Just before we went off for a bike ride in Kruger National Park I met a man who spoke Elephant. Just as well, too.

We were on a game drive, parked at the side of a dusty track watching a vast range of animals browse the sweeping banks of the Olifants River. All very idyllic, until one large bull elephant took exception to us and made as if to charge.

At 40ft, we were nervous; at 30, and speeding up, we wondered why our guide didn’t start the engine – but at this point he leaned out of the window, cupped his hands to his mouth and made a strange hissing noise that filled the superheated air, bringing the running beast, quite weirdly, to a halt. The guide repeated the noise, more gently this time, and the creature backed away, reassured by whatever message he had picked up from our man’s linguistic cunning. I asked Charl Koen how he’d learnt the trick but he laughed and said he kept his ears open, that’s all. This was day one.

Now here we are in a scorched bush clearing, preparing to go cycling – which doesn’t sound sensible, does it? It’s a new experiment operating in just one of the 21 camps in this most prestigious of South Africa’s state game parks, and we’re all very excited. We click our gear-levers and wonder aloud whether lions will snap at our pedals like farmyard dogs do back home, ha ha.

The guides warn that if we do see a big cat the last thing we should do is cycle away – “It triggers their instinct to chase.” This cranks up the tension. Then they fix clunky Winchester .450 rifles to their crossbars, and with two guards in front, one behind, our small party sets off down a path flanked by mopani trees and scented acacia.

The strange thing is, Kruger is such a controlled place normally. Bikes are generally forbidden. There is a £35 fine if you step out of your car or just hang out of the window. Private night driving is banned and there’s another fine if you get back to camp after the 6pm curfew. Yet here we are, cycling through an area the size of Wales, feeling free as birds, and it doesn’t seem right at first. But the farther we go, the more right it seems.

I had joined a group of six cyclists touring the region with Explore, their journey having so far taken them across the Drakensberg mountains, through lush valleys and across huge, colourful plains – a trip I did by car, and they were experiencing partly by bike, with a back-up truck for when they got tired.

It had been, they said, an incredible journey. Yet this 21km cycle was clearly the ride they had looked forward to the most. And why not? We were in the bush, whizzing down a firebreak path, tyres crushing the spore of elephants, hippos, rhinos, all of us under orders of silence. There are 2,000 lion in Kruger, 1,000 leopard, 12,000 elephant, 25,000 buffalo, 5,000 crocodile – and we were in the middle.

It took a little while to realise that raw danger was not really the point of cycling, however. It was a thrill knowing we were protected by armed guards from heaven-knows-what. But the gentler pleasure emerging as the miles unwound was more satisfyingly subtle – an odd sense of privilege.

The going was easy, occasionally we pushed. Temperatures touched 35C, but the breeze of cycling was welcome. Brendan Pienaar, lead guide, stopped every so often to show us tracks of rhino, hippo, kudu. Early on, as we were bending over elephant spore, he said calmly, “There’s one behind us,” like a panto warning. And indeed there was: 200m, plodding our way.

Moments later, we rounded a bend and found a hippo on the path. Hippos kill more humans than any animal in Africa but only if you get on their wrong side. This one scuttled into the bush as we stood there, riveted, almost scared, but not quite.

And we needn’t have been, of course. They organise regular walking safaris in Kruger and elsewhere – I tried one later, tiptoeing past seven lions in three hours. So a bicycle is no more dangerous than sitting in a car next to an irritated Nellie, or strolling past a dozing pride. It feels different though. It feels free. It feels, as Brendan pointed out, “like an adventure”.

We ate a picnic by a river pool full of hippos as fish eagles flew in, as distant elephant rambled by, as the sun heated our saddles and burnt our necks, and it was fulfilling – comforting – to be a part of this scene. Brendan said: “To a certain extent people come on the bike trail to see game, but it is best to come just for the experience. To bike in the bush, to sense the smells, the sights the sounds. That’s the point.”

In a vehicle I had seen far more game because we covered more ground, but had not had this sense of involvement. When we finally climbed a hill and found the trailer so we could stick our bikes on the back and return to camp, there was a feeling that we had trumped our lazy game drives. For a while we had been part of the landscape, bumping into hippo, sweating in the heat, travelling as fast as lions, or almost. We didn’t speak elephant. But we did bikes.

Need to know

Nicholas Roe travelled with Explore (0870 3334001, www.explore.co.uk), on the 13-day Transvaal and Game Trails group cycling tour of South Africa and Swaziland. The cost, from £1,805pp, includes flights from Gatwick and ten nights’ B&B, guiding and mountain bike hire.

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