Walking the Kalahari: A Wilderness Immersion

By Chantelle Guise-Brown

Six nights tracking, photographing, and sleeping beneath the stars

We drove along long, empty, corrugated roads, the bumps slowly shaking the city loose from our shoulders. The landscape thinned and opened until there was only sand, grass, thornveld and pale blue Kalahari sky. The Kalahari revealed itself slowly: in dust, in distance, and in the quiet disappearance of cell signal. By the time we reached the edge of the !Khamab Kalahari Reserve, the rest of the world felt very far away.

I had never been to the Kalahari before. In my mind, I had imagined it as dry and vast, all red sand, heat and distant horizons. It was those things, but it was also greener, softer and more alive than I expected. Recent rains had pulled new growth from the earth: green shoots between golden grasses, thick acacia bushveld, and tiny fuchsia wildflowers scattered through the veld. The sand glowed copper against muted sages and ochres.

Being selected for this opportunity through YWP gave me access to something I had wanted for years, but had never quite known how to reach. At Tapama Lodge, we were told that not only were we some of the only South Africans to have come through recently, but also some of the youngest. Experiences like this are not always accessible to young South Africans, and YWP and Tchagra Trails made this one possible. They gave us the rare privilege to know the Kalahari as somewhere we walked through, sweated in, slept beneath, and briefly belonged to.

The first day on trail stripped away any idealism about pack weight very quickly. With water for the midday heat, warm layers for the desert nights, six days of food, camera gear, and all the small essentials, many of our bags came close to twenty kilograms. We had all spoken beforehand about aiming for lighter packs and we had not one spare shirt between us, yet our packs were heavy.

Within the first hour we were trekking through soft sand at midday. It was hot. My back was sore already. The idea of doing this for six days suddenly felt less romantic. I remember thinking, quite sincerely, that I may have made a terrible mistake. Pride made me keep that thought to myself at the time.

Towards the end of that first day, we walked onto a pan that glowed with life. It was green and open, a wide break in the thicker bush. Cheetah tracks crossed the sand. Springbok moved in the distance. Eland and wildebeest stood lit by soft afternoon sun. The light was low and golden, catching on grass stems and animal backs alike. The weight on my shoulders did not disappear, but it became part of the bargain. Every sighting had been earned step by step.

We did not sleep on that first pan because we did not want to disturb the springbok, or the possibility that a cheetah hunt might unfold there. Instead, we moved to a neighbouring pan and made our first camp.

I had walked a little way across the pan with my head torch and a change of clothes, heading towards the bush we had collectively decided would be our camp bathroom. The evening had gone dusky. The crackling fire was behind me, surrounded by a loose semicircle of sleeping bags - our entire camp.

As I approached the bush, a pair of eyes flashed in the beam of my head torch. Green, then orange. For reasons that suggest my survival instincts may not be particularly strong, I stepped closer rather than back. Slowly, my eyes adjusted, and the creature behind the eyes revealed itself out of the dark. Shaggy brown fur. A sloping back. A strangely soft, almost puppy-like face. A brown hyena.

For a long moment, neither of us moved. She looked at me and I looked at her, both of us caught in that narrow thread of torchlight. Around us, the pan was dark. I felt giddy, but also strangely calm. Just two creatures briefly regarding one another in the dark. Then she turned and trotted away, dissolving back into the night. I called the others, but by then she was gone. There was no photograph or video - just a feeling that, for a minute, the Kalahari had let me in on something intimate.

Much later that night, or perhaps early morning, during my watch beside the fire, I believe the same hyena wandered back towards camp. This time I had the ridiculous joy of waking everyone up. I went from sleeping bag to sleeping bag: “There’s a brown hyena. Do you want to see?” When I crawled back into my own sleeping bag, I could not sleep. The stars were too bright. Jackals called from the dark, their cries rising and falling across the pan. I thought of Cry of the Kalahari, the first autobiography I had ever read as a child, and how magical it was that I was now immersed in that world.

By morning, everything had turned gold. I opened my eyes to light glimmering through dewy grass. Zebra and springbok moved across the pan. Around the fire, people stood softly exchanging stories from their first night watches. The smell of coffee and damp grass drifted through camp. The air was crisp and cold. The grass shone.

I reached for my camera immediately and hit record. Danielle laughed that my eyes had been open for two seconds and I was already filming. But I couldn’t help it. That was exactly the feeling I had hoped to capture: the childlike wonder, the giddiness, the disbelief that this was where we had woken up. Not separate from the landscape. In it.

As the days unfolded, the Kalahari and our wonderful guides began to teach us a new language. At first, the sand was just sand. Red, soft, endless. Beautiful, but still mostly a surface beneath our boots, and a texture that found its way into cameras, water bottles and fingernails. Then slowly, with the patient guidance of Noelle and Jared, it began to tell an intricate web of interlinked stories.

