Unpacked, Five Questions: In Botswana, Tracking Lions and Elephants—by Bike

In honor of our latest issue of Afar magazine, which focuses on epic trips—the kind of adventures that change your world—we’re hearing from the writers and photographers who chronicled and captured those trips.

In the third episode of the series, host and Afar executive editor Katherine LaGrave speaks with Afar contributor Chris Colin about his first safari — a family trip through Botswana that mixed biking, Land Cruisers, salt pans, and intimate wildlife encounters.

Chris describes the sensory moments that changed how he pays attention, the guides who opened the landscape to his family, and the small-scale wonders (including an antlion and a near-miss with a cobra) that stayed with him long after the trip.

Transcript

Katherine: Welcome to Unpacked: Five Questions, a podcast that takes you behind the scenes of one great travel story. I’m Katherine LaGrave, executive editor at Afar. I’m pretty lucky: I get to brainstorm, assign, and edit features for our print magazine, and in our latest issue, we published a series of stories focused on epic trips. You know, the kind of trips that push you outside your physical and mental comfort zones. The challenging, thrilling, complicated ones. For the next four weeks on Unpacked: Five Questions, I’ll be interviewing the writers and photographers who took and shared these trips to understand what it was like, the moments they’re still thinking about, and what they wish they’d known before their trip.

Afar contributing writer Chris Colin is one of those people. Chris has covered everything from an obscure Dutch art movement to a different, more responsible way to travel to Hawai‘i. Each of Chris’s stories is deep and delightful and makes me think differently about the world. The one you’ll hear about shortly, in which Chris and his family explore Botswana by bike and a few other modes of transportation, is no exception.

Welcome, Chris. So nice to be chatting with you again.

Chris: Thank you for having me. Nice to see you.

Katherine: So you’ve never been on safari before this trip? Why Botswana?

Chris: True. I’ve never been on safari. Had never been anywhere in Africa. Botswana is a place that you keep hearing about. If you’re a newbie like me and you say you want to go see animals, you want to see an interesting place. You want to not be swarmed by safari vehicles, and you just want to be somewhere beautiful.

Katherine: Those all sound like good reasons. And you start the story on a bike. What was it like to experience landscapes that way? Because when I think of safari, and admittedly, when you and I talked about the story, right, it’s like from a Land Cruiser is most common as I understood it. And then I read your pitch and was really intrigued.

Chris: Well, that was the other reason why Botswana is because I heard about this thing that’s really being done basically by one guy. His name is Kyle and he’s starting this Botswana-by-bike safari, which when I first read that, I thought maybe I’d misunderstood. It seemed crazy. It flew in the face of everything I knew about animals and people on that continent. But yeah, it’s a new thing. He’s been doing it on his own for years. He’s from Botswana, he grew up there, he’s very comfortable in the bush, and his feeling was, if you want to get to know the place, if you want to have a really intimate experience with the ecosystems there, you got to get out of the Land Cruiser. You’ve got to be out there, you know, face to face with the flora and fauna.

Katherine: And so take me through a typical experience or a few hours on a bike and what that was like for you and your family.

Chris: OK. Well, the experience starts long before I get on the bike. I have to be nervous about being on the bike. I had to put in many days of fretting about whether or not we were going to get eaten or trampled or gored, and none of those things happened. We didn’t come close. It was totally safe. But yeah, that was really the first phase—processing my own anxieties about that. And then it was all very easy. Botswana is a flat country and everywhere we went there was a support vehicle, always within a few miles. So if things ever required, you know, us to get on a truck, it was there.

But yeah, we were often on elephant trails. We were sometimes on old sort of overgrown dirt roads, and we would just start pedaling with Kyle in the lead. And it was very peaceful, and it was just such a different experience than being in a Land Cruiser, which I also did and which was wonderful. But, you know, you’re smelling everything, you’re hearing things, and very, very, very often you’re seeing amazing things. I mean, we were always late getting wherever we were supposed to be for lunch or whatever, because we had to keep stopping and looking at, you know, this weird bird doing this weird thing or this weird insect or a giraffe or a zebra. Zebra. Sorry, zebra.

Katherine: And whatever you want.

Chris: Yeah.

Katherine: Yeah. Well, I think there’s a beautiful line in the story about something to the effect of, like, earning PhDs in tracking because of this, that you’re always stopping, hopping on and hopping off the bike and looking at things. And there are so many incredible wildlife moments in the story, so many wildlife moments that you experience that probably didn’t make it into the story. I’m curious, what’s one that you think about the most?

