'I was swallowed by an angry hippo and ripped apart but miraculously survived' – Mirror Online, Mirror

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A man has told of how he was swallowed by an angry hippo – and survived.

Paul Templer could be the only person to have been swallowed by the giant animal and miraculously live to tell the bizarre and tragic tale.

The veteran safari guide was paddling along the Zambezi River when everything suddenly “went dark and quiet” and there was a terrible smell like 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”.

Dad-of-three Mr Templer, 50, told Mirror Online: “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. “

During the life-or-death struggle he had an eerie feeling of relief that he wasn’t trapped in the jaws of a crocodile.

The former British Army serviceman miraculously escaped the rogue hippo’s jaws and survived despite suffering gruesome injuries that resulted in his left arm being amputated.

His colleague, Evans Namasango, drowned after he was knocked out of a canoe during the horrifying incident in his native Zimbabwe in March 1996.

Mr Templer, then 27, and fellow guides were taking six tourists on a canoe trip near Victoria Falls when they came across a group of hippos in the crocodile-infested river in Africa.

The hippo that attacked had been aggressive towards visitors in the past, knocking Mr Templer out of his canoe on a previous journey.

The former guide, who has written a book calledWhat’s Left of Me,said the group kept a safe distance from the school of hippos which included the aggressive male weighing about 8, 000 lbs, almost twice the weight of a Land Rover.

But things went horribly wrong when they tried to go around the animals.

Mr Templer, who owned the safari company, said: “There was this loud thud behind me and I knew that thud. It was the sound of a hippo hitting a canoe.

“I turned to see the back of the canoe maybe three feet out of the water atop a hippo and the apprentice guide (Mr Namasango) flying out of it.”

He turned around and paddled towards Mr Namasango in a desperate attempt to save him.

He added: ” Evans is bobbing along in the water and then I see this big wave, kind of like a torpedo coming towards a ship, at quite a pace.

” I pull up alongside him, lean over to grab him and it’s almost a little too made-for-Hollywood moment with our fingers almost touching.

“Suddenly everything just went dark and quiet. I struggled to break free.

“I was sitting in (the hippo’s mouth) with my arms pressed to my sides. I could feel the bristles on a hippo’s snout.

“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. “

Mr Templer, who weighed about 200 lbs at the time, was in a fight for his life and the odds weren’t in his favor – 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 *** 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. “

Mr Templer 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 Mr Templer 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 Mr Templer went into shock.

As he lay bleeding he asked about Mr Namasango but was told: “He’s gone, mate.”

Mr Templer , 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, Mr Templer 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.

Mr Templer thought he was going to die, telling the group: “Please tell my family I am sorry and I love them.”

He had a near-death experience, describing it 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 practicing 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.

Mr Namasango’s body was recovered from the river a few days later.

Mr Templer wasn’t supposed to be on the trip – he stepped in as a last-minute replacement for a guide who had come down with malaria.

He said: “In the wild, we ‘ re the visitors, we’re the intruders. The hippo attacked because I was invading its territory. “

He faced a lengthy physical recovery in the following months and years, and the deadly attack continues to haunt him.

He said: “I was angry, I felt guilty, I felt responsible for Evans as the person in charge. “

Two years after the attack, he paddled the length of the 1, 600 – mile Zambezi with one arm, a month-long journey that proved to be “cathartic “for him.

He is convinced he encountered the same hippo aga in when one popped out of the water next to his canoe.

It dived back under as he screamed at the top of his lungs.

More than 20 years on from the attack, he said: “If I could undo the day and Evans could still be here and I could have *** arms I would in a heartbeat.

“I have a pretty strong faith and I just figure maybe there was something to be done with what happened. “

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 programs, 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. “