Safari, Solitude and Salt

At Jack’s Camp on Botswana’s Makgadikgadi salt flats, Heather Richardson finds an unexpected amount of life surviving in a harsh, yet beautiful wilderness.

"What’s out there?” Jack Bousfield asked, gesturing out to the emptiness that sprawled beyond the village of Gweta. It was 1962 and Bousfield, a guide, hunter and adventurer, was exploring Botswana. “Nothing. Only idiots go there,” came the villager’s reply. “Fine,” thought Bousfield. “That’s the place for me.”

Bousfield spent many years out in that wilderness. He was a legendary safari guide, with his Swahili kikoi wrapped around his head, bushy white beard and almost-black, weather-worn skin. He was a record-breaking hunter, having killed around 53,000 crocodiles before he turned to guiding the likes of royalty and movie stars. That didn’t mean his style of safari was tame; his camps were determinedly free of frills, he’d sleep under the stars and he crashed his light aircraft multiple times – until the final, fatal occasion.

Today, Jack’s Camp – named after Bousfield by his son Ralph and co-founder Catherine Raphaely – still pays homage to Jack Bousfield’s safari style, but with more than enough luxuries to make it a comfortable resting place in such unforgiving environs. Ten khaki canvas tents are dotted around an island of palm trees on the salt pan. Inside the tents, guests will find Persian rugs, dark-wood décor, four-poster beds so high you have to climb stairs to slip between the cotton sheets, and copper outdoor (and indoor) showers. At night, in lieu of electricity, gas lamps provide illumination.

The camp’s museum of Botswanan artifacts, photographs and animal skeletons.

An oasis in a sea of salt

On our way to Jack’s Camp in a four-seater Mosquito plane, I looked down at one of the largest salt flats in the world; Lake Makgadikgadi was the size of Switzerland before it dried up several thousand years ago.

Touching down on the salt flat, we were met by our guide, Dabe, chicly attired in polished, pointed-toe boots, a khaki safari shirt and tight-fitting beige trousers. We drove straight to the mess tent for lunch, which we ate at a long, communal table with Jack’s Camp staff, including our host, the always-smiling bk. Around us was the camp’s listed museum of ancient Botswanan artifacts, black and white photographs and an array of animal skeletons.

After cooling off in the shaded pool that somehow maintained a bone-numbing temperature despite the sweltering heat, we dried off on the deck with a couple of cold beers, watching silently as three bull elephants came to the nearby watering hole. After they’d had their fill, they slowly ambled on, giving us an enquiring lift of their trunks as they passed us.

Later, after we’d had afternoon cake in the Moroccan-style tea tent, we embarked on one of Jack’s Camp’s signature tours with our fellow guests. With a nod to Jack himself, we wrapped scarlet kikois around our heads – with a little help from our deft-handed guides – clambered onto quad bikes and zipped off into what the guides described as the ‘great nothingness’.

Silence and solitude

As we put distance between us and the little island, the carpet of crunchy, white, sun-dried salt expanded out before us, a true wilderness, impressive in its sheer vastness. The kikois protected us from the dust that flew out behind the bike in front. Eventually we stopped, in the middle of nowhere.

The sun was dipping lower in the sky, casting a warm, apricot glow above the featureless horizon. “This is one of the few remaining places you can experience absolute silence,” said Harold, one of the guides from San Camp, Jack’s neighbouring sister property. “When people say, ‘the silence was deafening’, it’s because they can only hear the blood rushing in their ears. That’s the only sound here.”

Jack’s Camp is located on the starkly beautiful Makgadikgadi Pan.

Harold asked us to walk 100 paces in different directions, sit down and watch the sun set by ourselves. Once alone, I made myself comfortable and as soon as I finished shuffling, I noticed it: the silence. Like the world had been muffled. As I ‘listened’, the only thing I could hear was my body working, my blood pulsing. The sun dropped lower, the sky turning to a dusty rose and the salt pan to pale mauve. As the light faded, we each slowly got up and walked back to the bikes.

In the dusk, Harold reminded us how bad our sense of direction is in such a barren landscape. To prove his point, he set a backpack a distance in front of us. “Your task is to walk to the backpack,” he said. “Blindfolded.”

