BOTSWANA
This is where camps like the luxurious Jack’ s Camp, San Camp and a handful of seasonal migration camps pitch up roughly between December and March, offering daytime game drives, quad-bike trips to the meerkat colonies( some of these cuties will even use your head as a lookout, which is beyond charming), and walks with San guides who read the ground with extreme accuracy. The nights, though, are the reason most people remember the Makgadikgadi for the rest of their lives. With essentially no ambient light for hundreds of kilometres, the pans act like a mirror, and the Milky Way comes down to meet itself.
A little further north, Nxai Pan National Park offers the other end of the migration experience. This is classic Kalahari country: fossil pans fringed by a ring of enormous baobabs( the famous Baines Baobabs sit in a neighbouring pan, still recognisable from Thomas Baines’ s 1862 paintings – a useful reminder of how little things have changed out here). By January the zebra herds are on the short new grass en masse, and with them come the Kalahari’ s distinctive dark-maned
Name: Burchell’ s zebra( a type of plains zebra) Scientific name: Equus quagga burchellii Where they live: Botswana, South Africa, and Namibia Habitat: Open grasslands, savannas, and light woodland Stripes: Wider, lighter stripes than other zebras; some have“ shadow stripes”( faint brown stripes between black ones) Body features: Often less striping on the legs and belly compared to other zebra types Social behaviour: Lives in small family groups( one male, several females, and their young) Movement: Known for seasonal migrations in search of food and water Predators: Lions, hyenas, and sometimes crocodiles Lifespan: Around 20 – 30 years in the wild Conservation status: Not endangered; part of the widely distributed plains zebra population
10 | WINTER 2026 • rovesa. co. za