Botswana: Central Kalahari Game Reserve

🌍The Central Kalahari Game Reserve — the second largest game reserve in the world

Established in 1961, the Central Kalahari Game Reserve covers a staggering 52,800 square kilometres — that’s just over 20,400 square miles for those of us still clinging to the old ways. To put that in some perspective, the entire Netherlands would fit inside it with room to spare, and it accounts for nearly ten percent of Botswana’s total land area, which is saying something given how enormous Botswana is. It is the second largest game reserve in the world, pipped only by the Northeast Greenland National Park, and by some margin the most remote reserve anywhere in southern Africa. The landscape is dominated by ancient fossil river valleys, sweeping grasslands, salt pans, and rolling sand dunes — a vast, semi-arid wilderness that in the dry season appears brutally inhospitable but which, in reality, teems with life. Among the wildlife found here are black-maned Kalahari lions, desert-adapted elephants, cheetahs, brown hyenas, wild dogs, rhinos, and more antelope species than you can sensibly keep track of.

✊The San people and a rather grim bit of politics

This land is the ancestral home of the San people, sometimes called Bushmen, one of the oldest human cultures on earth. Archaeological evidence suggests the San have lived in and around the Kalahari for at least 20,000 years, possibly considerably longer, making them the original inhabitants of southern Africa by an enormous margin. They are a hunter-gatherer society of extraordinary skill and resilience, perfectly adapted to surviving in one of the harshest environments on the planet. They track game across trackless sand, extract water from roots and tubers when there is none to be found on the surface, and navigate by the stars with a precision that would leave most of us looking rather foolish. Their click-based language family, known as Khoisan, is thought to be among the most ancient spoken languages on earth.

Unfortunately, the Botswana government ran a deeply controversial relocation programme that removed thousands of San people from their ancestral lands in the Kalahari, a process that began in earnest in the 1990s and accelerated in 2002. A Botswana High Court ruled in 2006 that the evictions were unlawful, and the San won the right to return. However, a separate ruling maintained a ban on the San hunting wildlife within the reserve — which is, of course, the very foundation of their entire way of life and cultural identity. The breathtaking irony here is that private game reserves operating within the park’s boundaries are perfectly at liberty to allow wealthy foreign tourists to hunt game for sport. And if that wasn’t enough of a kick in the teeth, the Botswana government also granted a major diamond mining company permission to establish a large open-cast mine within the National Park itself. Lovely stuff. Anyway, enough politics — we had roughly 400 kilometres ahead of us and a Land Cruiser that wasn’t going to drive itself.

💎The road north — diamonds, malls, and tarmac

The first leg of our journey took us north on the A14, Botswana’s main north-south arterial road connecting Gaborone in the south to Francistown in the north. It was not, if we’re being entirely honest, the most scenic of drives. The landscape was flat, dry scrubland for the most part, punctuated by the occasional small settlement. We made a brief stop in the village of Letlhakane to fill up with fuel. The place has a population of more than 22,000 people, which in most people’s books would constitute a town of reasonable size — though technically it is still classified as a village. It has grown to this scale primarily because it sits at the centre of one of the world’s most diamond-rich areas, surrounded by four significant mines: Damtshaa, Orapa, Letlhakane itself, and the vast Jwaneng deposit not far off either. The Orapa mine, which began operations in 1971, is one of the largest diamond mines in the world by area.

We popped into a brand new, very large western-style shopping centre that was still under development. Only a handful of units were occupied, and those that were open were stocked with relatively expensive goods aimed squarely at the higher end of the market. We found ourselves wondering who was actually going to shop here and whether the whole thing might turn out to be one of those rather optimistic development projects that ends up three-quarters empty for a decade. But it was time to move on.

🪨Leaving the tarmac behind — Rakops and the road to nowhere

After several hours of perfectly reasonable driving on sealed tarmac roads, we reached the village of Rakops, which this time actually looked like a village ought to. Rakops sits on the eastern fringe of the Kalahari basin and serves as the main jumping-off point for visitors heading into the Central Kalahari Game Reserve from the east. This is where we left the A14 behind and transitioned onto a dirt road heading west towards the Matswere Gate, the reserve’s principal eastern entrance.

