Inland from Namaqualand’s endless flower carpets, the great Kalahari Desert spills out over the borders of Botswana and Namibia into an often-forgotten corner of South Africa’s Northern Cape. This is where you’ll find the Southern Kalahari. Here, against a thorny backdrop of sweeping red sand dunes and pronking springbok, an extraordinary African desert safari – and a mob of friendly meerkats – awaits.
With its open spaces and dramatic beauty, the Southern Kalahari feels like a land before time. The iron-rich sands hint at vast mineral wealth strewn beneath the surface, from glittering diamond fields to bulging copper belts, while a wealth of desert-adapted wildlife roams above.
Tswalu in the heart of the Southern Kalahari offers up luxurious accommodation, fine dining and swathes of gemsbok, wildebeest, zebra, giraffe, warthog and ostrich. Black-maned lions, black rhino and wild dogs make for unforgettable sightings. And the nocturnal “Elusive Five” – pangolin, brown hyena, aardvark, aardwolf and the ridiculously cute bat-eared fox – all call this alluringly unusual place home.
