🏜️ The Kalahari: The Great Thirst

Before we get stuck into our adventures at Bagatelle itself, it’s worth taking a moment to understand exactly where we were. Spreading its enormous sandy skirts across three countries — Botswana, South Africa and Namibia — the Kalahari, whose name in the Tswana language means “the great thirst,” is a genuinely exceptional place. Don’t let anyone tell you it’s a proper desert in the same sense as the bone-dry Namib we’d come from; technically it’s a semi-arid sandy savannah, what geographers call a fossil desert, draped across a gently rolling inland sea of sand covering most of Botswana and large parts of Namibia and South Africa. It’s one of the largest continuous stretches of sand on earth, covering around 2.5 million square kilometres, and yet it receives just enough rain — in some areas up to 500mm a year in a good season — to support a surprisingly rich array of plant and animal life.

The Namibian portion of the Kalahari is particularly striking. Burnt-orange red sands are covered in thin, wispy, mostly golden grass that whispers in the wind, dotted liberally with umbrella-shaped acacia trees and inhabited by a wide-ranging cast of wildlife including gemsbok (those magnificent oryx with their sabre-straight horns), impala, black-backed jackals and, of course, cheetahs. It genuinely looks like a landscape that has been art-directed for a BBC wildlife documentary.

Crucially — and this is something we only properly appreciated when we were there — the Kalahari is also the last genuine bastion of the indigenous San people, one of the oldest cultures on earth. Archaeological evidence places them in southern Africa for at least 20,000 years, and some studies suggest their genetic lineage stretches back over 100,000 years, making them arguably the oldest continuous human culture on the planet. Over the past two millennia, as Bantu-speaking peoples moved in from the north and east and, later, European colonists arrived from the 17th century onwards, the San were gradually pushed out of more fertile lands into the harsh embrace of the Kalahari. It is the last place the modern world has not yet fully swallowed them up, which makes it all the more important to visit and understand.

🚗 Arrival: Welcome Drinks and Poor Decisions

After a long, dusty drive from Sesriem out in the Namib Desert — a proper seat-of-the-trousers Namibian road trip along gravel tracks that would loosen the fillings of the faint-hearted — we finally pulled into Bagatelle Kalahari and bowled up to reception. We were greeted warmly by the reception team, who pressed upon us a welcome drink that was, somewhat unusually and very pleasingly, spiked with alcohol. Now, with our guard somewhat lowered by the consumption of said refreshment — though to be fair, we hadn’t exactly been teetotal during our grand tour of Namibia (only joking, obviously, we were completely sober at all times, officer) — we rather rashly signed ourselves up for the cheetah feeding that afternoon and, for the following morning, a walking tour with a Kalahari Bushman guide. Both of which turned out to be absolutely brilliant decisions, as it happens.

📅 Day 1

🐆 The Cheetah Feeding: Up Close and Personal

The cheetah feeding was scheduled for later that afternoon. Now, we should say straight away: this is not generally the sort of wildlife experience we’d rush to book. We much prefer our animals wild, unencumbered and ideally at a respectful distance. But these were cheetahs, and we have a bit of a soft spot for cheetahs. There’s something utterly magnificent about them that bypasses rational judgement entirely. There were quite a few other guests at the ranch that evening, so we ended up filling three game-drive vehicles, which gave the whole thing a pleasantly sociable atmosphere.

ℹ️ Why These Cheetahs Call Bagatelle Home

The cheetahs at Bagatelle are all rescued animals, taken in from the wild because, for one reason or another, they were unable to survive on their own. Cheetahs have had a spectacularly rough time of it over the past century. Their global population has declined by an extraordinary 90% in the last hundred years, and today there are thought to be fewer than 7,000 left in the wild worldwide. Namibia actually holds the largest wild cheetah population of any country on earth — a distinction it has earned partly through the work of organisations like the Cheetah Conservation Fund (CCF), founded in Namibia in 1990 — but even here the pressures of habitat loss and human-wildlife conflict are severe.

The cheetahs at Bagatelle were brought to the ranch to save their lives, and this would be their permanent home. They simply couldn’t be released back into the wild. There are a couple of fairly significant challenges when it comes to keeping cheetahs in a managed setting. First, they need enormous amounts of space to roam; in the wild a male cheetah’s territory can cover hundreds of square kilometres. Second — and this surprised us — cheetahs are remarkably anti-social animals, at least with other cheetahs outside of coalitions of brothers. You absolutely cannot throw a group of unrelated animals into the same enclosure because they will, bluntly, kill each other and eat the loser of the fight. So, for the six cheetahs at Bagatelle, the ranch had divided them sensibly into three separate enclosures: one containing two males; another housing two females (that was the third thing we learnt — boys and girls most definitely don’t mix); and a third enclosure that held a large, elderly male who had grown rather mellow and philosophical with age, paired with a younger female. Like many of the best odd couples, it seemed to work.

🎯 First Up: The Ladies

The three game-drive vehicles pulled up at the gate to the first enclosure, where we were joined by a fourth truck carrying the food and the volunteers who’d be doing the actual feeding. These enclosures are genuinely vast — several hectares apiece, which gives the animals room to move and behave relatively naturally. The feeding truck swept through into the enclosure and shot off in the opposite direction, and moments later we followed in hot pursuit through a second gate at the far end. The idea, as it was explained to us, was to make the cheetahs chase the food truck across the enclosure — not because anyone was being unkind, but because the process of pursuit helps to replicate something of a natural hunting experience and keeps the animals mentally engaged. It’s the sort of enrichment that zoos and wildlife facilities around the world have increasingly prioritised over the past couple of decades, and it makes absolute sense. A couple of the volunteers then hopped off the truck holding large metal bowls piled high with raw meat and held them to the cheetahs’ faces. The animals gobbled everything down at a quite astonishing rate. Karen pointed out that this speed of consumption was more than a little reminiscent of a certain someone’s relationship with a Sunday roast. If that were true, I reflected, I had clearly lost rather a lot of my pace over the years.

🐾 Then the Blokes

Next up were the males. We followed exactly the same routine — the chase across the enclosure, the volunteers with bowls, the thundering approach over the brow of the hill. It was every bit as thrilling the second time around, partly because cheetahs running at full pace — they’re capable of reaching speeds of around 110 kilometres per hour, making them the fastest land animals on earth — is the sort of sight that does something quite primal to you. You stop thinking entirely and just watch.

👴 The Old Fellow and His Young Friend

Finally, it was the turn of the large old male and his smaller female companion. This time there was no chase. Whether it was the old boy’s diminished enthusiasm for sprinting or simply his hard-won wisdom about not expending unnecessary energy — a philosophy we can heartily endorse at our age — the procedure here was quite different. All the vehicles pulled up to a gate, the volunteer feeders went in with their bowls, and then — and this is the bit that made the whole afternoon genuinely special — we were all invited to climb down from our game-drive vehicles and quietly slip into the enclosure. With the cheetahs occupied with their dinner, we were able to get within a few metres of them. Standing a short distance from a wild-born cheetah who is entirely indifferent to your presence because there’s a bowl of meat in front of it is an experience that is very hard to describe adequately in a blog post. Extraordinary doesn’t really cover it.