Big Five Mountain Biking in Mashatu, Botswana Africa Travel

Botswana is a helluva dry place. Especially in the vicinity of the Pont Drift border post, where Augustine, the poker-faced immigration official, exhibits a sense of humour pegged just this side of deadpan.

Work your way through his droll repartee and step beyond the metal boom to enter a world of arid plains and sandy river beds where dust devils chase their tails amongst stands of straggly scotia and gnarly knob-thorn trees.

The rainy season is about two months off, but Murphy must have joined forces with the weather gods, because it starts pissing down as soon as we set foot on the open-topped game drive vehicles. But then, who's going to grumble about a few drops of rain when you're en route to Mashatu Game Reserve to ride like the wind on savanna plains stretching further than an eagle can fly in a day?

Not me anyway; I close my eyes and let the fat drops pelt me in the face as we negotiate the jolt and jerk of the bumpy track winding beyond the Limpopo River (not great or green or greasy during the dry season) and into this 26 000 hectare private reserve brushing up against the southern flank of Zimbabwe.

Home to the legendary relic herds of Shashe which once roamed the vast Limpopo catchment, Mashatu is now home to Africa's largest elephant population on private land. Well over 700 of these lumbering giants currently share this section of the Tuli Block with lion, leopard, cheetah, spotted hyena, giraffe, eland, wildebeest, kudu and other mammals (44 species in all), plus a dazzling array of birds and a mean selection of reptiles.

One of only a handful of big five reserves to offer mountainbiking as an adventure option, Mashatu is a must-do for all true fat tyre freaks and regularly lures off-road cyclists from the furthest corners of the globe. And they all come here with one main mission in mind: to face off to an elephant across the handlebars.

As you can imagine, this is not just a normal ride in the park. Good news then is that you will be accompanied by two rather unusual characters as you head out from the luxury tented camp, your base during your first night in the bush. Riding shotgun at the front of the pack is

Actor Lesomo, the man with the Big Gun (a .375 Magnum that should theoretically knock a charging bull elephant back on its haunches). Actor is a Tuli man through and through; he has grown up in a village not far away from here and has been working as a ranger at Mashatu for more than ten years. He is also the survivor of a malevolent bite inflicted by a Mozambican spitting cobra and the scars along his calf bear testimony to numerous skin grafts and nearly four months in hospital.

Bringing up the rear of the field is Grant Hall, the reserve's resident mountainbiking archaeologist and a constant source of down-to-earth banter, scientific tree names and semi-useful information. And then there is me and the 180 Degrees Adventure crew (Kirsty, Brenton and Louise); they are here on an educational and I have been invited to write a story on the Mashatu mountainbiking experience.

Our first ride, a short and sweet 12km jaunt, is very much about familiarising ourselves with the terrain and we're not really expecting to run into our pachyderm pals just yet, but the safety briefing comes as part of the deal. There are only a few basic rules you have to keep to: (1) animals, especially the big buggers, always have right of way; (2) make sure you have fortified your tyres with both tyre liners and green slime, as the thorns here take no prisoners; (3) slap on the sunscreen and (4) drink loads of water.

Packs and warm clothing get dumped on the back-up vehicle and we crank out of camp, through a dry gulch and along a snappy little jeep track dog-legging through ragged stands of winter mopane veldt.

And this is where a certain saddle-billed stork saves our bacon. It flies up as we are about to drop down into a dense little kloof, settling in a tree to pose as we stop and admire it through our binocs. Just about then that little patch of bush we were heading into starts to shimmy and shake as a family of elephant with young calves break cover, snapping branches while purposefully striding onto the road.

I'm scrabbling for my camera, but Actor will have none of it. He goes into Hoarse Whisperer mode, spurring us on like a manic mother hen while muttering 'Move! Move!' under his breath and fondling the breech of his Big Gun. My mountainbike, which has been rather zippy up to now, suddenly feels as if I'm biking through a knee-deep marsh and I have visions of tusks aimed at the small of my back as I crank away from danger like a maniac.

Back on high ground, we turn and look back to see the herd slowly lumbering away into the undergrowth, paying scant attention to our yellow-bellied chicken run.

Fully energized and wide awake, we continue our ride along a game singletrack dotted with hubcap-sized elephant prints, now scanning every clump of bush for the next ambush. The terrain is not overly technical and we keep to a leisurely pace, winding in between stunted mopane, false thorn and stink shepherd's trees.