Five days in Kgalagadi — sand, lions, no fences

The sand is red and the sky is very large

The Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park sits in the Northern Cape on the South Africa-Botswana border, 960 kilometres from Cape Town and 1,000 kilometres from Johannesburg. It occupies 38,000 square kilometres of semi-arid Kalahari — red sand dunes, sparse Camel Thorn acacia, the two fossilised riverbeds of the Auob and Nossob rivers along which the park’s main roads run, and a sky that is genuinely, oppressively, enormously present in a way that it is not in the Kruger lowveld or the Cape mountains.

We drove from Cape Town in September 2023, which is spring in the Northern Cape and the beginning of the wildflower bloom in the Namaqualand to the west. The drive takes eleven to twelve hours, which requires either a full day’s driving or an overnight in Upington, the large Northern Cape town that is the last proper supply point before the park. We stopped in Upington.

The practical realities first

Kgalagadi requires a 4x4 for the interior roads. The main Auob river road is graded sand and accessible to high-clearance 2WDs in dry season, but many of the loop roads — including the 4x4-only Wilderness Trails that are the most spectacular sections — require proper all-wheel drive and aired-down tyres. We drove a hired Toyota Land Cruiser 70 series, booked specifically for this trip.

Fuel is available at Twee Rivieren (the main entrance camp, South African side) and at Mata-Mata on the Auob. The Nossob camp on the Botswana border has fuel but supply is unreliable. Carry extra in approved containers. The park roads in the interior can leave you 100 kilometres from the next fuel stop with no mobile signal and no other vehicles in sight. This is not a hypothetical.

Accommodation must be pre-booked. SANParks runs Twee Rivieren, Mata-Mata, and Nossob camps, plus a series of wilderness camps — smaller, more remote, with fewer facilities — that require advance booking many months ahead in peak season. September is peak season. We booked in March for September.

The lions of the Auob

Kgalagadi lions are different in character from Kruger lions, in a way that is noticeable rather than subtle. They are accustomed to fewer vehicles, they are less habituated to human presence, and they behave with more wariness — which means they are harder to find but more interesting to watch when found.

We found a coalition of two young males on day two, early morning, walking the crest of a red sand dune on the Auob flood plain. They had not yet eaten — the gait was deliberate, the head carried low — and they were moving parallel to the river course in the direction of a gemsbok herd we had passed fifteen minutes earlier. We drove ahead and parked. We turned off the engine.

The lions came over the dune crest fifty metres from the car, saw the gemsbok, and stopped. The younger male lowered his body. The gemsbok herd moved. The lions walked closer. The stalking continued for twenty-two minutes. The hunt failed — the gemsbok scattered upwind before the male could close within sprint range — and the lions sat in the sand and looked at the horizon with the specific expression of animals that have just used significant energy and obtained nothing.

We saw lions on four of the five days. This is not unusual for Kgalagadi in the dry season, when the river courses are the only reliable water sources and predators concentrate around them.

The thing that went wrong

On day three, approaching Nossob from the Auob via the internal road, we drove over a section of soft sand that had been made softer by a night of dew and came off the track into the dune. The vehicle high-centred with the undercarriage resting on sand, all four wheels spinning. This is recoverable with a sand ladder, which we had, and with patience and a reduction in tyre pressure. It took two hours and the assistance of another vehicle that came along forty minutes into the recovery — a German family in a Land Rover who had a second sand ladder and who waited with professional calm while we extracted ourselves.

The lesson is simple and the same every time: if the sand looks different from the road surface you have been driving on, check it on foot before you commit the vehicle. We did not check. The sand was different. This is a standard Kgalagadi mistake and recoverable with the right equipment, but not without significant time cost.

What Kgalagadi delivers

The specific quality of the Kgalagadi that cannot be replicated elsewhere in South Africa is the absence. There are no lodges with pools and dinner menus. There are no helicopter trips and no spa. There is no mobile signal in most of the park. There is no queue at the gate because the park is so far from any city that the visitors who come have committed to being here. In three days on the Nossob road, we counted six other vehicles.

The gemsbok herds, the black-maned Kalahari lions (the black mane being a subspecies characteristic specific to the Kalahari population), the bat-eared foxes at their burrows at dusk, the kori bustards walking the open sandy flats — these are things that exist here in concentration because the Kgalagadi is remote enough that the ordinary South African tourism industry has not fully arrived. That will change. Go while it is still this quiet.