As readers of our last column know already, we are currently floating gently down the Lower Zambezi in canoes. And though it might sound recklessly intrepid, it's really a piece of cake.

A consortium of safari lodges has been established on the Zambian bank of the river. One simply canoes from lodge to lodge. In the dry season, the river is smooth, the current helpful. All necessary equipment is provided by the lodges, which also lay on guides and, if you're feeling lazy, supplementary paddlers, as well as mod cons such as drinks coolers and picnic lunches. But more on the logistics later. First a word about the wild life.

The Lower Zambezi National Park, despite its safari lodges with their gin and tonics and buffet dinners, is truly a wilderness area and, as such, needs to be treated with respect. There are Nile crocodiles at an average density of 100 per km of water frontage. Which is quite a lot. Swimming, trailing one's hand in the water or dipping one's feet from the bank obviously isn't recommended, but the giant reptiles aren't normally a hazard to canoeists and the guides know the telltale signs that indicate their presence.

The main problem animals to watch for as you swing your paddles are the hippopotamuses, which occur in a density of 70 per kilometer. Hippos are big. An adult male weighs in at anything up to 2 tons. They also come fully equipped with tusklike teeth and more than a slice of attitude.

Once thought to be strictly vegetarian, a single instance has been recorded of hippos eating a gazelle. But this was in a time of drought, and when there's a drought in Africa, anything goes. Oddly there have also been three scientifically recorded instances where hippos have been seen to rescue other animal species, either from drowning or crocodile attack.

Hippos mainly graze on grass and they're certainly not out to eat you. The problem arises from two things: fight and flight. When a male is in mating mood, he's distinctly territorial and if you come barging into his stretch of river, then he will barge back. The same goes for the females when they have young.

When love is not in the air, some hippos tend to do a runner when encountering people. If on land, they charge posthaste for the water. When in the water, it's vice versa. You don't want to get in the way of a stampeding hippo. As the Hippo song has it, "Some goes round but I busts through . . ."

As "Smither's Field Guide to the Mammals of South Africa" puts it, "If at all possible stay away from hippos." They are statistically the most dangerous mammals on the continent, Homo sapiens excluded.

Lions have a love/hate relationship with water. On the one hand, it is the magnet that attracts lunch, drawing game to drink. On the other, it makes them wet, and they loathe that. There are healthy populations on both the Zambian and Zimbabwean banks of the Zambezi, but never the twain do meet. They just roar at each other across the river.

Although they'll have a crack at most animals, including young elephants, their preferred prey is buffalo. There is no guarantee that you will see a kill, though forgetting your film or breaking your camera greatly improves the odds of a spectacular sighting.

The most noticeable locals are the elephants. Although poaching was once epidemic and still occurs (although to a lesser degree), the elephant populations are slowly bouncing back.

Encounters with elephants, sometimes extremely close encounters, are guaranteed in the Lower Zambezi National Park. While they make for a magnificent spectacle when drinking or bathing, elephants cause significant problems for the safari-lodge managers. For reasons unknown, they like to use the swimming pool at Kuibo as a latrine, turning the water bright green. They also enjoy wrenching up the lodges' shrubs. Although they don't often invade lodges during the day, they frequently amble through at night.

Birds are abundant. The river's edge is patrolled by hideously wattled marabou storks that resemble a cross between a pterodactyl and a hanging judge, as well as egrets, kingfishers and herons. Raptors include African fish eagles and palmnut vultures, which as their names suggest, eat fish and palm nuts, respectively. Adding delightful flashes of color are the bee eaters that nest in holes in the Zambezi's muddy riverbanks. White-fronted bee eaters are here year-round, while their more flamboyantly decorated cousins, the blue-cheeked and carmine bee eaters, appear in autumn.

Although the Zimbabwean border is by and large flat, with the exception of the Mpata Gorge area, the Muchinga Escarpment on the Zambian side rises as high as 1,500 meters. Muchinga provides a brooding backdrop to the low-lying flood plain of acacias and mopane trees. This is the least accessible part of the national park and is home to leopards, chacma baboons and klipspringers -- woolly, long-necked antelopes that are intrepid rock climbers.

In addition to facilitating the descent of the Lower Zambezi by canoe, the lodges offer land-based game drives and walking safaris. But it's the canoeing that's the real draw, as one drifts, dreamlike, on the slowly moving water road through a landscape unchanged in centuries.