In Botswana, Tracking Lions and Elephants—By Bike

An hour into the bush and a dung beetle had already pushed its namesake orb across our path. From a purple-pod terminalia tree a crimson-breasted shrike pontificated at us. A small croc in a muddy pond eyed us crossly. (Or sweetly? Hard to read those guys.) We reached the dry riverbed around noon.

For 15 minutes we traveled along its sun-bleached bank. Then our guide, Kyle MacIntyre, held up a hand.

“Notice anything?” he whispered. He gestured toward a lagoon ahead.

We scanned. No, nothing. Unless—

Two dark forms in the water. I began nudging my family backward.

“It’s OK,” MacIntyre said. “If we move very slowly, no sudden movements, we can get closer.”

We crept through scrub, stopped when the forms came into focus: ears wriggling, skin like wet granite, inestimable blubber.

An ominous gurgle came. Suddenly 10 more heads surfaced, every bulging eye on us.

If you’re a hippopotamus in southern Africa, there’s a decent chance you’ve seen people on safari. But not people like us: For the next few days, mine would allegedly be the first family ever to explore these parts by bicycle. With our two teens—Casper and Cora—my wife Amy and I would travel from tented camp to tented camp, making our way from the dusty frontier town of Maun to the Makgadikgadi Pans, the vast, cracked remnant of an ancient lake that once covered 30,000 square miles. From there we’d catch a flight for the watery labyrinth of the Okavango Delta, where we’d trade bikes for open-air trucks and dugout canoes.

Photos by Michelle Heimerman

Now, protected only by cycling shorts and gall, staring down 40,000 cumulative pounds of one of Africa’s deadliest species, I found myself scrutinizing the bike part of our plan.

Enough with the suspense: I am not writing this from inside a hippo. MacIntyre assessed the hulking animals’ vibe and deemed them a nonthreat. Which freed us to watch them snort and jostle, and to marvel at the sheer convergence of our otherwise separate universes. I once saw the actor Willem Dafoe in New York City and it was like that—except better, because Willem Dafoe probably can’t eat 88 pounds of grass a day or distinguish friends from rivals by smelling their dung.

Photo by Michelle Heimerman

If I sound like a wildlife novice, it’s because I am. We are wander-around-cities people, my family and I. But these last couple years had flipped a switch in us. We needed a break from humanity—our idiotic politics, our unsustainable pace, our stupid algorithms.

Humbling ourselves before nature seemed right, and Botswana features the most humbling nature around: the largest herd of elephants on the continent, plus a full 40 percent of the land protected as national parks, game reserves, or wildlife management areas. Parentally, we thought it might be good to stop muttering about Where Things Are Heading and instead appreciate some of what exists presently.

Hours after the hippo encounter, we arrived at Meno a Kwena, an elegant camp in northern Botswana, perched above the snaking Boteti River. Immediately a staff member ushered us past the open-air kitchen and firepit, down to the water—just as dozens of zebras and elephants were gathering for a drink. The zebras pranced, all frisky energy; the elephants, lumbering and mournful, trailed behind with their ancient thoughts.

Photos by Michelle Heimerman

My disorientation returned. These animals fill our books and screens and toy chests from infancy, and for that feel existentially familiar. But of course, they’re also deeply other—the cultural imagination seizes on these creatures because they’re rare. And now, here they were, defying something fundamental, exploding from concept into reality. The elephants were more solemn and inward-looking than we are typically shown, the zebras startlingly intricate and finely drawn. I vowed never to casually sketch either again.

At dinner, under blankets and a spatter of stars, we grilled our guide MacIntyre about his life in this world. Tall, affable, ready with a wink, he’s the sort who can orate entertainingly about anything, because he probably did that thing at some point, likely with a machete in his teeth. The son of renowned guides, he grew up in a different era of Botswana and of safari itself. MacIntyre’s emphasis now: conservation and respect.

Those aren’t just nice ideas. Over the past three decades, Botswana has doubled down on sustainable tourism as an engine of growth, in an economy historically dominated by diamonds and beef. Noting the crowds at other safari destinations, the government carved out a high-cost, low-volume approach. Capacity at safari lodges is limited, as is access to parks and concessions; in return those lodges are luxurious, and the ecosystems around them pristine.

Photos by Michelle Heimerman

Against this backdrop, MacIntyre has hung his bicycle-shaped shingle. As a guide for the safari outfitter Natural Selection, he’s spent the last few years exploring old elephant trails—paths that develop over time due to animal use—that could double as bike lanes. His routes needed to hit points of interest while also giving the animals a wide berth where appropriate. Traveling by bicycle requires a profoundly sensitive understanding of the wildlife all around, he contends: being attuned to the bush, rather than guns or radios, is what keeps us safe.

