The Chronicles of Suntwe - Chapter 5: Throttle, Tusk, and Terror

Evenings in the bush carry a magic of their own. The Zambezi air cools just enough to take the edge off the day’s furnace, and the mopane trees glow in the low sun like they’ve been dipped in gold. This was my time. My ritual. When most people were settling in with a drink, I’d be strapping a kettlebell to my hand and heading for the gorge.

The Batoka Gorge is a place that humbles you. Its black cliffs drop steep and sudden to the river, the kind of descent that steals your breath long before you reach the bottom. My training there was simple on paper and brutal in reality……run down with a twenty-kilo kettlebell, grind out push-ups and lifts by the water, then haul it all back up. Repeat until there’s nothing left to give.

But it wasn’t about showing strength. The gorge doesn’t care how strong you are. Some days you conquer it. Some days it conquers you. That was the point. To meet that edge where body and will collide, to face the voice that says stop and keep moving anyway…….or admit defeat and come back to fight again another day.

It was never about being special. Anyone who steps into the gorge is handed the same truth…….pain, fatigue, silence, and the chance to find out who you really are when the earth itself is against you. That’s why I went back, again and again. Not just to build fitness, but to sharpen something deeper.

That night was no different. I set off on the dirt road, the Yamaha humming beneath me, dust curling in my wake. The bush was alive in its quiet way…….guinea fowl scattering, a lone buffalo stepping through the trees, the kind of everyday wonders you stop marvelling at only when you have forgotten what it means to be alive. My heart was calm. My mind was locked on the cliff. This was just another evening.

The Yamaha TW200.  Ugly as sin. Unstoppable as hell.

Until the corner.

I leaned into the blind bend, and everything changed. Six elephants, right there in front of me. A moving barricade of hide and tusk, their ears flicking, their steps heavy enough to shake the ground. For a split second, my heart didn’t just sink………it stopped.

I hit the brakes with everything I had. The front tyre locked, the rear wheel lifted, and suddenly the Yamaha wasn’t a bike anymore but a catapult. It bucked me like a wild horse, launching me forward into the herd.

Time fractured.

The air caught me, and everything slowed to a crawl. Dust rose in lazy spirals, golden in the dying light. My arms stretched out in a grotesque parody of Superman, body weightless, suspended in that dreamlike stillness where the world gives you just enough time to understand how bad it’s about to be. I remember thinking with absurd clarity…….. this is going to hurt. This could be the end. I am royally fucked.

And then the ground slammed back into me. Hard. The impact ripped the air from my chest, leaving me hollow and gasping. I saw elephant legs in flashes…….tree trunks in motion, impossibly close. The earth shook with their weight.

Instinct didn’t wait for thought. I rolled, scrambled upright, and ran. My legs weren’t mine anymore they belonged to survival. I didn’t dare look back. I was convinced they were on me, tusks ready to drive me into the dirt. My body moved like a passenger in its own machine, blind with adrenaline, lungs burning, heart hammering.

This was the moment everything changed.

Fifty metres. That’s all I made before my chest gave out. I collapsed in the dust, wheezing, throat raw, fighting for air that wouldn’t come. Winded, broken, alive.

Behind me, the herd turned their attention to the bike. Not with rage, as I’d expected, but with curiosity. They circled it, prodded it with trunks, nudged it around like a strange new animal that had wandered too far into their path. The Yamaha had become my decoy, my sacrifice. They left it with little more than scratches, as though it had never been worth the trouble in the first place.

I just lay there, chest heaving, dust on my tongue, watching them disappear into the trees. Alive by a margin so thin it could be measured in heartbeats.

Reflection

The gorge had been waiting for me that night, but I never made it. My ritual, my hunger to suffer and grow…….none of it mattered when the bush decided otherwise. Nature doesn’t bend to your plans. It doesn’t care about kettlebells or discipline or how many times you’ve proven yourself. It reminds you, brutally, that you are small.

What stays with me is that frozen moment in the air…..suspended between life and death, when time slows and clarity cuts sharper than fear. I’ve had too many of those moments. And each time I walk away, I wonder…….how many second chances can one man really get?

The bush doesn’t answer. It just gives you breath again. And if you’re wise, you use it.

That night, I walked away coughing, wheezing, dust in my lungs, life still in my chest. And I understood something simple……..

sometimes survival is the only victory…….and it’s enough.