four years old. He then announced that I was relieved of unloading duties and could stay on the boat with his mother unpacking. It took awhile for me to quit hanging my head in shame. Who can’t walk up a gangway with a pillow?

Before we launched, Z had to go with the captain, Nhamu, to get petrol. They set off in a little motorboat. I love water but I mostly enjoy being beside it, reading a book. One of my first memories was of a little kiddie boat ride—about five little boats in a circle of dirty water—at Lesourdesville Lake Amusement Park in Ohio, where I was not happy, being lifted off of solid ground by my father and dumped into a boat by myself. I can’t remember now if there were tears or just unspoken fear, but what I do remember is peering down into murk thinking that anything could be lurking down there. So despite the fact that Z had on a required life jacket, I figured there was a 75% chance I’d never see him again. I stood at the stern, hands on hips, saying a little prayer of please Jesus, bringing him back safely. Then the motor cut out and Z and Nhamu were just bobbing around in the harbor. I wasn’t sure if this was answer to prayer or not, though it looked to me like eventually the little boat would drift right back to us. Finally, Nhamu was able to get the motor started and they puttered across the harbor, not out of my eyesight, not in crocodile-infested waters, but instead to a little petrol station that I could have swam to if need be. Z was back aboard the Tambonette in just a few minutes and all was right with my world, since I’d mostly forgotten about my gangway failure.

Eventually, everything was loaded and we set sail. This, I loved. The breeze was cool in a way that made me believe it would always be cool and reports about the heat at Kariba were overstated. The size of the lake was shocking, and the landscape was gorgeous. There really just aren’t enough adjectives. It was much more lush than the drive up the day before, and eventually my brother-in-law and nephew were pointing out lumps in the distance that were elephants. We docked somewhere between Spurwing and Fothergill Islands, and within minutes we’d seen upwards of twenty elephants on the shore. Some were splashing in water, some were eating. Our favorites were the babies, one in particular who seemed impossibly small. When the herd crossed from one piece of land to another, all of the grownups surrounded the baby to protect her from predators as they waded through the water. In the far distance was the silhouette of another long line of elephants that reminded me of the puppetry that Z and I had seen last year when we saw Lion King in Las Vegas. Hippos dotted the bank too, just in case we got bored with the pachyderms.

We won’t speak of the lone crocodile that floated by like a log, fooling no one.

Then it got really hot. For me. Everyone else suggested that it wasn’t hot at all and my sister-in-law told me about a trip there in summer during which she was so sick from the heat she couldn’t move. This did nothing to make me feel cooler. I worried I’d have a stroke and based on the desolate drive in, it didn’t appear to me that anyone would be medi-vacing me to a state-of-the-art hospital to cure my ills. I got even more panicky as the sun started down and I heard that boats had to be docked by 6 p.m., so it wasn’t like Nhamu was going to be zipping me back to civilization even if I begged.

The the sun went down, which was gorgeous for almost ten whole minutes before the mozzies started biting, and I had to go downstairs and cover my hot self in long pants, long sleeves, a scarf, and a dousing of DEET. Mosquitos can’t get enough of me—I am delicious. So I got hot again and sat in our little wall-less room and cried. This is NOT the way of Z’s family. Fortunately it was dark by then and there were no lights on (see “mosquitos” above) so when Z came down and said, “You must tell me if something is wrong or if you are just hot and itchy” I was able to say convincingly, “I’m just hot and itchy” when what I really wanted to say was please, please, please can we go back to the Wild Heritage lodge with the Africhill air conditioner above our bed, and then can we please drive back to your way cooler hometown, and then can we please get on a plane and fly to, I don’t know, Greenland, because even Seattle is too hot to live in and I can’t ever be anywhere hot ever again. But then he rubbed my back and I rubbed his and it got cooler and the wind kicked up and the mozzies started biting less, and it was all good again. Also, I took another Xanax and no longer felt like I needed the Holiday Inn Express with AC, and wi-fi (though it should be noted that animals can be seen there on the Discovery channel without fear or heat or insect bites).