I am reading Escape Routes by David Roberts. This is a collection of 20 articles ranging from a winter ascent in Iceland to the first descent of a river in Ethiopia, the Tekeze, a major tributary of the Blue Nile.
There are a lot of crocodiles on the Tekese, which runs through a deep canyon, 7,000 feet at its deepest. Roberts and his companions (founders of Mountain Travel Sobek) had to hike down 1,100 feet to get to the place where they could put in their rafts. So it doesn't seem like they could get far away from the river, particularly since they had 8,000 pounds of equipment. They were making a film for Mungo Park, an online adventure magazine funded by Bill Gates in the mid-1990s.
Roberts talks a good deal about the crocodiles in the river, for example:
On other Ethiopian streams, the guides had had boats bitten by crocs. Sure enough, by our fifth day, the occasional croc was charging a boat. Our response was to throw baseball-sized rocks (which we loaded up every morning) at the beasts. A week down the river, Bart Henderson drily mentioned that his boat had just dealt with our first "four rock croc".
But every evening, they had to camp by the river, and they also pulled into the river bank at other times for photography. Roberts says nothing -- nothing at all -- about how they protected their camp and themselves from the crocs while ashore or getting ashore.
They noticed that there were no habitations along the river, although people lived high up the surrounding cliffs and came down to cultivate the river banks because of lack of rain.
An inhabitant explained that the lack of dwellings beside the river was because of "the shaking sickness" -- malaria. He said his people could live with the crocodiles.
The last few sentences of the article kill the possibility that crocs cannot move fast on land:
The boat floats past a big croc on shore, who looks asleep. Suddenly the reptile spots the boat and charges towards the camera, running like a tailback across the stones, plunging into the water and swimming hard for Steve's offending lens.
My question is: How does one deal with crocodiles when there is no option but to camp on the shores of a croc infested river? The article does not give even a hint.