Makgadikgadi - a slice of the pans
“Things that are hard to bear are sweet to remember.”
Would I choose to get lost in the middle of nowhere, with no phone signal, a broken GPS and dead ends everywhere? Hell, no! Is camping without shade, ablutions or water my favourite thing to do? You guessed it - no! I don’t know who likes driving through cratered tracks and gnarly bushes that scrape your car at every turn. And I sure don’t know who enjoys working till late at night and getting up before the crack of dawn.
We did all those things and more at the Makgadikgadi Pans. They were hard to bear then but sweet to remember as I remember our experiences.
When I speak of the Makgadikgadi Pans, I refer to an ecosystem that covers over 30,000 sq km. Indeed, we only experienced a slice of this ecosystem, at Kubu Island, Nwetwe Pan and Nxai Pans, which I’ll write about in another post.
If you take nothing away from my experience, remember this advice about getting to Kubu Island.
“Take the road from Mmatshumo, and don’t believe your GPS if it says otherwise.”
The baobabs of Kubu island can often take your breath away
Of course, we didn’t follow that advice and veered into a dirt road far earlier than we needed to. The rest, as they say, is history. We went from gravel to sand roads and back for about three hours and a hundred-odd kilometres. The GPS made us feel like we were within touching distance of Kubu Island, but roads don’t come in straight lines, and there was no road to our destination. The more we lost, the more we invested our egos in our chosen tracks. I don’t know how often we said to each other, “I’m sure this is the right road,” and even when the road got dodgy after a while, we kept trying to make it work.
Don’t repeat our mistake. The simplest way to get to Kubu Island from Letlhakane is to pass by Orapa and head to Mmatshumo. There’s an office of the Gaing O Community Trust at the village and a clearly signposted dirt and sand track that goes for 40-odd kilometres before you hit the Kubu Island reception. Follow the signs, and you’ll save yourself the stress. But yeah, you won’t have our story to tell.
Kubu Island is one of the most magical places I’ve been to. It’s an island of granite rock on the southwestern side of the Sua Pan. Lekhubu, as the local name goes, means rock outcrop. While the granite formation is stunning, the island gets its otherworldly feel from the centuries-old baobabs scattered across the rocks. Everywhere you look, there’s a landscape photograph waiting. You can shoot early in the morning, late afternoon and late into the night. And the night skies? They’re to die for. If you’re at Kubu Island during a period of Milky Way visibility, good luck catching your breath when you look up at the starry skies.
But photography isn’t easy, and landscape photography isn’t easy either. If wildlife photography depends on reaction times and animal behaviour, landscape imagery depends on light, atmospheric conditions, skies and your ability to compose images that cut away nature’s inherent clutter. When working at night, everything’s slower, and the conditions are against you. Lighting is complicated. You can’t see a thing, so you’re composing blind. You want to stay safe, so you watch every step. Everything happens in slow motion. Before you know it, the skies move. If you’ve been up early to photograph the golden light, been out midday to scout compositions and stayed out in the late afternoon to catch the last rays of the sun, you're running on empty by the time night falls.
We knew all this, so initially, we’d planned three nights at Kubu Island. In hindsight, even that may have been short in a place full of photographic opportunities. We only had one full day at Kubu because we cut short our stay to see the meerkats near Nwetwe Pan, and we lost most of our first night because of our misadventures with the GPS. With that said, here are some images from our time at Kubu Island.
My friend, Anuroop, scopes out the baobabs at Lekhubu
Golden light bathes Kubu Island
Camping at Kubu Island
The facilities at Kubu Island are pretty basic. Gaing O Community Trust runs 13 campsites that form a ring on the west side of the granite island. There’s no water, no power and no ablutions. You get a few long drop toilets between campsites, not for the faint of heart, sight or smell. If you know what I mean.
We stayed at Johana 7, which we quite liked for the solitary baobab at the site. It makes for an excellent nightscape foreground.
Camp life at Kubu Island
From Kubu Island, we headed to Planet Baobab at Gweta. Our target? The world-famous meerkats from the Dynasties series. Before I tell you about the meerkats, let me tell you about the route to Gweta. If you are making this journey, I suggest speaking to people at the Kubu Island reception to learn about the most accessible route for the season you’re visiting. Since we were visiting during the late dry season, we cut through the pans, heading north until the veterinary control fence. After crossing the fence, it was a matter of driving alongside the barbed wire until we hit the big, broad pans. If there is one, the trick is to keep going in the general direction of Gweta, which is north-west. Diverging roads may seem confusing, but they usually join up. We kept going decisively and hit Planet Baobab well before noon.