The result of his project is a look at another side of Botswana. Riders experience a landscape they’d merely glimpse—not feel—from a Land Cruiser: the warm scent of wild sage; an acacia full of buffalo weavers and pied babblers; warthog holes to peer right into. In wide-open areas, MacIntyre let Casper speed ahead. In bushier parts—lurkier parts—we formed a watchful phalanx behind our leader. We were forever late reaching our next destination, because we were busy earning PhDs in tracking. Predator prints not yet topped with insect prints were recent. Older male lions leave a deeper heel impression. The mopane branches littering our path? Discarded elephant snacks, the bush’s version of Cheetos bags along a highway.

I’d been genuinely concerned that our happy biking scheme would end gruesomely. Maybe fear is our default lens on wildness—a leftover instinct that once kept us uneaten. And maybe in the West’s long tradition of exoticizing Africa, we’ve come to exaggerate the risks of the continent. But actually being here, that stuff melts away. In their place, more interesting preoccupations materialize: the architecture of the food chain, the sheer logistics of a giraffe. Frankly we were too fascinated to be scared, even when I almost peed on a cobra hiding in a thorn bush.

That afternoon we arrived at Camp Kalahari, a serene outpost at the edge of the Makgadikgadi Pans, some 100 miles southeast of Maun, where we had begun our journey. Camp Kalahari delivers the classic safari aesthetic: vintage trunks, Persian rugs, canvas tents under acacia trees. We thumbed through worn books, sipped tea, and then, a little before dusk, climbed into a Land Cruiser and rattled a few miles out to the salt pans.

There is nothing like nothingness. The earth stretched flat in every direction, almost to the horizon—a pale, cracked crust, vaguely lunar. No trees, no hills, not even a tuft of grass. A guide from the camp, Prince Tumisang Mugibelo, had joined us, and set a table with drinks. We raised our glasses to the silence, and the nearly setting sun. Then MacIntyre gave the order: Walk out onto the pans and lie down far from each other and experience solitude.

We fanned out, walking until we were all a couple hundred yards apart. That old bell trilled in my head: Predator country! Kids are far away! But I also trusted MacIntyre. The crust pressed into my spine, the enormous sky vaulting overhead. The silence pressed in. A minute passed, five minutes passed. My human thoughts dimmed, my animal senses sharpened. I became a vessel for wind and smell and sound. Then a deep, unmistakable roar of a lion rolled across the flatness. MacIntyre called us in.

Photo by Michelle Heimerman

We were getting ready to get back in the truck when Mugibelo cleared his throat. For the next 10 minutes, standing in the pale moonlight, he delivered one of those soliloquies you encounter only a few times in your life: a sweeping disquisition on his beloved country.

Many visitors, he began, go home thrilled by what they find here—the elephants, lions, and giraffes. “But those same things are in Zimbabwe, in South Africa. What makes Botswana unique?”

So he told us.

“We gained our full independence in 1966 from the British, and at that time we were the second-poorest nation in the world,” he said. The very next year, Botswana discovered diamonds; the country transformed. Life expectancy shot up, literacy shot up. The nation has been a democracy ever since. “And we have a bright future ahead of us,” he said.

From there he talked about racial harmony, and humane refugee policies, and solar power. As the moon rose, Mugibelo gestured out to the salt pans behind us.

This area was once the floor of a giant lake, he said, surrounded by forest. It was here that early humans lived, some researchers propose—until the rainfall and climate shifted and they began walking outward, becoming what we are now.

“So in a sense,” he said, “you’re back home. It’s been a long time, but you’re finally here.”

Photos by Michelle Heimerman

The next morning, MacIntyre led us to a different spot on the pans—bleached and still, seemingly lifeless, until we heard a stream of high-pitched squeaks. Wurwurwur!

Looking closer, we found the source: a large colony of meerkats, that impossibly cute variety of mongoose who stand at butler-like attention, perpetually scanning for predators. A dozen babies were begging their parents for breakfast.

“Lie down near them,” MacIntyre said. We did, and one by one, the meerkats began inching closer—and then scampering right up our bodies for a better vista. At first I feared they’d been tamed. In fact, they’d merely been habituated, the way a bird learns to ignore a rhino. We weren’t food or threat, just a handy step stool.

That afternoon, Mugibelo told me that the meerkats aren’t just adorable. They are proof that safaris can evolve: The cuteness of these creatures draws travelers to Natural Selection camps; the revenue helps relocate cattle farms; fewer cattle means fewer lions are shot; lion numbers in this area have risen. It was part of a larger story—the rebound of elephant numbers, a renewed war on poachers. Done right, tourism becomes not just an observer of ecosystems but part of their repair.

