A Botswana safari by bike

In the Okavango Delta bush, many things can kill the unwitting visitor. Not just the leopards and hyenas that flit through your mind when something rustles outside your tent at night. Apparently benign species will happily bump you off given the right circumstances.

A warthog’s tusks can disembowel. A giraffe can pulp a skull with one kick. Gentle-eyed impalas won’t hesitate to impale you if threatened. Step barefoot on the barb of a camelthorn tree and, if you’re lucky, you’ll receive a nasty wound. If you’re unlucky, it’ll go septic.

It’s not that the wilderness hates you. It’s just once you climb out of a safari truck all your wealth and good taste count for nothing. You’re just another creature in the bush.

That’s quite a thought when you come across a lion while cycling.

Ahead, 31-year-old guide Kyle McIntyre squats over the trail on which we’ve been riding through a forest of mopane trees. Fresh tracks the width of a hand are imprinted in its sand. An adult lion, he whispers. Probably a male. And he’s going our way.

The chances are the lion has already heard our peloton approach; that even now he’s camouflaged among dry grasses ahead, watching, waiting. But who knows? This far from civilisation, he may be dozing on the trail around the corner.

That happened to Kyle once. He got away with a mock charge and a roar that shook his soul. In a Top Trumps of cycle hazards, lions beat potholes.

Kyle stands up. Let’s continue slowly, he says, now barely audible. “And remember: never run.”

That’s the first rule they teach you on this safari cycle. Whatever happens never turn your back and sprint, whether on foot or on the bike. Sudden movement scares wildlife and a scared animal is an unpredictable one.

The traditional safari experience is one of luxury: of sumptuous decor, infinity pools overlooking watering holes and Champagne breakfasts served by chefs in whites. Cycling seemed an opportunity to experience the Okavango on more equal terms, so I had joined what was billed as the area’s first multi-day cycle safari, launched earlier this year.

We would cycle between two camps and make two 30-60km rides out from each (bike geeks: we cycle hard-tail Scott Scale 720s with three-inch tyres). The trip is available during the June-to-October dry season. From November each year, rain in the Angolan highlands floods south into one of the world’s few inland deltas, filling dry floodplains and rivers to produce up to 15,000 sq km of wetland. Without it the Okavango would be as arid as the Kalahari Desert.

So existential is the seasonal deluge to Botswana its currency is the pula — literally “rain”. Presidents say “pula” to end each cabinet session (the traditional response is “let it be so”). And because of the rain, the Okavango Delta supports one of the greatest concentrations of wildlife in Africa — which is why the safari-tourists come.

We ride not for speed but stealth: no banter, no noise except the twang of a twig in spokes

“Your senses sharpen on a bike,” Kyle tells me en route to the first camp, two hours’ drive north of Maun. “It’s our instinct but people have forgotten. In a truck you’re pretty much in a café waiting for something to happen.”

Owned by the local Sankuyo community, Kaziikini Camp is a grassland clearing whose sole facility is a standpipe. Our tents are standard small domes rather than the elaborate canvas rooms of most safari operations. The showers are tin buckets hoisted on pulleys; all heat comes from fire. When I take a wash after my long journey from Johannesberg, the water smells faintly of woodsmoke.

As we sit on canvas chairs around the campfire that night, a thorn tree silhouetted against the Milky Way, there’s a thump from the enveloping darkness — a herd of elephants 15 metres away. They shuffle in our torchlight as if caught eavesdropping. Later I wake to the unearthly whoop of hyenas and a lion’s guttural bark. Both sound close.

They probably were — we’re within the Kavango Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area, nearly 520,000 sq km incorporating national parks, game reserves and community land across Botswana, Namibia, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Angola, an area larger than Germany and Austria combined. In Botswana it is largely unfenced, so wildlife makes no distinction between official game reserves and community land.

The plan for the next four days is to ride each morning through the wilderness of lagoons, shallow flooded pans, grass plains and mopane forest alongside the boundary of the Moremi Game Reserve, a protected area created in 1963 by the Batawana people, now administered by the government (and inside which cycling isn’t allowed). At dusk there’ll be more conventional game-drives in a jeep (complete with G&Ts). Then for the last two nights we’ll shift to a more luxurious lodge in the adjacent 2,000 sq km Khwai Private Reserve.

A rose-gold dawn expands above the tree line as our little group pedals out the next morning: Kyle ahead with a GPS route-plotter and a rifle beneath his crossbar (a safety measure of last resort) then a fellow Botswanan guide, Wamumdoo Frank Mashebe. We four Britons and Americans in our 30s and 50s follow, with a third guide, South African Guy Symons, pulling up the rear. Each of us has an emergency whistle with strict instructions to keep it handy in case we get lost. I’m in two minds about whether this is reassuring.

