A safari guide has told of his terrifying experience being swallowed by a “monster hippo” that ripped his arm off and “threw him around like a ragdoll”.
Paul Templer was working as a canoe safari guide in Zimbabwe, spending his days guiding tourists down the Zambezi River, when the horrifying ordeal, which left him with 39 “major bite wounds” took place.
The terrifying incident took place on March 9, 1996, and Paul said he had started off the day with a “sense of foreboding”.
“A friend of mine who was supposed to be leading a canoe safari had come down with malaria,” he told 7News.
“You know, when you have that feeling of trepidation like something’s just not the way it’s supposed to be? That’s how I felt.”
However, Paul said the opportunity to take that safari was “fantastic”.
He told he told 7News: “It was on one of the most beautiful stretches of river, maybe in the world."
There were seven canoes on the safari, Paul said; three filled with tourists, the other four by Paul and three apprentice guides called Evans, Ben and Mike.
The safari had been going “pretty well,” he said, when the group of canoers came across a pod of around a dozen hippos wallowing in the shallows.
They pulled up beside them, keeping a safe distance, while he talked to the group about them.
Paul added: “Of course, there’s always someone on a safari who asks if it’s true that hippos kill more people every year than any other animal.
“The answer is yes. So that’s why we’re gonna stay away from them. Let’s go around them.”
However, the next thing he knew, a giant bull hippo had charged at Evans’ canoe.
Paul said he turned around to see the canoe about four feet out of the water and Evans being catapulted into the river.
“I thought, ‘that’s not good’ and I told my clients to paddle back to safety, and I move towards Evans,” Paul said.
“I’m like, ‘Hey, hang in there. I’m coming to get you.’ He looks at me and he’s got panic in his eyes.”
Paul said he was reaching over to help Evans when the water “exploded” and everything went “dark and quiet”.
Paul said he was hit with a “terrible” smell of rotten eggs.
As he ran his fingers through bristles on a snout he realised he was lodged headfirst down the throat of a massive hippopotamus that had gone "berserk".
Speaking to the Mirror Online in 2019, dad-of-three Paul said: "I had no idea whatsoever what had hit me.
"All I knew is from my waist up I wasn’t dry but I wasn’t wet either like my legs were.
"I could feel this incredible pressure crushing down on my lower back."
"My first response was just complete relief because I feared I was inside a croc, and in a weird way there’s some solace being in a hippo.
"That lasted an odd second and then I thought 'I’ve got to get out of here', but I couldn’t do anything because I’m tightly wedged in his mouth."
Paul, who weighed about 200lbs at the time, was in a fight for his life and the odds weren't in his favour - the hippo is the world's deadliest large land mammal, killing about 500 people a year in Africa.
The former guide, now a management consultant and public speaker living in Chicago in the US, said: "The hippo half spit, half-choked me out and I burst to the surface, grab a lung full of fresh air and I’m face to face with Evans.
"I started swimming away but Evans was struggling to stay afloat.
"When I looked at him I could see he was absolutely terrified and in the grips of panic.
"I swam back to him, then suddenly, wham, I was in the hippo’s throat again, but this time my legs were down his throat and he started thrashing me around again."
Paul tried to grab his holstered gun, a .357 Magnum revolver, but the hippo was thrashing him around so violently that he couldn't get his hands on the weapon.
When the hippo spat him out a second time, he came up for air and tried to swim away, but he was attacked again.
He said: "I was looking under my arm and I saw hippo with its mouth wide open.
"His tusks tore into my torso and now my legs are hanging out of one side of his mouth and my arms and my head and my shoulder are outside the other.
"This time he truly went berserk.
"He threw me up in the air and I did a half twist before I fell back into his mouth and he bit down so hard I thought he was going to bite me in half."
The hippo dived up to eight feet with Paul trapped in its jaws as he bled profusely.
He said: "I was relatively calm and I remember wondering who could hold their breath the longest.
"I was watching my blood coming out and I was wondering if I was going to bleed to death or if I would drown."
But the hippo then surged to the surface and spit him out again. He was rescued by a fellow guide and kayaker, named Mack, who dragged him to rocks and tried to stem the flow of blood as Paul went into shock.
As he lay bleeding he asked about Evans but was told: "He's gone, mate."
Paul, who suffered almost 40 severe bite wounds, said: "I was a mess.
"My one arm from the elbow up had been crushed to a pulp and from the elbow down most of the skin had been pulled off it.
"My other arm was kind of hanging on. My foot looked like someone had to beat a hole through it with a hammer.
"Blood started bubbling out of my mouth because I had internal injuries.
"You could see part of a lung through a hole in my back. I had a bite in the back of my head.
"One of the bites had severed an artery but the hippo bit it at the right angle that he tore it but it sealed itself.
"By the time I got rescued I lost so much blood that my status was inconsistent with life. I shouldn’t have been alive."
Terrified and in incredible pain, Paul was loaded into a canoe and the group set off to look for help.
Their first aid kit and radios were at the bottom of the river, the sun was setting and the crazed hippo was bumping up against the canoe.
Paul thought he was going to die, telling the group: "Please tell my family I am sorry and I love them."
He describ3ed the near-death experience as "a profoundly spiritual experience where my entire being was infused with this incredible sense of peace, like a moment of choice - should I stay or should I go?
"It was the moment I made the choice (to live) and all the pain came flooding back in and it was so intense that I wished I would die, but I didn't."
He was saved by sheer luck - the group encountered a rescue team which happened to be practising nearby.
Without any painkillers, it took eight hours for him to get to a hospital for the first of multiple surgeries to keep him alive.
His left arm had to be amputated but surgeons managed to save his other arm and his badly-injured leg.
Evans' body was recovered from the river a few days later.
He has since launched the Templer Foundation which helps people affected by post-traumatic stress disorder and terminally ill and disabled children and their families.
One of the programmes, Erin's Light, is named after his 14-year-old daughter, who is profoundly cognitively impaired.
He said: "We all have s***ty days and I have learned that stuff is going to happen but we get to choose what’s going to happen next."
