Kalahari dreaming – Botswana’s Makgadikgadi Pans

People often think of the Makgadikgadi Pans in Botswana as miles and miles of nothing – well, maybe a mirage or two shimmering in the midday heat. So what’s a row of tents doing on Ntwetwe Pan? Jackie Nel ventured there and found Jack’s Camp.

It may seem highly unlikely that anything could survive in the bleak and inhospitable Makgadikgadi Pans, an area almost the size of Switzerland, with prickly salt grass or flat white saltscape stretching from horizon to horizon. But appearances can be deceiving: look a little closer and you’ll find a wide variety of plants and creatures ingeniously adapted to their and surroundings.

Take the brown hyena, for example. It shelters from the sun in holes in the ground during the day and emerges at night to feed, its shaggy coat warding off the usual night-time desert chill.

A forager, the brown hyena will feed on carrion and hunt small prey such as spring hares, small rodents and insects but, remarkably, it has adapted its diet to include moisture-rich fruits, roots and tubers.

Unlike its spotted cousin, it’s a solitary forager – as our guide pointed out: “It doesn’t take a pack of hyenas to hunt down a tsama melon.” Because there is so little food, foraging occurs over huge ranges, sometimes as much as 30 kilometres a night, so the brown hyena doesn’t vocalise much – there’s no point in making whooping calls over such huge territories. But it does scent mark to let other hyenas know the area is already occupied and food will be scarce.
My view of this part of Botswana was from Jack’s Camp, set in a grove of ilala palms (Hyphaene benguellensis) on the western border of Makgadikgadi Pans National Park, the first private camp in the Kalahari – and itself an example of adaptation to an arid area. Guests here don’t merely stay in the desert; they stay in rather grand style.

Think adventurer Ernest Hemingway and designer Ralph Lauren, then throw in a touch of Karen Blixen’s Out of Africa and you have Jack’s Camp: an alluring blend of exposure to the remote surrounds and casual desert elegance.

Accommodation is in traditional safari-style tents, but with a few extras. Each tent has been pitched to ensure maximum privacy and perfect views. Beds are draped with mosquito nets and set on faded Persian carpets, with large wicker baskets at their feet. Copper water pitchers and canvas wash stands add a colonial atmosphere. Locally made silver boxes contain snacks and insect repellent. In private, adjoining wooden bomas bucket showers are suspended from lofty palms.

A communal mess tent contains antique maps of Makgadikgadi, a fully stocked bar, a small library of natural history works and a collection of artefacts found in the area: snake skins, a weaver’s nest, an ostrich claw and a springbok horn.

The dining room is a long table covered with crisp damask tablecloths and set with bone-handled silver, in the shade of a spreading umbrella thorn (Acacia tortillis). Gourmet bush cuisine is prepared over the coals or by gas.

There’s even a tea tent! Furnished with more Persian carpets, scatter cushions and wicker chests, and complete with chunky chess set and gramophone, it’s the perfect setting to enjoy high tea before the afternoon’s activities.
And at Jack’s camp there are activities aplenty. The first evening saw us heading into the pans for a ‘desert-orientation talk’ with guide Mike James behind the wheel of the open Land Cruiser. The emptiness stretched endlessly around us, there was nothing to break the views of nothing and the silence of the desert was eerie . . . until we saw a speck on the horizon.

As we neared, it transformed itself into a large wooden chest, canvas chairs, firewood and assorted bottles of liquid refreshments. “Welcome to Makgadikgadi Pub,” grinned Mike, “the most remote pub in the world.”

Also an unconventional classroom: after drinks were poured, a large-scale map of Makgadikgadi was unfurled and, by the light of the fire, the fascinating formation of the pans was explained, starting from millions of years ago when the area was one of Africa’s superlakes, fed by the mighty Okavango, Chobe and Zambezi rivers. At its largest, it covered a massive 80 000 square kilometres.

“Obviously it’s dried up now, otherwise we’d be running mokoro trips instead of desert-adaptation excursions,” concluded Mike.

But there’s still plenty of life in the area: during the rainy season, from November to March, brine shrimps hatch beneath the pan’s surface and attract huge pink clouds of flamingos. Also, nutritious summer grasses germinate there, starting off the southernmost migration in Africa when tens of thousands of zebra and wildebeest move east from the Boteti River.

Back at Jack’s we digested all this information as we thawed out round the camp fire – night-time temperatures can drop to around zero. As we sat down to dinner I experienced another example of desert adaptation when one of the staff advanced with intent – and a shovelful of burning embers from the fire. Not wanting to do a Joan of Arc impersonation at the table, I was about to leap away, but “it’s okay”, I was reassured – and the embers were heaped under our chairs, so the exquisite warmth could seep slowly upwards.

