San Camp

San Camp offers the Earth, stripped naked. And, such restraint holds its own charms.

Six pale khaki canvas tents twinned with a dramatic location, combine to create an oasis of civilisation in what can be the harshest of stark environments. The result: One of the most romantic camps in Africa!

And this place could not be more different from everywhere. The camp is the Stewart Granger Memorial Collection of 1940s safari tents, with no running water nor electricity but with comfortable beds, cotton sheets, paraffin lamps, wonderful food and personal service. Bathrooms are en-suite with bucket showers and flushing loos.

Jack's Camp and San Camp are unique in that they are the only permanent camps to offer a chance to explore and understand the Kalahari. Our concession adjoins the Makgadikgadi National Park with its endless vistas of rolling golden grasslands. Desert palms line the horizon. Through the tent flaps, the Makgadikgadi Pans run over the horizon like the mother of all Norfolk beaches.

A relic of one of the world's largest super-lakes, the Makgadikgadi dried up thousands of years ago as a result of the continued shifting of the earth's crust. When the lake was formed, some five to seven million years ago, its shores were the setting for the mysterious transition from ape to human.

Venturing far into the centre of the Makgadikgadi, on 4wd quad bikes, we are able to explore remote archaeological sites, periodically discovering never-before-documented fossil beds of extinct giant zebra and hippo. The fact that you can travel across the pans at great speed and still arrive nowhere only underlines the pan's immensity. There is nothing out here. Absolutely nothing. No outcrops, no features, no grass, no trees, no sound but the crunch of your boots in the crust.

The Kalahari desert is its own universe. It is the only place where guests are virtually guaranteed to see the rare and elusive brown hyaena and be able to walk through the Kalahari with a gang of habituated but, wild meerkats (suricates)!