My surgeon told me she’d never met a hippo victim before… they usually go straight to the morgue! Late life adventurer Roland – and his wife Shirley – describe how he escaped the jaws of the most dangerous beast on earth

Shirley Cherry will never forget the moment she watched her husband gasping for air before being dragged underwater by a 1.4-ton hippo.

Moments earlier, she and Roland, both 63, had been enjoying a peaceful meander in a canoe down the Kafue River in Zambia. 

The day was bright and warm and, just after 8am, their group – comprising eight tourists and two guides on a safari tour – had set off on the scenic African waterway, heading for an island 15km downstream where they planned to spend the night.

Shirley and Roland were experienced ­canoeists, so were ­looking forward to ­taking in the birdsong and hoping to see ­elephants, antelopes and buffalo grazing on the riverbanks.

‘We were all in a line, about three metres apart, and Roland and I were in the second canoe,’ recalls Shirley, from Tysoe in Warwickshire. ‘We’d only been going about five ­minutes when one of the guides, who was in the canoe in front, turned and said: ‘Hippo on the right, you need to keep to the left.’

‘The next minute there was an almighty bang from underneath; it was like a car crash.’

Given that a hippo is a similar weight to a family car, it’s an appropriately terrifying comparison.

Shirley and Roland Cherry were experienced ­canoeists, so were ­looking forward to ­taking in the birdsong and hoping to see ­elephants during a meander down the Kafue River in Zambia

Shirley will never forget the moment she watched her husband gasping for air before being dragged underwater by a 1.4-ton hippo (File image)

‘The canoe tipped up and, the next thing I knew, we were in the water,’ Shirley says. ‘People around me were shouting, ‘Swim!’, so I managed to get myself to the bank. It was only when I got there that I realised Roland was nowhere to be seen.’

Shivering on the shore, her heart pounding, Shirley frantically searched the water for signs of life. Two other canoeists, who’d also been ­capsized, stood in front of her with their ­paddles aloft – she now realises they were shielding her from seeing the worst.

Somewhere nearby, one of the guides shouted the unimaginable words, ‘He’s dead.’

Miraculously, they spoke too soon. Seconds later, Roland appeared in the middle of the river, choking, spluttering and struggling for breath.

‘I can’t explain the relief I felt when I saw him come to the ­surface,’ Shirley says. ‘He took a big gulp of air, but then he was dragged down again by the hippo. I thought: ‘This is it. There’s no way he can survive that.’

What happened next is a blur. One of the other tourists recalls the ­animal surfacing one final time with Roland lying limp in its jaws, before tossing him towards the ­riverbank ‘like a matchstick’.

Another witness described it as being like ‘a great white shark ­tossing a seal’.

Mercifully, Shirley has blocked these images out.

‘It’s the body’s coping mechanism, I suppose,’ she says.

What she knows now is that the hippo, apparently a female ­protecting her calf, flung Roland two metres into the air. He landed in shallow water close to the shore and, still conscious, managed to crawl to the edge, where he was dragged to safety.

Disorientated, bleeding profusely and so severely injured it wasn’t clear if he was going to make it, he was – somehow – still alive.

Shirley ran to him, shouting his name over and over. Neither of them could quite believe it was true.

Three months have passed since that awful day, and Roland is still here, though the scars of what ­happened run deep.

Today, back home in the quiet rural spot where the couple have lived for 33 years, 5,000 miles from the Kafue River, he admits it all feels ‘quite surreal’.

The wounds on both his legs – where the hippo’s tusks scraped so aggressively that the flesh was ripped to the bone – are healing nicely, as is the 10-inch gash on his abdomen.

There’s still some bruising from the bite mark on his left bicep, but he’s regained movement in his ­dislocated right shoulder, after months of intensive physiotherapy.

It took seven operations and a two-and-a-half-week stint in ­hospital to get him here, and he’s painfully aware how close he came to losing his life.

‘The surgeon who operated on me in South Africa said I was extremely lucky,’ says Roland, who worked as a company ­director but is – after everything he’s been through – now seriously considering retirement.

