Central Kalahari and the Pans in Botswana (Video)

With Maun as our basecamp, we embark on two big Botswana adventures. We venture into the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, the most remote we’ve ever been in 12+ years of full-time vehicle travel. Though it is unfenced with predators like lions and leopards, a much smaller animal ends up being the most dangerous.

Then we take another trip to “the Pans,” adjacent national parks Nxai Pan and Makgadikgadi Pans. We camp underneath a baobab older than 1,000 years, put our Jeep on a hand-pulled ferry across a river, and get surprised by a game drive.

Watch now:

Botswana is stretching our skills as overlanders and we are out of our comfort zone, but that is where we are growing.

We are also breaking the myth that overlanding in Botswana parks requires reservations far in advance. We are making our reservations days beforehand. Though we have to shift some things around, with just a bit of flexibility we are able to camp everywhere we hope to.

Maun is the safari capital of Botswana. So even though the population is under 100,000, it has a surprising amount of infrastructure and resources available to us during our stay.

That includes a Starlink Mini. Our Gen 3 dish gets fried at a campground–we think because of a power surge–and we desperately need to replace it for our work commitments. This ends up being entirely possible, though the setting is a little funny. Eric inquires at a bustling grocery store in the middle of town, and the employee disappears mysteriously into a stock room. When he emerges with the dish, Eric has to go into the liquor store to make his payment. The fun never ends around here.

I know we keep using superlatives here in Africa: “the most challenging,” “the most remote,” etc. But this is really the way our year has unfolded, unintentionally. Everywhere we go has been successively “more” than the place we were before.

In our next video, the dial gets turned up to 11.

Without a doubt, we will be sharing our biggest overlanding adventure ever. And I don’t think that title will be beat for a long time. We hope you’ll stay tuned.

Thank you for being part of our drive around the world.

-B