The first thing that strikes you about these roads — and this is something no photograph or written description quite prepares you for — is the sheer volume of sand. Deep, soft, pale Kalahari sand that has been accumulating here for millions of years and has absolutely no intention of making your life easy. The 45 kilometres from Rakops to the Matswere Gate featured potholes of genuinely impressive dimensions, many of them filled to the brim with sand so that you couldn’t tell how deep they were until the vehicle lurched into one. We averaged something approaching walking pace for much of it, and what might appear on the map as a forty-five minute drive took us well over two hours to complete. And that was just to reach the gate. We hadn’t even started yet.

🦁Sunday Pans campsite — lions, ladders, and a very dubious shower

Our assigned campsite at Sunday Pans was a further 60 kilometres into the park, on tracks that made the approach road feel like the M25 by comparison. Three hours of bone-jarring progress later, we finally pulled in. The Central Kalahari has 26 individual campsites scattered across its vast interior, many of them separated from their nearest neighbour by tens of kilometres. These are not your Butlins-style affairs with rows of caravans and a chip shop. There is no electricity, no running water, no wi-fi, no camp shop, no ranger on duty. You are entirely on your own.

Sunday Pans consists of a handful of widely spaced sites set amongst open savannah, and as we rolled in we could see absolutely nobody else. The site was enormous — a generous clearing with a single acacia tree at one end — and there was no sign of another human being anywhere in any direction. True wilderness, and genuinely beautiful. Also genuinely a little terrifying, particularly given that I had read beforehand that lions are rather fond of visiting these camps at night and have been known to wander around the tents. Rather helpfully, there was no one around to help us if they did.

We got out our folding chairs, our table, our cooking gear, and — for the first time on this trip — popped up our rooftop tent. It extends up on a spring-loaded frame above the vehicle and is accessed via an aluminium ladder bolted to the side. Now, I am not an expert on big cat locomotion, but I was fairly confident that both lions and leopards could manage a ladder without too much difficulty, and I made a mental note to check the rungs carefully before descending in the morning.

The campsite had what the booking description cheerfully described as a recently refurbished ablutions block, which turned out to consist of a pit toilet at a considerable distance from our pitch and a bucket shower that was entirely non-functional. For anything less urgent than a full sit-down visit, we’d be making use of the bush, especially at night when the walk to the facilities would take us into open darkness with whatever might be lurking out there.

🌌Sparrow weavers, stars, and a gin and tonic in a can

The site itself was very open and exposed, save for the single tree we had set up camp beneath. We were sharing this tree with a sizeable colony of white-browed sparrow weavers, a sociable little bird that builds untidy, bushy nests of dry grass in tight clusters — they’re an absolute racket but rather endearing. In the desert, water is a scarce and precious commodity, and the local birds had clearly clocked that two humans had appeared with a vehicle full of the stuff. Every time we went near our jerry cans or the washing-up bowl, a small audience would gather on the nearby branches watching with intense, beady interest. Eventually we took the hint and put down a small metal bowl of fresh water on the ground. What followed could only be described as a full-scale bird riot — within minutes there were sparrow weavers, queleas, and various other small desert birds jostling and splashing and shoving each other off the rim in scenes of complete chaos.

We settled in for the evening, breaking out the pre-mixed gin and tonic in a can that we had picked up in Francistown and had been keeping cold in our on-board refrigerator for two days. There is something deeply civilised about a cold G&T in a can in the middle of a vast African wilderness, and we sat in our folding chairs and watched the sun go down with a considerable degree of satisfaction. We then got on with cooking dinner before the light went completely.

It turned out to be an astonishingly clear night. Being so far from any human settlement — the nearest town, Rakops, was over 100 kilometres away — there was absolutely zero light pollution, and the moon had not yet risen above the horizon. The effect on the night sky was extraordinary. We could see stars all the way down to the horizon in every direction, and the Milky Way stretched overhead in its full, unadulterated glory — a dense, luminous river of light across the entire sky of a kind that most people who have lived their lives in or near cities have simply never seen. We sat outside for quite a while just staring upwards before finally climbing the ladder and crawling into our rooftop tent.