Makgadikgadi Pans

Few places on Earth are as flat, as white or as silent as the Makgadikgadi. In north-eastern Botswana, south-east of the Okavango Delta and ringed by the Kalahari, a chain of salt pans spreads across roughly 16,000 square kilometres — one of the largest salt flats in the world. In the dry months the crust is hard and blinding, the horizon dissolves into heat shimmer, and the only scale is the occasional line of tyre tracks or a lone baobab standing on a former shoreline.

The pans are the floor of a vanished sea. Lake Makgadikgadi once covered an area larger than Switzerland before it dried out tens of thousands of years ago, leaving Sua (Sowa) Pan, Ntwetwe Pan and the smaller Nxai Pan as its residue; the largest single pan is close to 5,000 square kilometres on its own, and Sua sits at about 890 metres, the lowest point of the basin. Look closely and the old lake is still legible: raised beaches, grassy islands and granite outcrops that were once headlands.

The most remarkable of those outcrops is Kubu Island, a ridge of granite rising out of Sua Pan and crowded with ancient baobabs whose silver trunks glow at dawn and dusk. It is protected in its entirety as a national monument and regarded as sacred by local people; archaeologists have recorded a dry-stone wall up to 1.25 metres high and 344 circular stone cairns there, and stone tools from the surrounding region are older than our own species. Camping on the island is run for the benefit of the local community.

Then the rains come. Between roughly December and April the pans hold shallow water, and the landscape that looked lifeless turns into one of Africa's great wildlife spectacles: tens of thousands of zebra and wildebeest leave the Boteti River in the west and move out onto the fresh grass of the pans, followed by predators. Sua Pan becomes one of only two breeding grounds of the greater flamingo in southern Africa, protected in part by the community-run Nata Bird Sanctuary. As the water evaporates the herds drift back to the Boteti, and the white silence returns.

Getting there

Letlhakane is the nearest town, about 100 km away; the pans are usually approached from Nata, Gweta or Maun, along the main road that crosses the region between Nata and Maun, which also gives access to Makgadikgadi Pans and Nxai Pan national parks. The nearest international airport is Maun International Airport (MUB), roughly 180 km from the pans. Kubu Island lies off-road on Sua Pan and is reached via Mmatshumo in the Boteti district; a four-wheel-drive vehicle is essential, and the pan surface becomes impassable when wet.