Tracking black rhino on foot was one of the greatest privileges of the trail. It was slower and more absorbing than simply arriving at a sighting. We had to pay attention to the ground, the vegetation, and the subtle lean of grasses. Every few minutes, our guides would stop and point out something I would have walked straight over. Still, I loved being given the opportunity to lead the group while tracking. There was something deeply satisfying about trying to piece together the story written into the earth.

Being on foot in Big Five country, I found myself thrilled by almost everything. Eyes in the torchlight. Rhino snorts in the darkness. Lion tracks through camp. Part of that fearlessness came from trust. Noelle and Jared guided us with such knowledge, calm and respect that it allowed the rest of us to surrender into the experience. They knew when to teach, when to stop, when to move, and when to let silence do the work.

The animals we encountered were made more meaningful by the fact that we had worked for them. Everything came through effort, patience and attention. Gemsbok, with their iconic desert elegance, a family of four bat-eared foxes and the brown hyenas that visited during the night became particular highlights. Our final reward, after six days of tracking, was a black rhino drinking from the pan a mere 200 meters from our last camp. And then there were the animals we did not see, but knew were there. Tracks through sand, roars in the night, and the bodily awareness that we were sharing space with these creatures was enough.

Each of us was drawn to different parts of the wilderness. Julian was intrigued by tracks and became our ‘apprentice trails guide.’ Pavay was our bird book. Sibella found wildflowers. Danielle almost took home a skink that crawled into her backpack. Kobus, already a guide himself and working towards his dangerous game qualification, had eagle eyes for spotting rhino in the dark. And I became, somewhat jokingly and somewhat accurately, “Madam Documentary Filmmaker.”

At first, it was strange not knowing the time. Then it became freeing. Among the group, “time is a concept” became something of a saying. We estimated our “hour” on night watch using the stars and a gut feel. We woke with the dawn chorus. On day three, we wanted to reach the waterhole by sunrise. So the plan was simply whoever was on watch when the spurfowl began to call would wake the rest of us.

Friendship formed quickly. There were no separate rooms to retreat to, no signal, no doors. We checked one another for ticks. Pulled thorns from feet. Braided hair. Kept watch while someone disappeared behind a bush for a bathroom break. It was intimate in the most unglamorous and beautiful way.

There was heat, dust, nosebleeds, swollen ankles, headaches, broken shoes and burst mattresses. My own shoe had to be cable-tied back together. The firewood was damp. The nights were cold.

None of it detracted from the experience. If anything, the discomfort made the joy sharper. We laughed constantly. Sometimes too much. We had to remind ourselves that we were supposed to be quiet if we wanted to see wildlife. By the end, we were a small, dusty, slightly feral little community. My chest ached when we said goodbye.

On the final morning, we thought we had one more day of walking. Our bottles were full. Snacks were ready. Packs were adjusted. We were tired, dusty, probably smellier than we realised, and should have been dreaming of showers and clean clothes. Instead, we wanted to stay and walk.

When we reached the edge of the pan and saw the vehicle waiting for us, there was genuine dismay. The ending had arrived too soon. We wanted to walk to the exit. We needed our last day. We were not ready to go back. We had stepped out of ordinary life for long enough that returning to it felt strange.

My photography improved, with much expert guidance from Kevin. I learned to photograph stars after having tried and failed before. I experimented with shutter speeds. My favourite “beanbag” was my entire sixty-litre backpack, propped upright between my knees while I knelt in the sand.

We sat at pans for hours waiting for a perfect wildlife shot, but when I look through my photographs now, the ones that move me most are the tracks in the copper sand, coffee steaming in cold hands and herds in the distance with a blurred human figure in the foreground.

And, true to my title of Madam Documentary Filmmaker, I did come home with more than 850 video clips. I am currently piecing them together into a film of the experience, so stay tuned. If the photographs offer glimpses of the trail, the video is where I hope the movement, sound, dust, laughter, silence and scale of it all will really come alive.

Our week was magical. We carried all we needed. We left behind what we did not. We walked for every sighting. We earned every view. We became dirty, tired, hungry, quiet, observant, grateful, entranced. And somewhere between the red sand, the firelight, the animal tracks and the stars, you remember that wilderness is not something separate from us. It is something we belong to.

I am deeply grateful to YWP for making this opportunity possible, and to Tchagra Trails, Lowveld Trails Co, Noelle, Jared and Kevin for holding the experience with such generosity, skill and care. It opened a door that many young South Africans do not often get to walk through. I hope more of us get the chance.