Holy shit, is that a honey badger?

Something dark and squat was racing ahead of us across the scrubby savannah, darting in and out of our headlights as we bounced over bushes and rocks in fevered pursuit, the truck lurching up and down violently as I struggled to take the world’s worst photo of, possibly, a honey badger.

I’d spent the day telling honey badger stories, as we rolled along and startled waterbucks and hartebeests and the occasional Abyssinian Roller. About how honey badgers had been my favorite animal ever since I was a kid, when I’d seen a bit of a nature documentary starring this bizarre character, the camera following dutifully as he bopped along the scrub with his little bird friend, who alerted him to the presence of bee hives, which he then dove into headfirst with the gusto of an animal who knows bee stings can’t pierce his thick skin and possibly isn’t aware that he can die at all.

As a kid I immediately burst out laughing at the honey badger’s swaggering gait, his little grunts, and the way he absolutely, completely and fully had no sense whatsoever of his size or limitations. Fight a lion? Sure, why not? What’s the worst that could happen? Honey badgers are one of the only animals that lions are actually afraid of, because even if you trap a honey badger in your jaws, his skin is so loose he can turn all the way around inside his own skin and bite you right on the face for being dumb enough to mess with a honey badger.

African farmers annoyed by honey badgers terrorizing their livestock have tried shooting them with shotguns, only to find that the pellets didn’t even penetrate the badger’s preposterously thick skin. Honey badgers often fight and eat cobras, because hey, YOLO. If the cobra manages to land a venomous death blow that somehow makes it through the badger’s skin, the badger simply lies down, takes a nap, and gets back up in a few hours like nothing happened.

But my favorite badger story of all was the tale of an African man who was running a sanctuary for maladjusted animals. A farmer brought him a honey badger that he’d captured but wasn’t sure how to kill, and the sanctuary dude was like sure, what’s the worst that could happen?

He named the badger Stoffel. And Stoffel promptly broke out of his pen, broke INTO the nearby lion pen, and threw down with the lions. The sanctuary dude built a better pen, which the honey badger promptly broke out of so he could attack the lions again. The dude brought in a female honey badger, thinking this would distract Stoffel from his obsession with kicking lion ass. Instead Stoffel taught his new girlfriend how to stand on his shoulders, pick the lock of their cage, and both escape to go attack the lions again.

The dude built a concrete badger pen. Stoffel dug up all the rocks from the soil, stacked them up in one corner, climbed out of the pen and went looking for the lions. The dude took out all the rocks. The badger knocked down a tree in the pen and used it to climb out again. The dude took out all the trees. What’cha gonna do now, smartass?

Then one of the caretakers accidentally left a rake in the pen, which Stoffel dragged to one corner of the pen, propped it against the wall, and used it to tightrope walk up out of the pen. The badger promptly broke into the dude’s house and tried to burrow under his bedroom door in the middle of the night to give him a talking to. Failing at this, Stoffel figured out how to open the fridge, ate several pounds of bacon, pissed on the floor and left.

I was almost sad to find out earlier that day that there were honey badgers in the national park we were visiting in Chad, because it was almost certain to just be a tease. What were the chances we were going to stumble across one during the one day we had left? Not very good.

But now, something was scurrying through the brush in a swaggering trot, as we bashed through ditches and over logs racing behind him. Our headlights bounced up into the trees as we crashed over some kind of thorny shrub that I think our driver ran over on purpose, out of some kind of long-held malice. As our truck angled back down, the headlights flashed across our mysterious stranger just as he looked back over his shoulder at us. His reflective eyes lit up eerily in the gloom and in that moment I knew: We were chasing a honey badger!

My friends in the truck cheered, 90% just excited for me but with a tiny bit of newfound personal enthusiasm for this wonderful bacon-stealing asshole of the natural world.

We continued to race along, the honey badger cutting left and right ahead of us, crossing a road and back into the brush as we pursued in a straight line that paid absolutely no heed to roads or the absolute and total lack of roads. The white stripes on the badger’s back lit up in our headlights and he seemed to smile as he trotted along, no doubt fantasizing that somewhere out there in the night, there was a lion whose ass he would improbably kick.

After a few blissful minutes of pursuit and me taking no fewer than 400 of the worst nighttime wildlife photos ever taken by man or even chimps that found a camera and hit each other with it for 45 minutes, the badger turned into the tree line and was gone from our lives.

