Two small, beady eyes are watching me. I’m close enough to see light swirling around the green irises, the black pupils reduced to the thinnest of slivers. It’s a lazy, passive, even dismissive look that’s cast my way by a ruthless killer whose craft has been honed for millennia. I can’t help but feel like prey that’s just been evaluated and deemed unworthy, but I don’t believe it for a second. Instead, I watch back.

I take my time carefully examining each one of the pearly whites sticking out of the jaw. They’re used to tearing through skin, ripping apart flesh and breaking bone, just like the sharp claws resting next to them. This opportunist can wait days, even weeks for the perfect kill. Unmoved, unbothered, just poised in death-like stillness ready to strike.

I’m totally unprepared for when the head suddenly snaps in my direction and I jolt back from the edge of the boat. I’m meant to be watching it back, but instead I’ve been lulled into submission by a 13-foot Nile crocodile and now I have a front seat as it slithers into the fast waters of the Zambezi.

The encounter is a sign of what’s to come during my nine-day adventure, tracing the dips and curves of the Zambezi and traversing the world’s largest man-made body of water by volume, Lake Kariba, on CroisiEurope’s southern Africa safari cruise. And I soon find out, it’s not just the crocodiles watching.

Several pairs of eyes look at our quietly drifting boat suspiciously. A twitch of an ear, a puff through the nostrils. Heads dip below the water as if someone’s playing invisible whack-a-mole. The hippos are curious but shy and quite cautious; they also don’t have to come back up for air for another five minutes or so.