We duck under branches and grind in low gear when wheels bog and slither in deep sand. For the most part, however, we’re on hard elephant trails. Elephants were Africa’s first road-makers. For hundreds of years, herds have plodded these routes between waterholes, casually littering them with dung the size of footballs and branches stripped of nutritious bark.

Out of a safari jeep for my first time, every branch’s crack, every mad cackle of hornbills seems portentous. We ride not for speed but stealth: no banter, no noise except the occasional twang of a twig in spokes. Communication is by hand signal: when to stop (a raised fist), an elephant nearby (a pinched hand twirled like a trunk), a waterhole ahead (a circling flat palm).

On a bike waterholes hold potential jeopardy. It’s not just whatever has arrived to drink you need to worry about. It’s what may be hunting unseen.

The great drama of safari — hunt or flee — assumes a bell-clanging clarity on two wheels. You assess risk, you evade, you hide

There’s a deep rumble as we edge to a pool, startling a pair of warthogs. A breeding herd of elephant some 16-strong surrounds its far edge: weeks-old youngsters beneath their mothers’ legs; teenagers larking in shallows; the matriarch standing guard at one side.

Elephant are Botswana’s success story. Poaching is low due to brittle ivory (a result of nutrient-poor diets) and conservation support from the army. The elephant population is estimated at 130,000, more than any other country.

No one visits this waterhole, Guy whispers: it’s too far for walkers, too inaccessible for safari jeeps. Most safari-goers are in reserves, so the irony of cycling in community land is you have the place to yourself. When the herd finally drifts, a dawdling teenager realises it has been left behind and crashes through the bush trumpeting wildly.

On the second day we’re in open forest on flowing single-track trails, long grass swishing against the bikes, sunlight splintering through the canopy. Twice we backtrack when six-tonne bull elephants lumber out from thick bush.

At one point it sounds like someone is following us squeezing a dog’s chew-toy — a honeyguide. The birds lead humans to bees’ nests in return for a share of honey. Renege on the bargain and next time you’ll be escorted to a snake. Or so Wamumdoo’s folk-tale goes.

A soft-spoken giant, Wamumdoo narrates astonishing stories like everyday occurrences. There was his grandfather who harvested honey oblivious to bee stings. There were the crocodiles that snatched his cows as they drank. There was his grandfather’s trick of soaking his T-shirt in elephant dung to pass through elephant herds without danger. Wamumdoo’s father wanted him to be a lawyer “but I didn’t want to sit inside walls”. The bush is home, he says.

I wonder if anything scares him. “The sea,” he says. Landlocked all his life, he swam in the ocean once. “The current took me out — there was nothing I could do. The lifeguards rescued me.”

After each ride we return to camp covered in a film of dust to find warm water in washstands and beers that have been chilled in the jeep’s portable fridge. After cycling about 50km to our second camp, a beautiful riverside site called Tshaa, near the village of Mababe, I lie beneath an acacia as four elephants wallow. Impala graze the banks. Baboons squat in the dust nibbling seeds. At night, hippos chuckle in the river and elephants pad delicately into camp to shake the thorn trees for seeds.

The last day’s cycling is on grass plains where, after days in the forest, there is a sense of infinite space. Herds of zebra and wildebeest rumble away beneath a vibrating sky. Giraffes canter in a slow-motion ballet. A jackal slinks through grasses. I find myself scanning the trail for tracks as we ride.

We round bushes to see a bull buffalo just ahead, chin raised, its nostrils flaring like a drunk on a Saturday night. It is 800kg of muscle and bad temper — time to retreat. Later we play cat and mouse to dodge elephants through mopane scrub.

I’m not suggesting we ever experienced genuine danger; that lion on the trail never materialised, the emergency whistles remained silent. But the great drama of safari — hunt or flee — assumes a bell-clanging clarity on two wheels. You assess risk, you evade, you hide. If you come to understand wildlife better it’s because you adopt similar behaviour.

Too soon we check into the lodge at Khwai. Hippos wallow beyond plush sofas. On game drives I watch a lion stalk impala and track wild dogs streaking through the bush to snatch a lechwe antelope from a leopard. It’s gripping but I’m on the sidelines. And I wonder if that’s what Kyle meant about cycling being the ultimate safari: embracing the bush, feeling each moment, senses alive.

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