That was awesome.

Granted, the honey badger was not the only animal we saw on three long days of Chadian safari. There were lions.

And lionesses.

And cubs.

And nighttime lions.

On our night drive we encountered no fewer than 19 lions, some of them no doubt the same lions we’d seen earlier, after a quick costume change backstage. The highest drama came as we were motoring back toward the lodge, shivering in the open air that had gone from bakingly hot to shiveringly cold in an improbably short amount of time as soon as the sun went down. I heard a sound coming from behind the trees to our right. Is that a lion growling? I must be imagining it- We hit a clearing. Oh, lions!

Three cubs were huddled in the dark in the middle of an open field, looking around awkwardly. A long distance from them their mother sat perched, and between her and the cubs there was a huge male lion who was doing all the growling. We bashed over the berm and rolled quietly up to the adult lions as our driver cut the engine and we coasted to a stop. Our driver quietly explained that the male lion was going to kill the female’s cubs if she didn’t let him mate with her. We sat and watched the tense standoff, the male lion occasionally growly a deep and ominous purring growl as the female lion sat in silent tension. The male had a cut on his face, and I imagined the initial altercation that had lead to our current standoff.

After ten minutes of watching, we realized we needed to leave them to whatever was going to happen next, hoping we wouldn’t return the next morning to find a pile of dead lion cubs.

In the morning, the entire field was empty.

That same night, we’d been out looking for leopards, one of the hardest animals to find on any safari. Our driver stopped by a large wall of tall grass, and cut the engine. Something was moving loudly through the dry grass. KSSSSH. KSSSSH. KSSSSH. Holy shit that’s ominous! Is it moving toward us, or away from us? I secretly hoped it was the later as we sat in silent tension in the dark, waiting for something to pounce out of the blackness and straight into our open safari truck.

The crunching steps suddenly stopped. Whatever it was knew we were here. Our driver started the engine. I thought we were leaving, but instead he steered straight into the six-foot-tall dry grass and bashed us right into it. Oh jeez, well I guess we’re going to find out what’s in here!

What was it going to be? It sounded huge, like an elephant crunching its way through an entire tree. Our driver cut the engine again, and pulled out his phone. He tapped some buttons in an app and a voice hilariously and unexpectedly announced:

“LEOPARD. Rawwwwwwr. Rawwwwwwr. Rawwwwwr.”

The formal announcement of the leopard’s name was followed by recorded leopard sounds. I laughed and wondered if the leopards ever popped out just at the annoucement of their name, like “Yeah? What?”

We sat in silence, nothing moving in the dark night or the light barren grass.

“LEOPARD. Rawwwwwr. Rawwwwwwr. Rawwwwrrr.”

Nothing. The engine came back on and we slowly backed up toward the road, bashing over the uneven ground in search of the road, somewhere back there in the night. We stopped and sat in the awful silence again. Lawrence and Jess in the back row heard something behind them, and I fully expected to turn around and see the leopard sitting between them on the bench seat, like “S’up?”

Nothing. We motored off again into the night. Some part of me thinks this was all better than actually seeing a leopard, watching some big cat glint through the headlights never could have matched the horror movie drama and tension of our near miss.

Zakouma park was full of marvels, from hammy posing elephants to hilarious mohawked warthog families to frankly, far too many crocodiles to serve any useful purpose.

During one long and frankly uneventful safari drive, we spotted vultures circling in the distance. As we grew nearer we began to realize that this was a lot of vultures. Nearer still: This is a completely absurd number of vultures. Hundreds hopped across the Savannah and came in for awkward landings. Is this some kind of vulture convention? Are they getting together to vote on the 2022 bylaws?

We gradually approached the epicenter of this colossal vulture eruption, and it suddenly dawned on us why they were there: Up ahead, tucked between the sparse trees covered in looming birds, there was a dead giraffe. Its long neck sprawled across the dirt, this was a vulture buffet of rare magnificence.

Thankfully we saw plenty of perky and very alive giraffes as well, not all of them grimly beautiful reminders of the pitiless cycle of life.

Our accommodations while we were in Zakouma were surprisingly nice 4-room huts arranged along a central dirt path that led to the open-air dining hall and the wifi hut.

