Makgadikgadi Pans

Twelve thousand square kilometres of salt. The Makgadikgadi is the remnant of Lake Makgadikgadi, a vast super-lake that once covered northern Botswana to depths of more than 30 metres, larger than modern Lake Victoria. The lake dried out over thousands of years as tectonic shifts redirected the rivers that fed it, leaving behind one of the largest salt pan complexes on earth: a shimmering crust of sodium and potassium that stretches beyond the horizon and produces optical effects, mirages, false horizons, vanishing distance, found nowhere else in southern Africa. The two principal pans, Sua to the east and Ntwetwe to the west, are flanked by grassy fringes and dry savannah that operate on a sharply seasonal calendar.

During the dry season (May to October), the pans are a hard bone-white lunar landscape: completely flat, blinding under the noon sun, entirely silent. Visitors quad-bike across the salt, sleep in bedrolls on the open crust under unimpeded stars, and experience a landscape that has no equivalent in the rest of Africa. During the wet season (November to April), everything changes. Summer rains turn the surface pans into shallow lakes; the fringing grasslands erupt in nutritious pasture; and Africa's second-largest zebra migration arrives, 25,000 zebra and 10,000 wildebeest moving in from the surrounding Kalahari to calve on the new grass. Predators follow. Pelicans, flamingos sometimes in the tens of thousands, and the full waterbird suite occupy the temporary wetlands.

Kubu Island, a crescent of ancient granite topped with massive baobabs rising from the flat white salt, is the pans' most photographed feature and the spiritual heart of the wider landscape. Site of San rock art and prehistoric stone tools, Kubu has spiritual significance for the local communities that goes back millennia. There are no facilities on the island: no water, fuel, or food. Visitors bring everything in and take everything out. The reward is one of the most atmospherically mystical locations in Botswana.