Chris: This is—I’m sure you’re not supposed to say this when you’re asked about safari in Botswana. We saw some extremely charismatic megafauna, but one of the most amazing things we saw was the antlion, which is a kind of insect.

Katherine: I thought it was a different type of lion that I’d never heard of. No, I’m very sorry. No, no, let’s hear about it. I’m interested.

Chris: So we’re riding along, and we pull up next to the base of a tree, and it’s kind of. . . ..The ground is pretty sandy in these parts. And there is a sort of, um, a pit dug in the sand like a cone-shaped pit. And we didn’t think anything of it. But our guide, Kyle, said, this is an antlion trap. So this incredible insect lives below the sand, so it’s buried and it digs this pit. And when an ant haplessly wanders in and starts walking around on the sand, it starts slipping down this pit. If you’ve seen Return of the Jedi, there’s a scene. This will remind you of where someone gets eaten by a much bigger creature. So we sat there and we watched it happen. It was real. It was not staged. This real, genuine ant wandered into this trap, and this predator insect grabbed it by its little ant legs and started flinging it around violently until it was, um, I don’t know, unconscious—ants go unconscious—and then pulled it down under and ate it. And it was as gruesome and as exciting as any other kill you could have seen in Botswana.

Katherine: Yeah, I think when we think about those moments, kills or stalkings or sightings, we think of them on such a grand scale with these giant animals. But scale is also something that or smallness, I’ll say, that you turn over as a question in the story. There’s a beautiful moment in the salt pans where you’re lying down, and I really enjoyed that because I could feel it. Right. You’re lying on your back feeling very small. And then there’s just this roar that comes across the landscape, I guess.

Chris: Yeah, yeah. The landscape—you can use that loosely because there’s really nothing on the land. But yeah, we were lying in the middle of nowhere. These salt pans are vast. They’re kind of lunar. They’re empty. They’re sort of hauntingly beautiful. And we were lying down there at around dusk, and this was a little thing that our guide, Kyle, had us do. Just take a minute. You’re pretty busy on a safari looking at things and checking things out. Just take a minute to go experience this quiet and this nothingness. And we were just lying on our backs under this huge African sky. And it really was amazing. It was the stillest I had been in a long time. And then, yeah, all of a sudden there was a roar. It was not an antlion, it was an actual lion. And we weren’t scared. You know, it was one of many times where we realized, OK, we’re in their country. We can make a cautious decision here and get up off of the salt pan and come closer to the Land Cruiser. And that’s what we did. But I think at that point the lions were probably a kilometer or two away. They were not about to pounce on us.

Katherine: I can just imagine what an incredible feeling. We’ve spoken a little bit already about Kyle, and you had some other guides, Ali, Prince, and you’re also traveling with your family. And I’m curious, big question: how some of the people on the trip opened up the experiences for you?

Chris: Oh my God, the folks we met there, the guides, Ali, Prince, Kyle, they were wonderful. And you know, if you’re a kid on a trip like this, it’s exciting, of course, but it can also be, I imagine, overwhelming for some kids or tiring or maybe you get bored sometimes. And those are all the realities of traveling with kids. And these guys—they happened to all be guys—were just lovely. They were funny, they were kind, and they were patient. But mainly they were as fascinated by the landscape and by the animals as we were. And that was really contagious. It was so fun to just, you know, be driving somewhere with this guy Ali, for example, and he just had to pull over. He just felt like there was a jaguar somewhere. He had this instinct and he’d been doing it for years, and he just really wanted to see if this one clump of trees had a jaguar, or if this other clump had some kind of predator, because this bird was squawking an alarm call in the branches. And that signaled maybe something interesting was about to happen. So he would just follow his own instincts. And that was contagious. And yes, there was a giant snake there, by the way. And yes, there was a jaguar there.

Katherine: That was so fun in the story because you see him just— or read him—just keep doing it. And that excitement comes through. What do you wish you’d known before this trip? I’m thinking of the action step and advice for travelers who might want to follow in your footsteps.

Chris: Oh, that’s an interesting question. I feel like this is true for this trip and probably every other trip everywhere, but don’t overschedule yourself. Leave yourself time in each spot to just hang out a little bit, partly to rest and partly just to get to know it a little bit. We were in these wonderful places and we were not rushing too much, and that was part of the magic. And we really did get a sense of, you know, in a very small traveler way, we still got a sense of where we were rather than just being, you know, one more box to check before we bounced off to the next location. So, yes, I would say the first thing is just put in a little time there and be kind of mellow in your itinerary building, get out of the car, get on the bike if that’s an option. And finally, I think reading your history. I don’t mean to sound like a teacher here, but you know, the more we learned about the history of Botswana, the more we learned about sort of where we were geologically, the more interesting it was to see these ecosystems unfolding in front of us.

