Botswana · Southern Africa
The Kalahari and the salt pans.
The Central Kalahari and the Makgadikgadi pans are the country's dry, spare, wide-horizon counterpoint to the Delta.
Photo Ed Wingate / Unsplash
The Makgadikgadi are among the largest salt flats in the world, and in the green season they draw a zebra migration and flamingos. In the dry months they are white, silent and empty, and quad-biking and walking with San guides become the point rather than game viewing.
The Central Kalahari Game Reserve is vast, seasonal and best in and just after the rains, when Deception Valley fills with grazing.
How big is the Central Kalahari Game Reserve?
About 52,800 square kilometres, which makes it one of the largest game reserves in the world and larger than Switzerland. It is almost entirely undeveloped: a handful of camps, sandy tracks and very few other people.
How do you get to the Central Kalahari and the Makgadikgadi?
Most visitors fly in from Maun by light aircraft to a camp airstrip. The Makgadikgadi and Nxai Pan are within a few hours' drive of Maun as well. Driving into the Central Kalahari is a serious 4x4 undertaking that needs full self-sufficiency, which is why a flight is usual.
Who are the San, and can you walk with them?
The San are the Kalahari's first people, hunter-gatherers whose knowledge of tracking, plants and water in the desert goes back tens of thousands of years. Several camps in the Central Kalahari and on the edge of the Makgadikgadi offer walks with San guides, who show how food, medicine and water are found in a landscape that looks as if it holds none.
What is there besides wildlife in the Makgadikgadi?
The pans themselves: the dry bed of a lake that once covered much of northern Botswana, now among the largest salt flats in the world. Habituated meerkat colonies live on their edges, Baines' Baobabs stand beside Nxai Pan, and in the dry months the flat white surface is the whole point of the visit.
How long should you spend in the Kalahari?
Two or three nights is typical, usually added to a Delta itinerary for its contrast of dry country after water.
What is there to see in the Kalahari and the salt pans?
Sample journeys that stop here
- Khwai, the Delta and the Kalahari →A nine-day mid-range Botswana safari from Maun through three landscapes: the woodland and river of the Khwai Concession, the islands and lagoons of the Okavango Delta, and the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, where Naro San guides share tracking and foraging.
What does the Kalahari and the salt pans pair well with?
- The Okavango DeltaThe Okavango is an inland delta that never reaches the sea, and the flood arrives in the dry season rather than the wet one.
- Chobe and the LinyantiChobe holds one of the largest elephant populations in Africa, concentrated along its river frontage in the dry months.
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