Makgadikgadi pan

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On paper this looked like the best part of the trip and it turned out to be pretty cool.

The Makgadikgadi pan is a large salt pan in the middle of the dry savannah of north-eastern Botswana, it is one of the largest salt flats in the world.

For most of the year it is covered with a dry salty clay crust and this is a very important piece of information to which I'll get back later.

We spent 2 or three nights here. When we got on the first day it was getting dark already, which didn't prevent us from trying one of the many local beers

yes... even here you can manage to get a cool beer when you need it the most. :-)

It was quite a nice lodge although instead of rooms they offered tents... large tents, but tents nonetheless. :-)

I had read somewhere you had to be careful with the scorpions and the snakes in that place so just to be sure I asked one of the employees at the lodge whether they had any scorpions or snakes and for our surprise he said...yes we have lots, you have to be careful...

After that reassuring response, Fran and I (we were sharing tent in that lodge) decided to take extra precautions so as soon as we got inside we checked the place out, all over, we even check inside the beds, undid them and did them again... Every time we went out or went to the toilet (which by the way was outside) we locked everything up and gave no chance to any snake or scorpion to get into our tent...

At this point I think is important to mention that not everyone was as cautions as we were, Luís and Victor (who were sharing the tent next door) had a couple of nice visitors when they came back from dinner and found a couple of scorpions in their tent... they didn't sleep much after that...

Dinner was nice

The following day we had an early morning, we were going to see the meerkats

We got into one of those typical 4x4 safari vehicles

and off we went to see the colony that was nearby, although along the way we managed to see a few zebra and wildebeest herds

And finally, we made it there... and there were lots... and you could get pretty close as you can see from these photos

That's how close we got to them!!

And below a couple of picture taken with a reflex camera with telescopic sight...
it really looks like taken out of National Geographic

But no, these photos were taken by Ina with her super-dupa camera. :-)