Few place names are as evocative as "the Kalahari". This miss-spelt Anglicism has come to represent the vastness of Africa's outback with all the romantic undertones of nomadic hunter-gatherers, lions and golden grasslands gently waving under the canopy of a limitless blue sky.

The Kalahari Desert stretches west of the eastern hardveld, covering 84% of the country. The Kalahari extends far beyond Botswana's western borders, covering substantial parts of South Africa, Namibia and Angola.

Desert', however, is a misnomer: its earliest travellers defined it as a 'thirstland'. Most of the Kalahari (or Kgalagadi, which is its Setswana name) is covered with vegetation including stunted thorn and scrub bush, trees and grasslands. The largely unchanging flat terrain is occasionally interrupted by gently descending valleys, sand dunes and large numbers of pans.

 

With little more than 100 to 200mm of rainfall per year, the fauna and flora in the Kalahari wages a daily struggle for survival. The Central Kalahari Game Reserve covering an area just under the combined size of Holland and Belgium, is truly immense, and the irony is that when it was declared in 1961 one of the primary purposes was not necessarily to protect the animals that lived in the area but to protect the people that lived there.