Baines’ Baobabs
Baines Baobabs
Interesting facts
- Baines and James Chapman travelled from Walvis Bay on the Atlantic coast to Lake Ngami and the Victoria Falls in 1861–1862, passing the trees on the way.
- Their journey was the first expedition to make extensive use of both photography and painting to record what the travellers saw.
- Both men wrote books about the same trip, Baines's Explorations in South-West Africa (1864) and Chapman's Travels (1868), giving two views of one journey.
- Baines's painting of the group shows covered wagons and men tending horses beneath the trees, with one great baobab in full leaf.
- Before Africa, Baines served as artist and storekeeper on Augustus Gregory's 1855–1857 expedition across northern Australia.
- The trees are sometimes called the Sleeping Sisters, because one of the seven grows lying almost on its side.
- Nxai Pan, the park around them, covers 2,578 square kilometres and is one of the Makgadikgadi salt pans, the bed of a vanished prehistoric lake.
Why it is worth it
Seven baobabs stand together on a low island of ground at the edge of Kudiakam Pan, a dry salt pan in Botswana's Nxai Pan National Park. Around them the land is flat to the horizon. The trees are enormous, more than 20 metres tall, with the swollen grey trunks and bare, root-like crowns that make baobabs look as if they had been planted upside down. They are thought to be around a thousand years old, and in that empty country they read from far off like a landmark built on purpose.
They carry the name of Thomas Baines, the English artist and explorer born in King's Lynn in 1820, who had already travelled the Zambezi with David Livingstone in 1858. In 1862, journeying through this region with the explorer James Chapman, he stopped by the group and painted it; the date usually given for the picture is 22 May 1862. Baines's canvas made the trees known well beyond Africa, and the comparison it allows is the real marvel of the place.
Baobabs grow almost imperceptibly, their girth widening by about a millimetre a year, so the scene a visitor finds today is very nearly the one Baines recorded more than a century and a half ago; the most noticeable change is a single fallen branch. Standing in the same spot as the painter, with the pan stretching away behind the trunks, is a rare experience of a landscape that has simply waited. The area was taken into Nxai Pan National Park in 1992.
Getting there
The nearest town is Maun, about 140 km away, and the nearest airport is Maun International Airport (MUB), about 141 km away; Gweta is roughly 65 km off. Nxai Pan National Park lies just north of the main Maun–Nata road, and the baobabs are reached on sand tracks for which a 4x4 vehicle is essential. Tracks can be hard going in the rainy season from November to April; the dry months from May to September are the easier time. There is a campsite near the trees.
On these lists
-20.11222, 24.76917per Wikidata