Here is a particular kind of attention you develop quickly when you are riding a mountain bike through Mashatu. It is not the attention of someone watching the road. It is the attention of someone watching everything else — the tree line, the dry riverbed to the left, the dust rising in the middle distance that may be wind or may be something considerably larger than you.

The Tuli Block sits in the far eastern corner of Botswana, wedged into the confluence of the Limpopo and Shashe rivers where Botswana, Zimbabwe and South Africa share a border so remote it barely feels real. Mashatu Game Reserve occupies a generous slice of it — 25,000 hectares of mopane woodland, ancient leadwood forest and wide sandstone plains crossed by game tracks that double, rather magnificently, as riding routes. Our guide had done this loop a hundred times and still scanned the bush with the same quality of attention he was teaching us. That, it turned out, was rather the point.

We stopped. The elephant regarded us with the patient indifference of something that has been here considerably longer than bicycles.

The riding itself is unlike anywhere else on the continent. The tracks are soft in places — elephant-softened, compressed by decades of enormous feet — and fast and hard in others where the calcrete breaks through the surface. There are no climbs to speak of, but the terrain keeps you honest: sandy crossings that swallow your front wheel if you hesitate, rocky sections through dry drainage lines, long flats through mopane scrub where the monotony is broken, without warning, by giraffe.

On day two we rounded a bend in the Majale riverbed and came upon a breeding herd of elephant at close enough range that stopping felt both necessary and slightly inadequate as a plan. We stopped. The elephant regarded us with the patient indifference of something that has been here considerably longer than bicycles. A calf wandered briefly in our direction, lost interest, and the herd moved on through the riverbed in the unhurried way they do everything. Nobody spoke for a while after that.

Evenings at Mashatu Lodge are the kind that make you reassess what you thought a sundowner meant. The deck faces the floodlit waterhole, and by the time the first gin arrives something is usually already drinking from it — kudu, warthog, the occasional leopard if the timing is right. You arrive back from the ride pleasantly tired, comfortably dusty, and entirely grateful that someone else has already sorted dinner.