We departed Ghanzi on the 9th and headed to Maun for another overnighter before making our way to just outside Makgadikgadi National Park for a three-night stay in a baobab hut at a place called “Planet Baobab.”
The road to Maun was paved and very good, but the road to the Pans was crazy, with a multitude of very deep potholes littering the road. These things could easily eat up a small Toyota, but fortunately our tires seemed to be made of kryptonite, so no flat tires so far.
Planet Baobab is located near Makgadikgadi Pans NP and gets its name from the many ancient baobab trees growing in the area. Some are believed to be more than 4,000 years old.
Our hut was funky and made us feel like we were living in the Flintstones era. Located in the middle of dry savanna, there were very few, if any, wild animals. However, Botswana has a thriving cattle and livestock industry, so there was no shortage of cows, steers, mules and goats roaming freely throughout the bush and highways, making them as much of a challenge as the potholes.
The baobab trees are a sight to behold, with trunk diameters exceeding, I’m guessing here, at least 30 feet.
We spent our first night relaxing in our abode and having some beers in the bar. The next day, we headed out in a 4×4 safari truck to make our 40 km drive to Ntwetwe Pan.
On our way, we stopped to visit a colony of wild meerkats who had been partially habituated through a two-year effort by a local man who spent every day with them. We had a great interaction with these little mongoose.
Our next stop was a local farm where they stored Honda ATVs that we used for our final journey out into the pan.
When we finally arrived after a very dusty ATV journey into the middle of nowhere, we were met by a roaring campfire and T-bone steaks sizzling over the embers.
The Makgadikgadi, which comprises the Nxai and Ntwetwe Pans, is one of the largest pans in the world and is all that remains of the formerly enormous Lake Makgadikgadi, which once covered an area larger than Switzerland but dried up several thousand years ago and today is surrounded by the Kalahari Desert.
The sun had set a couple of hours earlier and the moon hadn’t risen yet, so we were treated to a stellar show of stars and the Milky Way visible from horizon to horizon.
After dinner and a walk through total darkness to the tiny tented outhouse, we bedded down in our individual sleeping bags—canvas on the outside, lots of blankets on the inside—and lay in awe, staring up at the stars. We were treated to two large falling stars before reluctantly calling it a night.
We were fortunate that there were only five of us. We were told that the next night a group of 19 would be doing the same, so the magic would probably have been interrupted by a lot of human sleeping noises. Later in the evening, the moon had risen and cast a light across the endless horizon, revealing a moonscape of nothingness but white salt and sand for as far as the eye could see. It was an experience we will never forget.
