Makgadikgadi Salt Pans
If you look at the direct flight path of AirLink’s Joburg to Kasane route, you will notice that it is a straight line over the landscape of Botswana. The flight time is around 110 minutes, and about two thirds of the way through the flight, if you look out of the window, you will see a strange white patch on the earth. In summer, it is a startling body of water in an otherwise arid area. And it is not small – in fact you fly over it for quite a few minutes… These Makgadikgadi Pans are apparently visible from the moon.
Makgadikgadi Pans are the largest salt pans in the world. This collection of salt flats covers an area of more than 30 000 km². Its sheer size surpasses the Bolivian Salar de Uyuni salt pan – which is the largest continuous pan in the world. These huge salt-encrusted pans are, however, all that remain of the massive Lake Makgadikgadi, an ancient lake which was 30 metres deep and once covered as much as 80,000 km². Formed approximately 2 million years ago, the lake was 30 m deep – fed by the Okavango, Zambezi and Cuando Rivers which once emptied into its enormous basin. Plate tectonics caused the feeding rivers to be cut off, and the rest, as they say, is history. This ancient shifting of the earth’s plates left us a truly magnificent, magical feature… Makgadikgadi is technically not a single pan, but many pans with sandy desert joining them. The largest is the Sua (Sowa) pan, followed by the Ntwetwe and Nxai Pans.
The better-known Sua Pan (which is home to the legendary Kubu Island / Lekhubu) is the eastern pan, extending roughly southwards from the town of Nata (which is in its northeast corner). On the southern shore is the village of Mosu; to the north lies the Maun-Nata road. The western boundary is a thin strip of grassland, which divides it from Ntwetwe Pan. Sua is sometimes spelt ‘Sowa’, which means ‘salt’ in the language of the local San people. This mineral residue dominates the geology and ecology of the pan.
Whereas a long time ago salt was laboriously collected from the pan surface by the San and carried away on donkeys, today it is mined by Botswana Ash (Pty) Ltd (Botash), which today is owned, at 50% shareholding each, by the Government of the Republic of Botswana and Chlor Alkali Holdings (Pty) Ltd, a South African owned company and a member of the Bud Chemicals and Minerals group of companies. They began operating in April 1991 and today Botash’s production capacity for soda ash is 300 000 tons per annum and for salt is approximately 650 000 tons per annum (which includes the variants chemical grade, food grade coarse salt, and food grade fine salt).
The Nata River feeds the Sua Pan from the northeast (bringing the rains from Zimbabwe) and, in good years, it floods from December to April with shallow, warm water. Where this fresh water of the river meets the saline pan, a brackish delta of silted reedbeds has formed which is now protected within the Nata Sanctuary – an area of 230 km². In summer, this corner of the pan attracts huge concentrations of breeding waterbirds, which often include up to 250 000 flamingos. It is one of only three nesting places for flamingo in Africa, and it has been recognized by UNESCO as one of the largest breeding sites of flamingo in the world.
Speaking of large numbers, when the first drops of the summer rains begin to fall, the zebra throng together and start to move south, in their thousands, across the scrublands. As the summer rains gain momentum and fresh grass appears on the pans, some 30,000 zebras will congregate to give birth and graze. The predators obviously follow the zebras, which can lead to some superb sightings.
Only in 2012 did researchers confirm (through the use of tracking collars) that the zebras were completing an unexpectedly long return journey of over 1000 km each year. Until then, the zebras’ route through inaccessible parts of Botswana via the Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area had kept their movements largely hidden. But the story of these migrations is for another newsletter and will follow soon…
Ntwetwe Pan is the western twin of Sua. The old north–south trading route between Gweta and Mopipi crosses the centre of this pan, and the two famous isolated baobabs (Green’s Baobab and Chapman’s Baobab) that marked this route for early European explorers, including Livingstone who left his initials here, are still landmarks for travellers today.
The world-famous Bain’s Baobabs are located in the Nxai Pan National Park, which lies just north of the Maun-Nata road and adjoins Makgadikgadi Pans National Park on its northern border.
The idea of ‘magic’ is often a theme in my writing, particularly in reference to the wilderness. I find one of the most magical places to be the ancient system of the Makgadikgadi. If you ever have the opportunity (particularly if it is full moon), visit this place. It will remain with you for a lifetime…
Jacqui Ikin & The Cross Country Team