The best way to get across the saltpan is to fly like the kites and the crows, otherwise it is a quad bike. This is low-impact trespass. Setting off early in convoy, bikes carry bedrolls, food and water, a long-range desert patrol driving Indian-fashion. Here you lose contact with time, space and direction.
You hum along, travelling without perceptively moving, while all the power and conceit of commerce and position evaporate, the delicate network of friends and plans and diaries, all the human hierarchy of achievement and aspiration ebb away.
As the sun begins to drop, a smudge on the horizon - Kubu Island! A 2.7 billion year old granite fist that rises unexpectedly out of the vast and empty salt pan flatness of Sowa Pan.
The camp staff will get there first; boiling a cauldron of water bubbles for the shower suspended from a tree. The dining table is set and the drinks tray, with Beefeater, and Georgian fobs on bottle labels, stands waiting. A mobile drinks chest is set up by our trusty team and Guests are able to lean back in their safari chairs while toasting their toes around the roaring camp fire.
Dinners are three course culinary extravaganzas, laid out on white damask table linen, decked with fine glassware and bone-handled silver. An embarrassment of riches in this extraordinary and desolate domain! The next two days are spent exploring the fascinating and surreal surrounding area.
The Makgadikgadi was once a great inland sea. The remaining salt pans are the size of Switzerland, a fact that is difficult for many to comprehend... Around the edges are incongruous dunes of seashells, thousands of miles from any coast. There is the clock-stopping frisson of picking up something that was last touched 10,000 years ago by a man who looked over the horizon and could not imagine that his chipping this flint would lead to jumbo jets and skyscrapers. There are tiny beads, glass and stone and ostrich shell that the bushmen used as decoration for thousands of years. Some are Phoenician and Roman and even Chinese; beads were currency for salt and the salt cakes that glisten like icing sugar on the pan and have been traded by the Bushmen for millennia. 30 000 flamingo fledge in the vicinity when water is good and although the mud mound nests are deserted at the times of the year when we are able to visit Kubu, they are still an extraordinary sight.
After two days of luxurious desolation, Guests mount their quad bikes to journey back to Jack's for an evening of surreally contrasting sumptuous relaxation! The most important aspect of these trips is that it gives the Guests a chance to truly understand the Makgadikgadi Pans. There is the sense of true adventure and active involvement. The Kalahari is a place of extremes and metaphor and allegory, it shuffles your deck, rearranges the cerebral furniture, messes up your priorities... It is the perfect unrest cure!
MOBILE SAFARI EXPEDITIONS
