The Road to Kasane, Part 2 (Pictures)

July 12th, Day 32:

Camping out had been a bit scary and I hadn't managed to get a great night of rest. Besides the constant fear of lions, it had been cold during the night and in my attempt to snuggle up with the fire I had gotten a bit too cozy and burned a sizable hole through my sleeping bag. But despite these problems we managed to pack up camp relatively quickly and hit the road early. Riding was different with a support vehicle. For one thing, we could finally get the film shots that we had always wanted. Jonathan (my brother) turned out to be a very enthusiastic cinematographer and spent literally hours each day driving along side us from every angle and getting all the shots with all types of scenic background that we could ever want. Then, when he got bored driving beside us, he would go scout up ahead the to look for good places to spent the night. It was a relatively uneventful for the first 20 miles or so, but we managed to stumble upon something big at one of our stops.
  Jonathan had pulled over to wait for us and had failed to notice that there was a huge bull elephant just behind several meters further down the road, hidden behind a tree. Eric and I however scoped it out while approaching him and anxiously tried to get his attention without disturbing the mammoth. We wanted to get Jonathan to get the camera rolling at the perfect angle to capture us riding past the elephant, but had to do it before the elephant moved away. In retrospect we should have thought more about our personal safety as elephants have a bad habit of charging people and vehicles that startle them (a local newspaper just had a story about some tourist getting severed by an elephant after it chased her down). However, we were so excited about the potential shot that we jumped the gun a bit and started riding towards the elephant a bit hastily. At the last second Jonathan managed to get a clip of me passing the best just as it bucked it enormous tusks at me and gave a huge roar. I veered out of the way and sprinted off into the distance with Eric and Jonathan close behind me. We managed to escape unharmed and with the an incredible shot, but were a bit tired so we stopped to rest in this little valley we saw at the bottom of the road.
 After setting our bicycle down and looking around we noticed a large object buried deep in the bush. Despite our fear of traveling away from the road and into the bush (there are lion, black mambas, etc.) we had to satisfy our curiosity. After a short hike we stumbled upon a most unexpected site; a large elephant corpse. The tusks had already been removed, which meant it may have been poachers but we couldn't conclude entirely. It was an eerily enchanting scene, and you could sense a sadness about the scene, but we couldn't stay long because it seemed like the elephant had died recently and there were sure to be large cats and hyenas in the area. We paid our respects to the elephant and left it, carrying on down the road towards our destination for the night.
  The final 30 miles were uneventful except for a huge forest fire that was lighting the sky for some distance. It was a beautiful sight, and we rode towards it until we reached the camp site that my brother had scoped out for us. We managed to get a good deal on these tiny little huts, set up our sleeping bags, and went to sleep in order to prepare to a 5am wake-up the next morning. It was sunrise footage time!

-Aaron