Cool style in Kalahari heat

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This was published 10 years ago

Cool style in Kalahari heat

The white tents of San Camp.

The white tents of San Camp.Credit: David Crookes

From a chic camp on a pristine salt pan, Helen Anderson finds a seemingly barren desert teeming with life.

In the furnace of the Kalahari Desert, on the edge of a salt pan, there are ostriches dancing on the horizon and palms rising from an ocean. The sudden appearance of a mediaeval jousting tent, pennants flapping in the heat waves, is odd, but no more trippy than the ant-sized elephants that crawl across this Dali-esque mirage.

As one, we blink - for the tent grows closer, and several more materialise beside towering fan palms. There is so little to focus on, it's distracting - while the desert we've crossed had stones and scrub, in front of us now lies the pristine white nothingness of the Makgadikgadi Pan, the bleached salty remains of an ancient super-lake in north-eastern Botswana. And from this surrealist mirage we step into the alternative universe of San Camp.

Looking out across the salt pan.

Looking out across the salt pan.Credit: David Crookes

Who knew such cool glamour could exist in such a hot place? Our startled silence is broken by warm Setswana greetings from khaki-clad staff bearing cold drinks and iced towels. And, for a moment, we might well be on a catwalk. "I would ask you to watch your step," says Ralph Bousfield, a fourth-generation African explorer, conservationist, owner of the family-run Uncharted Africa Safari Co and the quintessence of a dream guide and wilderness companion: handsome, funny, utterly charming and prodigiously well informed. "The ecosystem here is incredibly fragile - these grasses take years to recover - so step only on the paths you can see."

And so we sashay carefully into the main tent, a little Ralph Lauren, a little Indiana Jones. The cool cotton walls are lined with cabinets of rare treasures (Stone-Age tools, Bushmen poison arrows), quirky collectables (carved ostrich eggs, corkscrew kudu horns) and textured comforts. We wander past the lounge bar, the long dining table, the extravagantly carpeted and cushioned tea tent and past the yoga pavilion, to six very private, very white guest tents positioned in an arc around the rim of the salt pan. Part safari, part unpowered film set, they're breezy, heavily textured (canvas, cotton, leather, sisal) and pared back, with well-dressed four-poster campaign beds, old Persian rugs, family photos and wood-panelled bathrooms bearing solar hot water, bespoke toiletries and flushing toilets within handsome thunderbox thrones.

The camp is so romantic, the food so good and the view so mesmerisingly featureless it would be a pleasure to spend all day mirage-gazing between day bed and tea tent. But we rise before dawn, as lemon poppy-seed muffins exit the oven, and by the time the sun warms the desert stubble, we're walking behind a troop of meerkats foraging furiously for scorpions and grubs.

A pair of meerkats keep watch.

A pair of meerkats keep watch.Credit: Getty Images

There is much about this encounter that's remarkable. These four neighbouring troops are the only wild meerkats in the world that are habituated to the presence of humans, an achievement that's taken a decade of daily contact and a world of patience. Our presence is so non-threatening that when the troop takes a rest, prompting a sentry to seek a protective vantage, I sit on a stubbly dune and find a meerkat scampering up my back and onto my shoulder, then atop my head. Two curious kittens scratch gently at my trousers. "We haven't fed them or protected them, just lived with them for a long time," says Batshambi, who cycles out here every day to observe them. He's here when the meerkats group-hug each morning to warm up, when they race to tunnels on the approach of a martial eagle, when they fight a rival clan and defecate communally in triumph.

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This is perversely fascinating, but then the Kalahari - so harsh, so superficially lifeless - is perversely teeming with life, though not as we know it. With his brilliantly BBC narration and boyish enthusiasm, Bousfield points out incredible adaptations and only-in-Botswana phenomena on our game drives. We head-swivel from ground squirrels at nine o'clock, with tails that double as luxe parasols and outrageously large testicles that double as pouffes, to pronking springboks at two o'clock, to bizarre succulents at 11 o'clock with pharmaceutically exciting appetite-suppressing effects.

Kalahari Bushmen knew about the Hoodia 20,000 years before the pharma-giant Pfizer tried to synthesise its active ingredients. The supremely resourceful hunters - "humanity's oldest living relatives," Bousfield says - ate the spiny succulent to suppress hunger and thirst before long journeys with few provisions.

A local woman and her child.

A local woman and her child.Credit: Alamy

A community of Zu/'hoasi Bushmen lives close to the eccentric and wonderful Jack's Camp, named in honour of Ralph's late father. One afternoon we walk with them into the desert. Bousfield grew up with the Bushmen; he speaks their melodic language and they regard him as family. It's a rare privilege later to sit by their fire and listen as the women start a hypnotic chant and four shamans shuffle in a trance dance.

By night, there are even more surprises in the Kalahari - who knew the place is hopping after dark with kangaroo-lookalike rodents called (oddly) springhares?

Not all the surprises are biological. As we return to camp at dusk, a speck on the horizon materialises as a hilariously well-stocked pop-up bar, possibly the most fabulous cocktail "lounge" in all of Africa. The following night the glow of a campfire in the middle of nowhere materialises as a superb dinner party on the saltpan.

To reach our desert dinner date, we hare across the saltpan at dusk on quad bikes. This would be impossible in the wet season, when the pan fills with water, algae blooms, brine shrimp hatch and flamingos flock. This seems incredible as we follow our leader into the bone-dry darkness - and find another surprise.

We stop, walk a little way alone and lie down. Satellites wink overhead. The starry sky is amazing, but there's something else. I have never experienced such silence: immense, profound, pure. I'm aware for the first time that I have tinnitus, aware of my irregular heartbeat, aware of the prickle of tears in my eyes. Flat out on the crust of the Makgadikgadi salt pan in little landlocked Botswana, surrounded by nothing at all, I'm suddenly aware of everything.

Helen Anderson travelled courtesy of the Classic Safari Company, Uncharted Africa Safari Co. and Qantas.

FAST FACTS

Getting there Qantas has a fare to Johannesburg from Sydney (14hr non-stop, about 12hr on the return leg) for about $2180 low-season return, including tax. Melbourne passengers pay about the same and fly Qantas to Sydney to connect; see qantas.com.au. Air Botswana and South African Airways connect to Maun in north-west Botswana (1hr 25min), then a chartered light plane to San Camp (1hr).

Staying there A night at San Camp costs from $US1100 ($1046) a person twin share, including bush luxury accommodation, all meals and drinks, and unique guided activities, such as mingling with meerkats, desert quad-bike riding, game drives and walking with bushmen. San Camp reopens after the wet season in April until late October. Stays at San Camp can be combined with Uncharted Africa's other three desert camps and, for the ultimate adventure, with the company's award-winning mobile safaris in the Okavango Delta. Uncharted Africa is represented in Australia by The Classic Safari Company, based in Sydney. Phone 9327 0666, see classicsafaricompany.com.au.

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