Eric,
I've been in some pretty dicey situations with guides (Armed and unarmed) and I've never seen guides more nervouse than when we were on Lake Tana Ethiopia and asked them "Let's go see some hippos!" and we were in a failry sizeable boat (Only slightly larger then the hippos)and those puppies did not like us coming close as the group had a baby that was kind of scared of us. We were about 30 yards away. The bulls would raise thier heads out of the water and roar at us.

The guides (and us) got really wigged out when we started seeing these big black shadows criss crossing underneath our boat, just waiting for some giant head to pop up out right next to us or for them to start bumping the boat. We got out of there quick.

They pulled out thier bag of qat and all had a chew to calm down.

Best,
Stiv