Photo by Michelle Heimerman

More evidence of this is found in the village of Seronga, in northwest Botswana. For years, children here had to walk through elephant corridors en route to school, sometimes with tragic results. (This, in turn, lowered sympathy for the animals among locals.) In 2020, Natural Selection helped sponsor a bus service to provide safe transport for the kids and anyone else needing it. One morning, we saw the so-called Elephant Express pick up more than a dozen people along a dirt road. It was a solution not of conquest but coexistence—a glimpse of what humans can do when we decide not to be the problem.

Warthogs on the runway! On day five of our expedition, we watched a small plane abort its landing at an airstrip, circle around, and then slow to stop and pick us up after the animals had moved away. Up we bounced into the sky, where for the next half hour we observed parched brown give way to electric green, and noted a density of megafauna that would make cycling impossible. Even from the plane the Okavango Delta was astonishing.

The Okavango is not your classic delta. Every year a pulse of water sloshes into northern Botswana from Angola, fanning across more than 6,000 square miles but never leading to an ocean—it pours into the country and stops, creating a dreamlike inland floodplain all its own: channels, wild grasses, hippo trails carving their way to islands that began with a termite mound, which summoned hungry elephants, whose dung contained seeds for trees.

Photos by Michelle Heimerman

We touched down in a clearing, where a guide named Ali Ntwayagae was waiting to drive us a couple hours to Mbamba, a plush tented camp in a private concession that opened in April 2025. We were heading west, or maybe east, possibly south, when Ntwayagae’s eyes shot to a cluster of small trees. He pulled over and we saw it: a sleek leopard, slinking through brush for an unsuspecting spur fowl.

The cat moved in utter silence, sometimes freezing for minutes at a time. We froze too. She was up against not just her quarry, but time itself. Any minute the bush squirrels above would sound the alarm. She took another step, ears flat. Nobody breathed. Then it came: a warning call from a branch above. The jig was up. She’d likely been hunting for hours. She sprawled on her side and closed her eyes.

Photo by Michelle Heimerman

We missed the bikes—we’d been spoiled by that unmediated immersion in the bush. But over the next three days, we had staggering encounters with the full safari canon. Zebras, ostriches, baboons, impalas, elephants, crocodiles, elephants whose tails had been eaten by crocodiles. On one of our drives, Ntwayagae pointed out a patch of earth containing nothing but two giraffes’ hooves.

“If you want to commit a murder, do it here,” he said. “The hyenas eat all the bones, just leave hooves.”

Another morning, Ntwayagae hurried us into the Land Cruiser and drove east from camp about 10 minutes. He didn’t want to get our hopes up, but . . . he trailed off, cut the engine. There, in a patch of sun, lay half a dozen African wild dogs, piled atop one another like puppies. The continent’s most endangered predators might also be the most beautiful, their coats a mottled patchwork of gold and black. For 15 minutes we watched in silence, wondering if we’d witness a hunt. Where lions kill quickly, wild dogs devour their prey alive, one bite at a time. Even the most hardened bush guides I met winced when describing the end of an impala or a kudu or a springbok. We were thankful, in a way, not to witness it.

Photos by Michelle Heimerman

Our final day, driving to the airstrip, Ntwayagae pulled over one last time. He gestured to a patch of dry grass. In it lay a massive white tusk. The elephant, he guessed, had died months earlier. He turned off the car and we climbed out. One by one, we took turns lifting the object. It was far heavier than it looked, like lead, and we were absorbing the burden elephants bear when my wife Amy went to hoist the tusk. She was briefly triumphant, and then it slipped. We all heard the crunch and saw the blood on the ivory. It had landed on her nose.

For the rest of the ride, she laughed through tissues. All that worrying about being mauled by a lion, perforated by a hippo—and it was a dead elephant that got her. We bumped along toward the clearing in the trees and our journey back to the domain of humans and their absurdities. At home in California, life’s clamor soon resumed: work, errands, headlines. But something seems to have stayed with us—a rearranged sense of scale, or maybe our place in it. I like knowing that the wild dogs aren’t thinking at all about us, just their next meal.

Photo by Michelle Heimerman

How to Take This Trip

Contributing writer Chris Colin’s eight-day Botswana itinerary was put together by Teresa Sullivan, cofounder of Mango African Safaris, who specializes in family travel. The trip featured a Natural Selection cycling safari into the Makgadikgadi Pans and exploring the Okavango Delta. From $2,444 per person, per day.