Saturday, October 2, 2010

To the Makgadikgadi Pans and Back


It was a trip of Note....THe Makgadikgadi salt pans never disappoint. Starting from my good friends camp 'Meno a Kwena' we travelled south for about 100 km and stopped at an ancient village site, the site has produced some quite rare artifacts, on this stop we only found pottery fragment, but from 2 periods.
from here we proceeded north east up into the cattle post areas east of Rakops.
Its at the 5th cattle post that we site our 1st Meerkats, they are living near humans so bolt to their holes and are gone... We continue to a spot David knows will provide some shade for a lunch stop... Lunch is an excellent affair in true Meno style on a small rise overlooking the salt pans. From here we decide that the 2 vehicles should split up in order to cover more ground in are search for meerkats but as the heat rises into the top 30's we realise that the meerkats are in the burrows sheltering from the sun, by 4 p.m. its still very hot but now coming into the lower 30's and we site our kats' we keep a distance as these are very wild kats' but get good sighting, after 30 minutes we are driving out onto the moon like surface of the pan to make our camp and sleep out under a full moon. wow this is one of those 'empty box' moments ....