how it all pans out

This past weekend, I went up to the Makgadikgadi salt pans again. I had gone up there with two friends in early May, but I wanted to see the landscape of the pans a second time. The lodge at which we stayed organized all the activities, and I didn't mind doing the village tour, the sorghum beer-tasting, and the lunch of dijo tsa setswana ('traditional food') all over again. This time we got also got to see a colony of meerkats and to ride quad bikes across the pans to our campsite. For part of our journey by truck, we drove along the 'missionary road', carved out (so our guide said) by Robert Moffat and his son-in-law, David Livingstone. (Yes, he of the I presume fame.)

The pans are like mud flats; the ground is covered in dried mud that looks something like shattered pottery and feels something like very rough pumice to bare feet. If you go out far enough into the pans, you can't see their edges. All you see around you is this vast, almost lunar landscape. The campsite, consisting of a fire, some camp chairs, a table, bedrolls, and a canvas loo set apart from the site, had been prepared by the time we got there.

In addition to me and my friends C and M and our guide, there was a Batswana couple from Gabs with us for the camping, and I really enjoyed their company. We sat around a campfire in what looked and felt like the middle of nothingness. We ate a delicious dinner cooked over a fire: beef, roasted potatoes and squash, 'beer bread' (which I adore) and tomato salad. Then we went to sleep snuggled up in bedrolls.

Because C had done all the driving, I was awake enough to look at the stars for a while before I drifted off. I woke a few times in the night (at least once because my face was freezing and I needed to pull the covers over my head). The first time I woke, I noticed that a constellation--Scorpio, maybe, or part of Virgo?--that had been directly overhead when I went to sleep was lingering over the western horizon. The second time I woke, the moon had risen.

Clever girl that I am, I managed to leave the memory card for my camera at home. And I don't have the equipment to take pictures of the night sky in any case. But here are a few pics from when I was up there in May.