Nxai Pan NP - Day 1

Arriving at South Gate

Up at 5am and gone by 6am, it would be a long drive to Nxai Pan from Gaborone; about 11 hours according to Google.

Considering many people would have taken Friday off to make it a 5 day long weekend, the road between Gaborone and Palapye - easily Botswana’s busiest road - was surprisingly quiet.

We figured that many people had taken the previous day afternoon off to get to their districts in time to vote today so it made for an uneventful drive.

A great surprise at the waterhole

From Palapye, through Serowe, Letlhakane and Rakops, it was the usual quiet drive with only the donkeys, cows and herds of elephants to look out for and just before 3pm we were turning off the main road into the Nxai Pan entrance. Parks fees were taken care of and a hello to Gerald, a parks guy that had helped us out last year when our canopy had come off our bakkie thanks the bad roads in Makgadikgadi, and we were starting the 35 km sandy, corrugated road to the campsite. An hour and 20 min later we arrived at the campsite. We checked in with the campsite attendants and went to put some of our stuff down. We had booked NX7 a campsite that is a bit away from the main ones with nice shade trees.

Buffalo herd at dusk

But when we got there we discovered the elephants had knocked down the 3 shade trees and the thought of spending the next 4 days in blazing heat didn’t appeal, so we made a quick stop back to the attendant to see if she could help change our campsite. With a promise from her to try to move us the next day, we headed to Nxai Pan’s only waterhole. We had heard that lions had been there 2 days ago which was better news than we expected. The last few times we’ve been there’s been hardly any sign of lions so we were looking forward to chasing them this time. Well, no chasing required. We arrived at the waterhole to find 2 lionesses with a fresh male kudu kill! It’s really not often that we get to a park and are rewarded with such a sighting - we were stoked.

Lion vs Elephant

We didn’t move anywhere for the rest of the afternoon drive. The lionesses didn’t eat from the carcass and we were shooting straight into the light as the sun went down but it was such an awesome scene, especially since there were other animals around. Being the main waterhole of Nxai Pan at the tail end of the dry season meant that all the animals had to come drink at some stage, lion or no. So besides the always present elephants, we had plenty of springbok, kudu, impala and ostriches for watch. Hi And the biggest surprise of all - buffalo. We cannot ever recall seeing buffalo in Nxai Pan but here a big breeding herd arrived to drink paying no attention to the lions. In fact we’re not even sure they noticed them until one of the lionesses stood up.

Black-backed jackal

After a quick stop and stare the buffalo carries on, possibly confident that they had the numbers on their side and could take on 2 lions.

Sunset gave us some nice silhouette shots before it was time to call it a day and head back to camp as the light got poor.

We got back to our camp and were pleasantly surprised to find the campsite lately empty so a nice quiet evening was anticipated. What we didn’t expect was the millions of small beetles swarming around as the light went. It was pretty hectic being constantly smacked in the face and torso by these little flying missiles and we hoped that this was just a temporary thing.

Giraffe silhouette

We set up our gas lamp and that attracted a lot of them away from us but it took about an hour before they disappeared to our relief. Although dinner was precooked chicken on rolls, we still lit a fire and relaxed under the sky of stars before making our way to bed, wondering if our luck would hold in the morning.