Hot-water bottles in all the beds, thoughtfully placed there by unseen hands, was another welcome touch.
“There’s a bit of water left in the park, we should go check on it,” said Mike on the morrow, heading eastwards in the direction of a small water hole magnanimously named ‘The Crater’.

“You need a permit to get into the park if you’re overlanding, but you have to go a long way out of your way to the game scout’s camp for that. We won’t see another vehicle on the way.”

Famous last words: en route we came across a battered and broken Ford sedan sans windscreen and some clothes further along. “There’ll be vultures next,” mused Mike.

We also saw four kudu, including a suckling calf; the spoor and scent marks of brown hyena; many black korhaans rising like helicopters from the golden grass; and a dead Cape hare lying on the track, with no discernible spoor nearby. “Something must have swooped and maimed it, possibly a giant eagle owl. It’s too early for the vultures, they’re still waiting for the thermals,” explained Mike, as we studied the carcass.

All the guides are qualified biologists or zoologists and highly adept at explaining and interpreting the environment and animal behaviour. “I was doing research work in Uganda before I came here,” said Mike.

“Studying what?” I asked, thinking of chimpanzees and gorillas. “Ants.”

It pays to be interested in the ‘lesser’ things in the desert, and at the water hole we ticked off red-billed teal, chestnut banded plover, black korhaan, guineafowl and a flock of about 40 ostriches, including the remains of one still being gloated over by hordes of vultures, both lappet-faced and white-backed. Gabar goshawk, pale chanting goshawk, lanner falcon. Bradfield’s hornbill, yellow-billed hornbill and squawking pied crows also made it onto the list.

“In a year and a half I’ve seen 207 bird species here,” exclaimed Mike, consulting his Newman’s to confirm that the plover was indeed a chestnut banded (juvenile). “You even get fish eagles here, they feed on the terrapins.”

Representing the mammals was a lone blue wildebeest, a black-backed jackal, a few zebra bones and the fur and skull of another, less lively, jackal.

On the drive back we passed months-old zebra tracks and Mike elaborated on his career. “So before Uganda I was doing research in South America, in Peru.” “Oh,” I said, thinking of anacondas and jaguars and other jungle creatures. “On what?” “Crickets.”
“Jump on your bikes, bedrolls on the back and a vehicle will bring whatever else you need. Take a windcheater, sunblock, toothbrush and camera,” was the briefing for our trip to Kubu Island, some 100 kilometres southeast of Jack’s, on the western border of Sowa Pan.

The bikes are quad bikes, well adapted to the salt pans, with large flotation tyres to minimise damage to the fragile environment and light enough not to sink in muddy conditions. “They’re designed to go where people haven’t been, so we’re exploring previously undocumented areas; we’ve started finding the most incredible fossils and stone tools,” exulted Mike.

Indeed, the pans became one huge scratch patch as we stopped along the way to search for – and find – Bushman beads made from ostrich-egg shells and warthog tusks, and Stone Age tools. We even found fossilised otoliths (the inner bones of fish ears), proving conclusively that the salt pans did indeed once contain water. As is custom at Jack’s, everything was returned more or less to where it had been found.

After negotiating endless kilometres of salt pans – plus a few obstacles in the shape of aardvark holes and a very long veterinary fence – we came across Kubu Island. If any destination is worth that extra mile, Kubu is it.

A huge outcrop of granite, studded with centuries-old baobabs and African star chestnuts (Sterculia africana), it was a revelation in the middle of all the sun-bleached emptiness. The advance vehicle was already there and the ever-efficient team had done its thing: a table was spread under a baobab and bed rolls were laid under the stars.

We as guests also fulfilled our role, clambering up the rocks to admire the sun set and the moon rise in fiery splendour over the pans (a full moon, it was perfect timing). “This place had great spiritual significance for the Bushmen; they saw it as the place where the world begins and ends,” explained Mike. “More recently, it was also the inspiration for Wilbur Smith’s book The Sunbird. “

Currently, Kubu Island features on the cover of Veronica Roodt’s Tourist Guide to Botswana, complete with GPS co-ordinates of how to get there. “Ms Roodt has a lot to answer for,” growled one of the campers who’d prefer to keep it secret.

The dust of the day was washed away with hot bucket showers strung in a baobab, then dinner was served under the stars: thick pea soup, vegetable curry with all the condiments, and even lemon meringue pie with hot chocolate sauce, and a bottle of Nederburg Baronne. Who says the desert is a harsh place?
“See that black line on the horizon?” Mike asked after a never-to-be-forgotten sunrise and breakfast under a baobab.