Being what the kids call a digital nomad, I spent most of my time at the wifi hut, which sounds like it should have also served pizza but absolutely did not. The hut was where the French couple running the camp lived, and for a price you could hop on their atrociously slow satellite internet and bash your face on your keyboard for four days straight trying to get some work done, only to be completely thwarted every time somebody stopped by to upload their 3 gigabyte photo of a monkey to Facebook.

It wasn’t all bad though, as sitting on a porch and drinking a cold Top Ananas in the shade of the hot sun sure beats the frigid Minnesota winter I had left only days earlier. The only real downside, aside from all the flying things trying desperately to either fly into my mouth or have sex on my laptop screen, were the baboons.

The park has no fences, so there’s nothing separating you on your midnight walk from the lions and crocodiles and pythons, other than your common sense knowledge that you probably shouldn’t be walking around at midnight you dummy. Every night I’d be happily toiling away from the wifi hut porch as my friends slowly fell away, satisfied that they’d got their killer shot of a lion behind their thumb uploaded in only 93 minutes flat, or else frustrated into giving up and going to bed. Then it was just me. Me and the baboons.

As the night grew long, the baboons would begin to come out. The males would growl ominously from the trees, low, threatening warnings of immediately impending death and dismemberment, punctuated by wild screams as the baboons killed each other or descended on a lost baby.

Those not familiar with baboons probably don’t think of them as very threatening at all. They’re just monkeys, right? Not THAT big? Baboons make up for their size and lack of firearms training by being insanely, berserkly honey-badger-level aggressive. But instead of being adorable, they are terrifying. They’re basically what geese would be like if they had teeth and claws. They are complete assholes.

As the clock ticked past 10pm each night the baboons would quickly begin to take over the camp. It was clear they were not used to people being out that late. It was their camp now. By 11pm, the air was awash with screams and gutteral, satanic cries. By midnight, it was clear I needed to get back to my cabin before they got organized enough to raid the wifi hut.

Walking through the pitch black with my headlamp as my only friend, the baboons growled down from the trees.

“Heyyyy new fish.”

“Where ya goin’, pretty?”

I need to reconsider my life choices.

“Send me a selfie with the baboons!” my friend texted me.

“If I get a photo at all it’ll be of a baboon biting me on the face.”

“Send us some photos of where you are!” my manager requested.

“I might be able to get a blurry photo of me running away from baboons in the night, I’ll see what I can do.”

“Do you think you could win a fight with a baboon?” our tour guide asked me.

Well you have to define “win.” I’m pretty sure I could kickball-boot a baboon back up into the trees but also pretty sure I’d come out of the altercation with rabies, so I’m not sure who I’d call the winner there.

The next day our guide told a story of waking up to the sound of somebody trying to open the door of his cabin. Thinking it was one of us with a question, he opened the door to find a four-foot-tall baboon standing there, looking at him like he didn’t understand why there was a human in his cabin.

When I was in Zambia last year I was attacked by baboons. I was hiking up out of a gorge near Victoria Falls and stopped suddenly when I saw a baboon up above, blocking the path. I attempted to go around and he growled with an insistent clarity that this would not be a good idea. I ended up standing there for 20 minutes until he got bored of winning our encounter and left. Several minutes later I was walking up another path when I found two baboons blocking the way. I stopped, and a local further up the path called back “Just go! They’ll move.” I took one step forward and both baboons immediately charged straight at me, screaming and swiping at me with their long claws. I backpedaled as fast as I think I can possibly run backwards, balancing my need to not get bit in the nuts with the strategic necessity of needing to plant my feet at the right time in case I needed to start kicking baboons in the face to save my life. The local who’d just seconds before given me the worst advice I’ve ever received came running with a tree branch and started bashing the baboons with it, which in time convinced them to reluctantly give up on Mission: Eat Sean.

Back in Zakouma, I ran this baboon gauntlet every night, occasionally seeing one screaming baboon chase another across the path, but mostly tiptoeing through the pitch black sound-field of baboon chaos, hoping to go unnoticed.

We’d reached Zakouma after 20 hours of driving spread across two days, from Chad’s capital city of N’Djamena which, yeah, good luck pronouncing that.

