Kalahari Diaries — Chronicling 15 years of Kalahari Desert journeys

Through vivid journal entries and striking photography, Allen Zimbler offers a glimpse into one of humanity’s oldest societies — their deep knowledge, egalitarian spirit, and harmony with nature. Both a personal travelogue and a cultural record, this memoir is a testament to resilience, respect and the urgent need to preserve endangered traditions. Here is an excerpt.

Heart of the Kalahari

Day 1

520km away from sunrise in Johannesburg, the heat had reached 42ºC when we crossed the Botswana border at Lobatse. The ubiquitous domestic cattle of the earlier stages of our journey gave way to mongoose, warthog and baboons. Time passed quickly. Rain about a month before left foot-long grasses, but the sand was very dry. We made good progress towards our evening halt at Sekoma Pan on a dry, red-brown sand road lined with soft, yellow-tufted flowers of gum arabic against the burnt green of the bushveld.

I had already driven 330km the day before in my own car from Johannesburg to Izak’s farm in Geysdorp, near Delareyville in the north-western Transvaal, to help pack and prepare the vehicle, one of his low-ratio, four-wheel drive, long wheelbase International trucks rebuilt into a half-bus, half-truck by Izak in his own workshop and painted a dull light green. He had about five of these vehicles and he called this version the “half-track” for some reason, although with his broadly Afrikaans-accented English, that may well have been “truck”. (For years afterwards, my own pronunciation of all the botanical names I learnt from Izak was in heavily accented English, leading me to misspell many of them in my earlier years of visiting the Kalahari.)

I sit in the young night after a massive red sunset (I was too busy to pay much attention while we were unloading the vehicle and setting up camp) and now watch a bright, yellow-orbed moon rising through the dark, twisted branches of the thorn trees, the sound of crickets filling the star-sparkled darkness, moths and flies and beetles flitting and flying around my light.

Day 2

We left at 08:30 after packing up the vehicle again (tents, stretchers, mattresses, sleeping bags, kitchen and eating equipment and utensils, food, water cans, washbasins, folding tables, camp chairs, luggage, all carefully and tightly packed in the back of the truck, where the tools and spare vehicle parts remained, and in the custom-built roof compartment) and drove through Sekoma Pan on a white sand road bordered by low bush scrub, the temperature in the morning reaching 30ºC. Mongoose scuttled for cover and a bateleur eagle swooped past, the white flashes under its wings tilting from one side to the other. A small tortoise crawled slowly across the sand road — we narrowly missed making paste of it. We stopped for water at Mabutsane, where two ground squirrels darted away into the bush, and the borehole pump was not working. According to Izak, the Botswana government had asked all South African supervisors to leave. Without them, the pumps and equipment had stopped working — there simply wasn’t enough local expertise to maintain them. We would now have to drive the whole day to find water.

It was very hot and dusty, with the wind having been blowing for some days. But still there was no rain. One cannot conceive of the importance of rain here. People sit waiting for it in whatever shade they can find throughout the long, hot Kalahari summer.

Izak churned the vehicle through deep sand, the steering wheel juddering wildly. On the rare occasion that a vehicle passed us from the opposite direction, we scrambled to wind the windows closed against the clouds of red dust that would billow up in its wake. Eventually, we gave up on this because it was too hot in the vehicle without air flowing in, and we surrendered to the taste and smell of the dust — it went everywhere.

We passed numerous broken-down vehicles on the way. We came across one expensive new Land Rover from the health department, whose passengers had sat the whole night in the road because they had not turned their reserve petrol tank to the “on” position. They had, however, made a partial assault on the engine before giving up. Izak observed “Dis die verskil tussen krag en verstand.” (This is the difference between force and understanding.)

Steenbok and hartebeest were in evidence, and we passed by an open yellow grass plain dotted with trees, indicating a salt pan nearby. There was cloud in the west. If it does not change, I thought, there will be rain today.

Two adult ostriches crossed the road ahead of us with about eight chicks. Pulling to a sudden halt, Izak and I leapt out of the vehicle and, charging wildly across the desert scrub after the chicks, scattering now in all directions, caught one each, with difficulty, for photographs. We then let them go.

At 14:45 we reached Kang on the Tropic of Capricorn with the temperature at 40ºC. The afternoon was oppressive and exhausting — the air coming into the vehicle through its open windows was dusty and desiccating; we felt half dead in the heat. The road west was heavy going — an unending stretch of miles and miles of deeply rutted tracks, sometimes obscured by beds of treacherous, soft shifting sand — until the rain came. Finally, it fell from a dark sky with glittering freshness — not enough for the desert, but enough to cool our parched feelings.

I sat on the roof of the lurching vehicle in my shorts until I was soaked and freezing against the rush of air, a moment of incredible joy, a dark sky with sun shining through, the bush glistening as far as the eye could see in this African heartland, and a fresh green smell — I was ecstatic. We passed through patches of delicate white shrubs that resembled soft brushes, a lavender-like perfume drifting in the cool, wet air.

The sun reappeared and I was soon dry, but clean and fresh, like the plants. A white-backed vulture, unfolding at our approach, lifted its four-foot wingspan off the road and, a short distance later, a boomslang made a slow crossing, quite unconcerned about us.

And the Bushmen! The first warm greeting in Botswana by a woman and some children herding cattle near Lone Tree. I felt like I was coming home. In truth, it was hardly “coming home”, but it seemed like a return to the inexplicable and incredible spiritual connection I had experienced with them on my first meeting just two years before.

Excitement and fuss and Bushmen exchanging warm and smiling greetings — always smiling. Eager hands to help with water filling, an old, wrinkled woman in skins from the Central Kalahari, a young child throwing stones at cattle and laughingly retreating to his mother, people crowding for cigarettes and smiling. DM

Kalahari Diaries is published by Paul Holberton Publishing. It is available to purchase from local retailers.