Makgadikgadi & Nxai Pans

About this destination

Open skies and the last great migration

The Makgadikgadi and Nxai Pans are the remnants of an ancient superlake — a vast, once-flooded basin that dried up thousands of years ago, leaving behind a landscape of shimmering salt flats, fossil shorelines, and wide open sky unlike anything in the Okavango.

The Makgadikgadi is one of the largest salt pan networks in the world. In the dry season, the pans are bleached white and almost totally bare — hauntingly beautiful, and home to meerkats, brown hyena, and massive flocks of flamingo at the seasonal water pools. In the green season, the transformation is total: the plains flood with fresh grass, and one of Africa's remaining great migrations unfolds as tens of thousands of zebra and wildebeest move across the pans.

Nxai Pan National Park, connected to the Makgadikgadi in the north, offers an entirely different experience: open grassland, ancient baobab trees, and some of the most reliable cheetah viewing in southern Africa. The famous Baines' Baobabs — a small cluster of ancient trees immortalised in watercolour by the explorer Thomas Baines in 1862 — stand unchanged in the south of the park.

This is Botswana's most otherworldly landscape, and one that rewards the curious traveller who looks beyond the Delta. The solitude and scale of the pans are genuinely difficult to describe — you simply have to stand in the middle of them.