The hippo, apparently a female ­protecting her calf, flung Roland two metres into the air. He is pictured being rushed to a nearby hospital

‘She was incredulous. She said: ‘You are my first. I’ve never met a hippo attack victim before because they normally go straight to the morgue.’

‘If the wounds in my legs had been one or two millimetres deeper, they could have snapped off. If the wound in my abdomen had gone into my gut, I would have bled to death.’

It sounds horrific but Roland has, somehow, maintained his sense of humour throughout, crediting Shirley and their two children, as well as the doctors involved in ­Zambia and South Africa, for ­keeping his spirits up.

There are, he laughs, some ‘fairly gruesome photographs’ of his injuries ‘that aren’t for family viewing’.

It’s certainly not the experience – nor the holiday snaps – that Roland and Shirley expected to bring back from their big African adventure.

The couple, who met at Leeds University, aged 19, and have been married for 38 years, had become later-life travellers after their ­children, Ben and Tara, both in their 30s, left home.

‘We’ve been to Iran, Ecuador, ­Peru, Patagonia,’ says Roland. ‘Earlier this year we did a tour of Turkey.

‘Last year we were in Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand. We also did an Indian safari, and we’d done an African safari before to the ­Okavango Delta in Botswana.

‘I read geography and archeology at university, so I’m a ­geographer at heart. I love big mountains, big waterfalls, big valleys; that’s what floats my boat.

‘It’s me who has the real ­wanderlust. Shirley is very polite and turns up with her passport and asks me where we’re going this time.’

Having read travel ­articles about the South Luangwa National Park in Zambia, Roland longed to visit, so this trip – a five-week camping expedition through Botswana, then exploring Zambia, Malawi and down the Mozambique coast to Kruger National Park – had been long in the planning.

Though not risk-takers, Roland and Shirley were all too aware of the dangers of the wildlife in these far-flung places – and insist it never put them off.

‘You need to have an understanding that these are seriously wild ­animals and they can, in the worst circumstances, kill you,’ says Shirley.

‘Our son is a wildlife ­photographer and we are wildlife enthusiasts, but you see pictures of them looking cute and cuddly – even the hippos look benign – and that’s far from the truth.

‘I remember once, when we were on a walking safari in Africa, we were brought to a sudden halt by our guide and told to stay very, very quiet.

‘Out of the bushes, this troupe of elephants appeared, just 10 metres away. They’re huge beasts but they move silently – they could have knocked us over and killed us.

‘It’s all about being sensible, doing what you’re told and never taking any chances.’

Having completed the first leg of their tour, from Johannesburg in South Africa to the majestic ­Victoria Falls, they were excited for the two weeks of adventuring they had left.

Four days into their itinerary, the group – Ronald and Shirley, four Australians, a Swiss man and a ­German woman – camped ­overnight on the banks of the Kafue River, a tributary of the Zambezi.

The hippo’s tusks scraped Roland’s legs so aggressively that the flesh was ripped to the bone

Shirley remembers waking on June 25 to a ‘cursory’ safety ­briefing, after which life jackets were handed out. Having canoed ­several times in the past, both at home and abroad, she had no ­concerns about being in the water.

‘I did latch on to one thing the guides said: ‘Avoid the hippos and hope the crocs don’t get you,’ she recalls. ‘You hear these things, but you put your faith in the locals, and you never think it’ll happen to you.’

Roland’s memories of the hippo attack are hazy. Astonishingly, he never actually saw the animal itself: his experience was mostly of the pain and being pulled with vicious force under the river.

His shoulder was dislocated by the force of hitting the water after the canoe was struck and he remembers it ‘really smarting’.

‘Shirley did what we had been told to do in the case of falling in: swim like crazy for the bank,’ he recalls.

‘But I couldn’t swim because I only had one arm working. I tried by best to do a one-handed breast-stroke, but minutes later I felt this thing come up and grab me.