“Yes. What is it?”

“Where we’re going” – but first we had to give directions to a party of French campers, fully kitted to the roof racks and beyond, who were looking for the national park.

“Do you have a map?” we asked.

“Oui, but where is ze road?” they replied, staring in awe at the nothingness around them.

Driving on the quad bikes is in single file so as not to create additional tracks, and far enough behind each other to cut down on dust and sand – kikois tied Bedouin-style round our heads were another clever adaptation.

Everything is of interest in such empty land and en route we stopped to study the shells of flamingo eggs, a wildebeest horn with spiders inside and a distant steenbok that we initially mistook for a mirage.

Our destination turned out to be an escarpment of some 50 metres in height, rather a novelty in such a flat landscape. We parked in a grove of baobabs and climbed the escarpment for lunch with a view, then embarked on a fossicking session for more beads, pottery shards and stone implements.

Back at Kubu, a last walk round the rocky outcrop brought us to a site that has long perplexed historians and archaeologists: a low circular stone wall, built in similar style to the ruins at Great Zimbabwe, but with no middens inside to indicate that people once lived there. The presence of many stone cairns nearby also had the boffs baffled. The current theory is that the area was used for initiation rituals: the boys were kept in the stone enclosure and circumcised on the cairns.

Even glass beads can be found. “They would have been brought down the coast from Southern Europe, handed over at Mocambique then carried across here by hand. Just imagine what went the other way in exchange,” mused one of the group.

Kubu Island has been declared a national monument so nothing may be removed and you should take out everything you’ve brought with you.
Back at Jack’s camp we found parties from the Natural History Museum of America setting off on a late-afternoon drive into the pans and stalking lilac-breasted rollers with their binoculars. They were remarkably unfazed when our group of bikers pulled up in clouds of dust.

A fork-tailed drongo stood guard in the palm tree outside my tent; the bucket shower waited.

Having such learned guests did present the guides with a few challenges: it must be difficult, for example, to impress renowned palaeo-anthropologist Glenn Conroy, author of the book Reconstructing Human Origins, with your knowledge of archaeology. “Let’s see what he has to say about stone tools,” Mike picked up Glenn’s book and turned to the index. “Whoa! There’re 1000 entries under stone tools.”

Half the Americans were staying at Jack’s sister camp, San Camp, a few kilometres away and perched on the very edge of the park. Like Jack’s, it’s a tented camp: the differences are that San is all white canvas (so there’s nothing to detract from the views) and it has long-drop instead of flush toilets (there’s a well at Jack’s but water is trucked into San). San is also smaller and more private, with only six tents as opposed to eight at Jack’s and is open only during the dry season (May to October).

Round the fire that evening we learned how the camp was named: after famous – some might say infamous – explorer and hunter-turned-conservationist Jack Bousfield. He enjoyed Makgadikgadi so much he settled there and eventually became something of a tour operator, showing people around the area if he liked the look of them.

Tragically, he was killed in a plane crash in 1992 – his son Ralph and Ralph’s partner Catherine Raphaely were also in the plane but managed to escape, although Ralph was badly burnt while trying to free his father from the flaming wreckage.

A year later, Ralph and Catherine – daughter of publisher Jane Raphaely – opened Jack’s Camp as part of their Uncharted Africa Safari Co, which aims to explore, as the name implies, undocumented areas.
Still on the agenda was a walk with Cobra the Bushman to study spoor, nests, hides and droppings, and learn about the medicinal and constructional uses of various trees and grasses.

And there was a visit to Chapman’s Baobab, nearly 25 metres in girth and named after explorer and hunter James Chapman; you can see his initials neatly carved in old-fashioned script near the base of the massive trunk. A landmark, the tree was used by early explorers to navigate their way across the pans and was a former camp site of, among others, David Livingstone, Frederick Selous and Thomas Baines.

Between all this, we also managed to get in a fair amount of birding. “Double-banded courser. That’s the ultimate example of ‘don’t put all your eggs in one basket’; it lays one egg four times a year instead of one clutch of four, hoping they’ll coincide with the rainy season. Watch for the lovely orange on the wings when he flies.”

Instead, he ran in front of the Land Cruiser.

“My, they’re very reluctant to fly, aren’t they?”

Always, there were fascinating new features to learn about arid adaptations, from the double-banded courser and the Kalahari burrowing frog to the elegant springbok and the stately gemsbok.

But whatever the extraordinary physical adaptations of the creatures we saw and heard about, I left with the overriding impression that none had adapted to the harsh surroundings with quite as much panache as Jack’s Camp.