I was nominated as the guinea pig. As the blindfold was wrapped around my eyes, I decided my strategy would be confidence. I marched forward, trying to focus on a spot in the darkness to maintain a steady trajectory. I felt like I’d been walking for a long time, the only noises – my footsteps crunching through the salt crust and a slight breeze around my ears – disclosing nothing to my position, but I kept going. Suddenly, I heard Harold’s voice directly in front of me: “Stop!” I whipped off my blindfold, utterly confused. I was stood exactly where I’d started, having somehow walked in a perfect circle.

Jack's Camp pool deck.

Lessons in survival

The next morning, we went out for a walk with the Zu/’hoasi Bushmen, one of the world’s oldest surviving cultures. From the Western Kalahari, the community still live semi-traditionally, continuing to pass down knowledge of the land, but also learning English and going to school. The Bushmen know this land to an intimate degree and revealed a few of its secrets to us: a root that they dig up in droughts, squeezing water from its pulp, before carefully replanting it; an abandoned ostrich shell they use for their decorative beads; and the branches they use to make fire. In the evening, we were lucky enough to watch them perform a trance dance with their healer, something that one of the guides, Greg, told me he had only seen three times in as many years. The men stomped around the fire as the women clapped and sang. They continued long into the night after we went back to our tents.

One afternoon, Dabe took us out for a game drive to find the tiny lion cubs he thought were in a thicket, sheltering from the sun. Sure enough, as we drove into the area, he noticed a couple of wildebeest standing and staring in the same direction. Following their gaze, we found the two cubs, play-stalking each other in the tall grass. Their mother and another female were close by, in the shade.

Quad biking is a signature experience at Jack's.

Walking with the Bushmen allows a little insight into their semi-traditional lifestyle.

The Bushmen know this land to an intimate degree and revealed a few of its secrets to us."

Suddenly, we noticed a third lioness. Dabe recognised her: “She’s not from this group,” he said, reversing the truck out of the bush as the other lionesses immediately took off after her. As the two females chased the imposter, we sped along behind, watching them close in on her, swiping viciously at her hind quarters. Eventually, they reached the edge of their territory and launched into the lioness, dust billowing around the three of them, until the intruder lay down in submission, roaring, teeth bared, her eyes wide. They stood over her, not allowing her to get up. As our heart rates settled and we watched, Dabe told us that the outsider was actually related to the first two lionesses. Their untraditional pride meant they had no other females to hunt with and no dominant male. As such, survival is even tougher. “I hope they let her in,” Dabe said, watching the two lionesses finally walk away, leaving the third lying in the grass, waiting for her cue to get up and limp away. The bullying is often a rite of passage, necessary before lions will let an outsider join the pride.

As we drove away, we passed a family of bat-eared foxes, no doubt mightily relieved the charging lions had not been coming for them, and a solitary, brown hyena – the rarest of hyenas – waking up for a night of scavenging.

The next day we saw another threat to the lionesses, or at least their cubs: three young brothers who had just moved into the territory. The resident male – father to the cubs and a bigger, older and more experienced lion – was nearby. Each of the pale blonde lions, still with the faint, tan-coloured spots of youth, were alert, always looking around and resisting the urge to sleep through the heat of the day. They will eventually have to fight the large male, but it wasn’t to be during the time we spent with them.

The lionesses chased the intruder to the edge of their territory where she lay down in submission.

A short distance away, wildebeest and zebras streamed past, all but ignored by the distracted brothers. These parts are no stranger to such herds. The zebra migration is the second largest of its kind after the much more famous Great Migration of Tanzania and Kenya. Though the Serengeti and the Mara see greater numbers of animals, the Southern African zebra migration is longer than that of any other large mammal. Approximately 25,000 zebras journey 300 miles from Namibia to the Makgadikgadi Pans and back again, leading some to call the flats the ‘Serengeti of the south’.

As we drove away from Jack’s Camp at the end of our stay, we passed through the town of Gweta, where Jack Bousfield first gazed out to the wilderness into which ‘only idiots go’. What is out there? At first glance it may seem to be a ‘great nothingness’ offering a luxurious sense of real solitude and space – but a short stay reveals that there is much more to the Makgadikgadi, from ancient culture and fascinating geography to rare animals fighting for survival in this harsh, vast and eerily beautiful landscape.