‘I remember thinking: ‘This is it. This is me. This isn’t how I planned to go.’ I was ­thinking, ‘No, I’m not ready to die. I still have things I want to do.’

‘It took me to the bottom and then it let me go, and my life vest started taking me up towards the surface. I remember counting to ten as I went up, and realising how deep I was.

‘When I reached the ­surface, I took a great gulp of air and then it came for me again and grabbed me and pulled me under.’

Roland doesn’t remember being submerged again, nor the hippo – whose bite is so powerful it can snap a human in half – tossing him in the air.

‘My body had gone into ­shutdown-mode through sheer trauma,’ he says. ‘The next thing I remember was sitting in shallow water looking at my knees, which were a bloody mess. There were bits of flesh sticking out from my torn shorts and blood all over my left thigh. I couldn’t see the rest of it, but I was in a lot of pain.’

A motorboat took Roland to the jetty, where he was lain across three seats in a minibus which drove him to Mtendere Mission Hospital is nearby Chirundu.

Here, he received life-saving care: within two hours, they’d given him a general anaesthetic, cleaned his wounds and sewed them up sufficiently for him to be airlifted to Johannesburg’s ­Milpark Hospital for plastic ­surgery the following day.

‘They were amazing,’ says Roland, who has since set up a fundraising page for vital supplies and equipment at the small rural hospital, for which donations now exceed £20,000.

‘They didn’t say, ‘Where’s your credit card?’ or ‘Do you have insurance?’ They took one look at me and did everything they could to save my life. I am forever in their debt.’

He is full of praise, too, for the hospital in Johannesburg where he had another six operations, which he credits with having ‘the best trauma surgeons in the world’.

Throughout, Shirley – who had to battle unsympathetic border police, acquire last-minute visas and unexpectedly find herself money, accommodation and transport in South Africa, not to mention breaking the news to their horrified children – has been his ‘rock’.

She spent every day for two weeks at Roland’s side, feeding him, washing him, climbing into his bed to read to him and ­keeping him motivated for what lay ahead.

Both Shirley and Roland insist they harbour no ill will towards the ­hippo, into whose habitat they unwittingly strayed

‘I was quite analytical about it,’ insists Roland. ‘You have to be stoic; it’s a fairly British reaction to something like this.

‘I set myself targets about where I was going to be, what operation I was having next. But without Shirley there, I might have ­unravelled quite quickly.’

Their son, Ben, flew out to join them, while their daughter, Tara, booked time off work to spend with her father as soon as he got back to Britain.

‘We’re a very close family unit,’ says Shirley. ‘It was wonderful being reunited. Roland’s whole face lit up when he saw them.’

Not a day goes by when she doesn’t remind herself that, but for their sitting positions in the canoe that day, it could have been her.

‘In the nicest possible way, there’s less of me than there is of Roland,’ she says. ‘There’s less of me to chomp.

‘I can’t help feeling that, if it had been me, I wouldn’t be here now.’

She pats Roland’s knee fondly. ‘I’m immensely proud of him. He didn’t complain once.

‘It was astonishing. He must have been in quite some pain at times, but he got through it, and I’m amazed at his bravery and his resilience.’

The passing of time has, certainly, helped both Roland and Shirley talk about the trauma with levity – so much so that they’re giving a series of talks about the experience in their local community, where Roland has been nicknamed ‘Hippo Man’.

With retirement on the cards, Shirley, an amateur artist, has turned her attention to drawing portraits of wild animals – most recently a zebra, leopard and elephant.

She has not, yet, attempted a hippo, though both insist they harbour no ill will towards the ­animal, into whose habitat they unwittingly strayed.

Roland is simply enjoying what he calls his ‘second chance at life’.

Currently he has no travel plans in the calendar, but he refuses to rule out a return to Africa, which both he and Shirley say is a ‘­magical’ place.

For now, perhaps something closer to home.

‘I think,’ he smiles, ‘a cottage in Cornwall might be a good idea.’

• To donate to the Mtendere Mission Hospital, visit: www.justgiving.com/crowdfunding/RolandCherry