Katherine: And so the story is in our Epic Trips issue. What makes it epic to you?

Chris: That’s a tough question. Something happens to you in this part of the world that I’m still struggling to put a finger on. I can tell you that everyone else I’ve talked to who has been there says something similar, that there’s a pace, there’s a feel, there’s an energy. There is, I don’t know, am I allowed to say vibe? Um . . .

Katherine: Was. Yeah, we’ll bleep it out.

Chris: Thank you. It was just unlike anywhere I’d ever been. Of course that didn’t surprise me. But it just felt like, really lucky to be in this place that operates apart from so many of the things that we’ve come to accept as part of everyday life elsewhere.

Katherine: And you write a little bit about that in the end of the story. So I won’t take away from that. But so your first safari—I’ve actually never been on safari, and I think I have an idea of what it’ll be like, but I’m so curious how your expectations, if you let yourself have any, how they differed from the reality.

Chris: Yeah. You know, I wasn’t sure if it would remain interesting all those days. There was a part of me that worried, OK, maybe eventually we will get sick of seeing these amazing, majestic elephants. You know, maybe after a while you’re like, all right, I got it. They’re big and they’re old-looking or whatever. But there is—this is part of what I was trying to get at earlier—there is something that happens there that’s almost like a magic spell. We would be watching these elephants very close to us. We would be watching lions, wild dogs, of which there are very few left on the planet. And we could look at these creatures for a long, long time, which seems like kind of a basic thing. But when you think about your normal life, my normal life unfolds in 30-second increments. That’s about what my attention span is for a lot of what I do. And here we were, just staring at these animals who were sometimes doing fascinating things. Other times they were just being themselves. And it was just, you know, they have their own cadence and pace and it was just fine to sit and watch them for a long time and just appreciate how different they were from us and how beautiful they were and how they lived by their own logic and wisdom. That’s very different from ours. And you’re just sort of—it’s a lucky little keyhole into this whole other reality.

Katherine: It’s a different way of paying attention, for sure. It sounds like. And in the same way that you said the guides were energetic and enthusiastic about opening up some of those experiences for you, I can imagine traveling with your family as a parent, that it’s exciting to experience these things for yourself, but also to watch your kids in such new environments.

Chris: Oh yeah, a lot of traveling with kids is just watching them do whatever you’re also doing and trying not to sort of freight it with too much expectation or whatever. But yeah, I mean, the kids were enthralled. They were as hooked and fascinated as we were. It was really neat to see the things that grabbed them.

Katherine: OK, last question. We talked about the antlion already, but what’s a moment that didn’t make it into the story?

Chris: OK, I think I mentioned this in passing, but I’m going to try and get a little ring, a little more life out of it because it was significant to me. This is not R-rated. This is PG-13. But I went to go pee on a bush. As happens in life. We were in the middle of nowhere and all of a sudden I see a little movement in the bush, and it’s distinctly slithering movement. And I backed up as one would, and it was a massive, massive cobra, you know, a foot from me just slithering around in there up to that point. So I, of course, dutifully called Kyle our guide over, and he’d been kind of blasé about a lot of these amazing animals we’d been seeing, but he was impressed. He agreed that this was impressive and actually worth backing up a little bit. He had been kind of casual about the danger. He felt like it wasn’t nearly as scary as outsiders think in general to be there. But this massive cobra, he was like, all right, correct. We should back up a little bit. So I just want credit for almost peeing on a cobra.

Katherine: Yes, I think that is worth credit. OK, cool. Thanks, Chris.

Chris: Thanks. Nice talking to you.

Katherine: Listener, thank you for tuning in to this special Epic Trips episode of Unpacked: Five Questions. In the show notes, you’ll find a link to Chris’s story and to his social media handles.

Join me next Wednesday for another episode that takes you behind the scenes with our award-winning features writers. I’ll be speaking with Ryan Knighton, who is blind and who traveled to Peru to scale Machu Picchu and to explore the Amazon on his first group tour.

Ready for more interviews with travel writers? Visit Afar.com. Be sure to follow us on Instagram and TikTok— We are @AfarMedia. If you enjoyed today’s exploration, I hope you’ll come back for more great travel stories. Subscribing always makes that easy. And be sure to rate and review the show on your favorite podcast platform. It helps other travelers find it.

This has been Unpacked: Five Questions, a production of Afar Media. The podcast is produced by Aislyn Greene, Nikki Galteland, and Katherine LaGrave. This podcast is part of Airwave Media Podcast Network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to its other fine shows like Culture Kids and The Explorers Podcast.