The Chad driving was some of the wildest I’ve experienced, our old, battered SUVs racing along at completely inadvisable speeds on utterly wrecked roads. Our drivers were constantly swerving off the road to avoid demolished sections of pavement, opting instead to race down into the ditch by the side of the road, nearly tipping the truck over sideways as we dropped down the steep decline, before we spent several minutes weaving between trees in the dirt at 60 miles an hour. Eventually the drivers would seem to get bored of this and we’d swerve back up onto the paved road for a few minutes. After a while I decided they were weaving back and forth purely for something to do.

Our trucks were kicking up a huge dust storm as we went. We’d race through villages that seemed to be engulfed in an eerie fog, the dust from the truck ahead of us creating a stunningly beautiful scene that I would have enjoyed more if not for the time spent wondering if our drivers could see a single thing out there, because we certainly couldn’t.

Also, none of the seat belts worked, but this is Africa so I don’t need to tell you that.

I was riding with Rob from New York and William from Cornwall in the UK. The two days of driving raced by as William and I talked through all the world’s problems, William’s proper Britishness and natty attire balanced out by the fact that he took his shirt off at literally every opportunity the entire trip, which I found hilarious and almost as funny as the fact that he had the “OH SHIIIIIT” look you have on your face right before you crash into a Taco Bell on his face for literally the entire drive, as he clutched the JC handle and we weaved at high speed between cows.

We broke up the drive there with a night of camping in an open cow field between the giant rock formations outside of Mongo.

As we set up the tents, local children edged closer and closer to our camp, no doubt curious about these strange creatures who had emerged out of the dust cloud only to sleep in a cow-shit-strewn field in the absolute middle of nowhere.

My friend Chris and I laughed as we noted that Jess inside his tiny tent looked like someone wearing some kind of bizarre 1800s weight loss contraption.

In the morning, all jokes were null as the beautiful sunrise scorched the sky.

Chris and I met on a tour through the ‘stans in 2018, then when I showed up on Socotra Island off Yemen in 2020, I suddenly realized I was standing next to him at the airport. Oh hi! God, this kind of travel is a small small world. Now in 2022, I had just landed in Chad and was talking to my friend Yogi as we waited to take our fake arrival covid tests when I turned to one side and, Holy shit! Chris! We've got to stop meeting like this, or else maybe plan travel together on purpose or something.

“I’ve heard your Yemen gun story from so many other people, I need to hear it from you!”

Oh really? Wow. I guess that is the kind of story that gets around.

In the morning after breakfast, the drivers were taking so long packing up the trucks that they suggested we all go for a walk to the main road so they'd stop feeling the weight of our expectant stares. We trundled off across the scrubland toward the sunrise and I told my Yemen gun story for the 400th time. A truck rolled by with a goat strapped down in the flatbed, who was protesting loudly.

“Baaaa! Baaaaaaa! Why are you all just standing there? For the love of God help me!!”

I think he sensed that they weren’t going to Disneyland.

During one of our stops on the drive I noticed that the decals on the sides of our Land Cruisers advertised the company name as Tchad Evasion, which seemed to suggest the best way to enjoy Chad was to avoid it entirely. John from France explained that it French it means something more like “escape” which still doesn’t seem that flattering but I can sort of see what they were going for.

It is still, however, inexcusable that they didn’t call the company Chadventure.

Nobody in Chad speaks English, so our guide had strategically split up the few French speakers in the group so that there was one in each car, in case we needed to talk to the driver or have any idea what the fuck was going on at any point. The luckiest car got native French speaker John. Fluently French-speaking Brit Mel was in the next car. The third got our guide Nick from the Netherlands, who’d had some French in school and could get by. The fourth car got me. Oh you poor, poor sons of bitches.

We would periodically stop in small villages to buy beverages, one of which inexplicably had RC Cola, which I'm not sure I could even find in the US. They must have a really good representative in Africa. Or I just drank a soda from 1983.

The last time I'd seen my friend Yogi was on a tour in Cameroon back in December, where I gave him shit for unexpectedly buying condoms when we stopped to buy soda. Now here in Chad we were stopped by the dusty side of the road and Yogi was buying Vaseline. Dude, what are you getting up to while we’re all sleeping?

I later found out that during the safari, Yogi had tried to get out of the Jeep to pet a lion cub, which was laying next to its sleeping mother.

“OH MY GOD GET BACK IN THE JEEEP!!”

“But the mom is asleep!”

