Nxai Pan National Park

Thomas Baines arrived at this cluster of baobabs in 1862, set up his equipment, and painted them in oils. The painting still exists. I had seen it reproduced in a book before I left, and I carried a vague image of it into the park without really expecting the trees to match. They did match. Not approximately, not symbolically — exactly. Same branching, same arrangement, same impossible bulk. The largest of the seven trees has a circumference large enough that five adults with outstretched arms cannot encircle it, and it was already ancient when Baines stood here a hundred and sixty years ago. When you are looking at these trees, you are looking at organisms that were old before the industrial revolution began.

Nxai Pan itself is a fossil lake — the remnant of a body of water that dried up many thousands of years ago, leaving a flat white surface of calcite crust that stretches for several kilometers in every direction from the baobabs. In the dry season, this pan is hard and white and almost featureless, and the light bouncing off it creates the same perspective-destroying flatness I experienced at the Makgadikgadi. But Nxai Pan is smaller, more intimate, ringed by tree lines on three sides that give the landscape a stage-like quality. You feel like you are looking at something contained, purposeful — a theater for animals rather than an accidental emptiness.

In the wet season, the transformation is complete. The pan floods to a depth of a few centimeters — enough to reflect the sky and turn the flat white surface into a mirror. The zebras arrive. They come from the direction of the Boteti River, following some signal that the guides acknowledge exists but cannot precisely articulate, and they arrive in their thousands over the course of a week in December or January. I came in February, slightly late, and the main migration had passed but a few thousand remained, moving slowly across the shallow water in lines that seemed to have no beginning and no end, their stripes reflected perfectly below them, doubling them.

The camp inside Nxai Pan is small and unfenced. The baobabs are a fifteen-minute drive from camp across the pan surface. On my last evening I drove out to them alone, as the rules permit, and sat for an hour in the failing light watching the trees turn from silver to orange to a deep purple-grey as the sun dropped behind the tree line. A family of ground squirrels was using the base of the largest tree as their home — there were at least twelve burrow entrances visible in the soil among the roots. They ran back and forth without much concern for my presence.

The quietness here is different from the Kalahari silence and different from the Okavango silence. It is a quietness with depth in it — the seven trees absorbing light and time in equal measure, the pan behind them holding the sky. You get the feeling that if you sat here long enough and paid close enough attention, you might understand something. I did not sit long enough. I never do.

When to go: December through March brings the wet season, the zebra migration, and the flooded pan — the most visually dramatic period. January is the peak month for zebras and for newborn animals of all species. The dry season (May to October) brings the baobabs against a clear sky and easier access — the pan is hard and navigable by vehicle. Avoid April when the roads are soft but the migration has ended. The baobabs are extraordinary at any time of year.