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Write a User ReviewThe Desolate Beauty of the Seemingly Endless Salt Pans
Makgadikgadi is home to the world’s largest salt pans and stands in striking contrast to the Okavango river that finally meets its demise close to here. Not surprisingly considering the desolate terrain, big game tends to be scarce and hard to find, though large herds of zebra and wildebeest migrate through the park during the wetter months and bring with them better chances of seeing predators. The rare brown hyena is a fairly regular sighting here. Smaller mammals such as meerkats are common, while the Sowa Pan in the east is a popular flamingo breeding ground.
For the most part though, Makgadikgadi’s main drawcard is the barren landscape and the complete sense of isolation that it invokes. As well as the vast salt pans, there are rugged rocky outcrops, rings of ancient baobabs and strangely incongruous tall, thin palms. On our visit here, we didn’t see a single other car inside the park, which, for me, is always a treat.
A Unique Environment With Wildlife Aplenty
However, this review focuses on the western side of the park, about a 2-hour drive from Maun. Here, a few barely floating logs wrapped together and powered by two outboard motors pass as a ferry. It’s the only way to cross the beautiful Boteti River into the park (except for when water levels are low, as they often are, in which case you drive across). It can fit one car at a time, so hope there isn’t a queue – there rarely is. After you make the 3-minute crossing, there’s a campground just a kilometer or so along the river. In fact, shadowing the river once inside the park generally produced the most productive wildlife viewing. On my last trip here I saw scores of wildebeest, zebra, kudu and giraffe. I was even lucky enough to spot two bat-eared foxes, sitting lazily in the afternoon sun, their huge ears resembling radar dishes, and an African wildcat that ran parallel to our safari vehicle for some time. There are
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no other accommodations inside the park but on the outside near the Xhumaga Gate there are a couple of lodges. I’d recommend Meno a Kwena, especially for families; it’s about 30km from the gate.World of Extremes Where the Okavango Meets the Kalahari
Makgadikgadi Pans is where all those billions of gallons of Okavango river water disappear when they have finally completed their course all the way from the rainy hills of Angola. As such it is a place of extremes: in the dry season it turns into a hellish dustbowl (although having the benefit of concentrating wildlife around what little water can be found); in the wet, the surface of the roads (not to mention the campsites) turn to rutted liquid mulch that can be tough going even for the hardiest 4WD. It is an adventure at any time though and wildlife sightings include some of Africa’s biggest zebra and wildebeest herds. This was my second visit to Makgadikgadi Pans. Because of its isolation, both times we had the entire park completely to ourselves.
Beautiful Nothingness
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upheld by the 360-degree views of crazed-cracked salt pan and the soft, pink glow of the sun as it slowly sank below the horizon revealing the vast star-studded night sky.Off-Grid and Wild
The Makgadikgadi Pans are what remain of Lake Makgadikgadi, a lake that was the size of Switzerland. These vast salt pans are south of the Okavango Delta and provide a real off-grid, wilderness experience – there is no signal and few camps provide Wi-Fi. Sitting on the pans watching the sun go down and marvelling at the almost complete silence is one of my top travel memories. I expected there to be little to no wildlife here, but I was pleasantly surprised on my two trips to the pans – I saw male lion coalitions, a lioness taking down a wildebeest as her cubs watched, big bull elephants (the females don’t tend to venture into this harsh environment), wildebeest and zebra herds, brown hyenas, bat-eared foxes and habituated meerkats. Quad biking is a fun way to explore this great, wild environment – for a real adventure, you can bike out to the giant baobabs of Kubu Island and camp overnight.
The Largest Salt Pans in the World
In a country best known for its shimmering inland waterways and huge, charismatic herds of elephants, Makgadikgadi offers visitors a startling change of scene. Its giant salt-encrusted pans, once the bed of an ancient expanse of water, are truly surreal.
I’m not generally a fan of quad bikes – I don’t like the way that, like jet skis on wheels, they can cause great disturbance to animals, plants and the environment – but there’s no denying the thrill of whizzing around this forbidding patch of the Kalahari.
The pans may seem stark but the park is by no means all bleak desolation. Guides can help you find meerkat colonies, Sowa Pan in the east is the breeding ground for greater and lesser flamingos, and the western reaches become grassy after the rains, attracting streams of wildebeest, zebras and lions.
Empty Horizons With Wildlife Surprises
The appeal of this unique park comes down to personal taste. Some find it depressingly desolate; others see a fascinating wilderness with unusual wildlife. On my first visit, many years ago, I saw few large mammals but was bewitched by the immense space and spectacular storm skies, and thrilled to find springhares bounding around
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my campsite and breeding flamingos on the edge of Sowa Pan. On a more recent visit, staying at a lodge towards the west, I coincided with an impressive zebra migration and saw a prolific variety of wildlife – including both lion and cheetah, plentiful springbok and blue wildebeest, and a scattering of bull elephant bulls drawn to waterholes that are now kept permanently pumped.Perhaps even more exciting were the smaller mammals. The park is home to several habituated meerkat troops, which allow intimate viewing (one climbed on my head), while night drives produced springhares, bat-eared foxes and a memorable encounter with a foraging aardvark. Aardwolves and brown hyenas are a speciality here, though this time both eluded me, and the excellent birding is typical of the Kalahari, with raptors, bustards, sandgrouse and other arid, open-country species.
Lodges that operate in this area are not focused solely on the wildlife but will take you out onto the salt pans to learn about everything from the stars to the ancient archaeological sites. Other activities include starlit camp-outs, horse riding, bush walks with San trackers and – if you can bear violating this perfect wilderness with roaring engines – quad-bike trails. For the independent traveller, this is an area that rewards exploration, but only the experienced, well prepared and well equipped should venture onto the pans themselves, as the fragile crust can easily give way.