Planet Baobab is part of the Uncharted Africa group, which also runs the ultra-luxurious Jack’s Camp, San Camp, and Camp Kalahari. It’s also part of the cheat code to have an affordable meerkat interaction. Uncharted Africa employs naturalists who monitor the meerkat colony every day. Thanks to them, guests at all of Uncharted Africa’s properties can catch sight of these critters.
The meerkat cheat code
The luxury camps charge an eye-watering tariff that most of us can’t afford ($800 - $11,000 per person per night). In contrast, Planet Baobab offers an overnight experience at the pans, where you can visit the meerkats and then sleep out under the stars.
Let me be clear - the experience isn’t cheap. It’s still $280 per person. Compared to the stay at luxury camps, however, Planet Baobab’s experience feels like a bargain. You get one good session with the meerkats - make what you will of it.
Our meerkat interaction was the stuff of magic, and I don’t say this lightly. I’ve been with meerkats before, but unfortunately, a mid-trip hard-drive loss left me with no photos to show for the experience. My experience with these social mongooses in the pans, though, well made up for that loss. I must rate the experience as one of my top 10 wildlife experiences. Meerkats dislike extreme cold and extreme heat, so late afternoons offer you the best chance of observing them during the golden hour. Observe them; we did.
Unlike the meerkats you may bump into while blundering through various desert habitats, the meerkat colony we interacted with have been a research subject for almost two decades. They treat humans like furniture and go about their business like we don’t exist. Two hours flew by as the meerkats dug around for food, pranced around and occasionally stood up on their hinds and tails to play sentinels. I’ve rarely had so much fun observing a bunch of social animals. Here are some images from our experience.
Meerkats at their burrow during the golden hour
A meerkat scurries across the pan
Photography advice
Scouting locations and figuring out what to shoot are the most challenging parts of visiting Kubu Island. We had to spend much time driving around the rock to know where we’d spend our mornings and afternoons. And you can’t shoot at night unless you’ve scouted compositions during the day. To make it easy for you, I’ve compiled a map of Kubu Island that’ll lead you to the locations you must check out when you visit. Once you get to those spots, you can decide when to photograph them and how to compose images that match your style.
Before I end, a few words of advice about Kubu Island and the meerkat experience.
You can’t just walk around the granite rocks to bring your compositions to life. It often takes a car to get from one location to another in good time to chase the light. I reckon you’ll find it hard to create more than one or two decent images each session because while the light is beautiful, it only lasts about 40-odd minutes. So, get to a spot you like before the light is good and milk the location as much as possible before moving shop.
The night here is pitch dark. Scout your nightscapes during the day so you can move around decisively at night. Use Photo Pills or Sun Surveyor to plan your exposures and predict the Milky Way's visibility. Be sure to know your camera settings inside and out so you won’t have to fumble with your controls in the darkness.
When working at night, be sensitive to the ethos of the place. You’re there for the darkness. Don’t overpower it with headlamps, torches and flashes. You’ll inevitably need these artificial lights, but use them only in short bursts to enjoy the primaeval experience of being out there in the dark. Don’t forget, you’re always close to one of the campsites. Too many flashing lights can also ruin other campers’ experience of the place.
As for the meerkats, talk to your guide to give yourself the most time with them. You’ll reach them by late afternoon, and they’re active right until sundown when the light’s stunning. Usually, some other guests will head to the quad biking experience on the pans, so you can request your guide to leave you with the meerkats and pick you up at sunset.
If you’re up for some hit-or-miss opportunities with the meerkats, keep your wide-angle lens within reach. The meerkats are rather bold and come within touching distance. You can get some dramatic shots if you stick with a wide-angle perspective. I chose to keep things simple with a telephoto lens, but I’ll try more wide-angle images the next time I photograph meerkats.
As I say this, I might sound like a broken record, but both Kubu Island and the meerkat experience need time. If it fits your plan and budget, spend 4-5 nights at Kubu Island to enjoy the place without stress and to create a nice set of landscape and nightscape images. A couple of meerkat sessions will also allow you to experiment with different perspectives. Most people don’t observe meerkats every day. You’ll learn a lot about their behaviour in the first session. The second session will give you a chance to capitalise on that knowledge.
Whatever you do, make the pans a part of your Botswana experience. I do not doubt that you’ll enjoy every moment there. And if you have a misadventure like ours, you’ll probably remember it fondly as you retell the story much like I do now.