05/08/2016
Kalahari - Botswana
The parched alter ego of the Okavango Delta, the Kalahari is a primeval landscape, recalling in stone, thorns and brush the earliest memories of the human experience. This impression of a land where time began finds voice in the hot winds and snap of thorn bush under a San tracker’s feet in the Kalahari. It is the timeless roar of a Kalahari lion resonating across the still desert air. It is a valley that cuts through the desert’s heart and follows the path left by ancient rivers that long ago disappeared into the dust.
The Tswana call this the Kgalagadi: Land of Thirst. And this is indeed dry, parched country. By some accounts, the Kalahari has the largest volume of sand of any desert on earth. Such statistics can be misleading – this is no desert of rolling sand dunes. But this is undoubtedly a land painted by a sand palette: blood and mud reds and bleached bone yellow; dust that bites you back as you taste it in the morning. But come the nights, this hard end of the colour wheel shifts into its cooler, sometimes white-cold shades: indigo nights that fade to deepest black, and blue stars ice-speckling the impossibly long horizon. Indeed, the local San insist that here you can hear ‘the stars in song’ behind the dark.
The Kalahari’s 1.2-million-sq-km basin stretches across parts of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Angola, Zambia, Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe and South Africa, and in Botswana it also includes places like the Tsodilo Hills and Makgadikgadi Pans. But in this section here we focus on the chain of parks and small towns that cut through the centre and south of the country.
