Hello and welcome to the Witness History Podcast from the BBC World Service with me Jill

Kursley.

I'm taking you back to 2004 and an unusual story of friendship and hope that went viral.

So you had these two animals behaving like each other. The hippo behaving like a

tortoise and the tortoise behaving like a hippo. That's wildlife

conservationist Dr. Paula Kuhumbu. Paula was based at Halla Park in and was an abandoned limestone quarry that had been transformed into a wildlife sanctuary.

It was the home of a 130 year old giant tortoise called Misei.

So Misei was one of the 13 giant Aldubran tortoises that lived in the rehabilitated

quarries. He was brought into Kenya about 30 years earlier and was adopted by a family who looked

after him for a while. These are dubran tortoises somehow washed up on the East African

coast and he had somehow gotten himself into a ditch and a vehicle

reversed onto his bag and cracked his shell.

So he was this marked tortoise because to be honest when you look at them they all look

kind of the same and because of that crack he also wasn't commercially very

valuable. Masey was this big old guy who nobody wanted because of his big crack on his back.

Misei means old man in Swahili. He was different from the others at the sanctuary.

He was quite a character. He was notorious for going on long walks.

He would walk out of the compound, disappear sometimes for days,

and be found somewhere else in another part of the neighborhood of Mombasa, and then he'd have to be brought back, which was difficult because he was so big.

Big? He was huge, weighing around 300 kilograms.

That's about the same weight as three average 20 year old American men.

And he was over one and a half meters tall.

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