Later in the trip, Yogi picked up a python off the ground. So I’m not sure Yogi’s going to live long enough for me to ever find out what he was doing with that Vaseline.

By the time we reached Zakouma, my very white Republican friend Jess had absorbed so much road dust that he looked like Ray Charles, and we spent the whole night making jokes about Jess getting cancelled for walking around in blackface.

The drive back to N’Djamena after the safari was even more bizarre, as now we needed to do all 20 hours of the drive in a single day, in order to get back in time for our pre-flight PCR tests, the irregularity of flights out of Chad not meshing well with the world’s lingering covid regulations.

We were up at 2am and on the road by 3. Some of us were understandably concerned about how the drivers were going to manage this already-crazy drive, only now in the pitch black and on minimal sleep. I’d only had 90 minutes of sleep myself, after working late and dodging baboons in the night.

Quickly it became obvious that the drive was going to be one long trust exercise. On the way down we’d had to rotate the more desirable front passenger seat, now everyone wanted to sit in the back. If only to be a few feet further from whatever kind of antelope or thorny acacia tree was sure to be bashing through the windshield any second now. I decided there wasn’t much I could do about any of this, and promptly fell asleep for the first four hours of the drive. This might not sound that impressive, but this was basically akin to sleeping while falling down a mountain. The truck violently bucked up and down as we swerved through the dust cloud and zagged at the last possible second to avoid trees and wildlife. Every time I woke it was because we were slamming on the brakes and sliding diagonally toward a terrified-looking antelope or were about to roll the truck upside down into a ditch. Or because my face had just bounced off the passenger-door window. But I somehow meshed all of this terror into quickly falling back asleep, again and again, an accomplishment I still don’t understand.

On one of our stops on the way back, I looked down and noticed that my lap and the floor was covered in a thin layer of grey fuzz. What in the hell is that from? After careful inspection I realized it was from where the seatbelt repeatedly slamming into my chest had sawed off a layer of the outer material from the fleece I was wearing. Jeez.

Rob wasn’t in our Land Cruiser for the ride back, as he’d unwisely saved a sandwich from our picnic lunch on the way down to eat later that afternoon, which the 100+ degree temperatures for hours in the truck had turned into a mayonnaise death bomb. Rob spent most of his time at Zakouma in the bathroom, then suddenly passed out so hard he cracked his head on the floor and had to get stitches. It broke my heart that Rob came all that way and endured the drives there and back only to miss pretty much all of the wonderful safaris. Don't mess with mayo kids. Rob was with a nurse in the other car for the ride back.

We blew three tires on the way back to the city, to match the three we’d blown on the way down for some nice trip symmetry.

Our time in N’Djamena, while not as exciting as honey-badger-drenched safaris, or death-defying drives, was not without its own charms. For one, we missed all the coup-related violence in the streets that had bookended our visit, when the military government decided that the best way to deal with the protests was with machine guns. And no less importantly, our surprisingly nice hotel had giant tortoises wandering around the pool, being Chadish.

We visited the natural history museum, where Chad Frenchly made the case for being the cradle of humanity, with glass cases of human-ish skulls even older than the famous Lucy in Ethiopia.

And of course there was the central square where we were only allowed to take photos from one angle, because of all the secrets of life being revealed in the other directions.

But the most interesting part of our city visit was the nearby village we drove to on our first day. Here we walked through some traditional huts and saw pottery being made.

But far more memorable was the throng of kids who followed us through the village, I spent the entire time with little kids holding my hands and resolutely and without pause insisting that I should be buying them candy right now this very second.

“Cadeau?”

“No.”

“Cadeau?”

“Nope.”

“Cadeau.”

“Not a chance.”

“Cadeau?”

A few of the kids got the message and entertained themselves instead by picking up random trash off the ground and giving it to me. Oh, a box of condoms? Thanks, 4-year old!

One kid handed me an empty candy wrapper to make sure I understood this was what he wanted and what I should buy him right now this instant.

“Bom bom,” he nodded.

But it was still sweet to hang out with them and teach them how to give high fives, which quickly turned into a contest to see who could give the hardest high-five, which was very painful.

After two straight hours of dozens of dusty little kids clutching my hands and stroking my bizarrely white skin, I realized I was going to need a LOT of Purell for this trip.

A lot.

This concludes my blog-length advertisement for hand sanitizer.