Expeditions / Trips Makgadikgadi Pans Diary / Updates Makgadikgadi Pans: Day 1
Monday, 16 August 2010 00:00 Last Updated on Monday, 23 August 2010 15:46
Distance Walked: 20km
Woke up early to get to the pans which where a 160km away from the campsite in Francis Town. Luckily Lance woke up without any issues because getting him out of bed can sometimes be a real problem. The starting point was at near a village called Mosu on the south side of the Sua Pan. The Makgadikgadi Pans consists of 2 big pans the one east side is called Sua and the one on the north is Ntwetwe. For me to be able to say I crossed the Makgadikgadi Pans I needed to cross both.
So just after Mosu village we turned off onto a track that led to near the south side of the Sua pan. We drove as far on this track as we thought the card could go before getting stuck and then started to setup the trailer and all the kit. Lance joined me to the start of the pan to take some photos and a video of me starting off. I eventually got going at around 8:20am.
Start walking on the south side of Sua Pan - Click to Enlarge
The first 10km was no problem at all. The pan surface was hard and although the weight of all my water, food and other kit was between 75-80kg it was relatively easy to pull. Once the heat got to bad at around 11:00am I stopped and made a little shelter with a groundsheet I bought so I could stay out of the sun until it cooled down enough for me to carry on. When I constructed my little shelter there was no wind at all so I didn’t do much effort to tie down the ground sheet. While I was lying down a sudden burst of wind blew the groundsheet of and I had to run after it. At just after 3:00pm I thought I would start walking again.
It wasn’t long before I encountered the first wetter sections of the Sua pan. With such incredible heat during the day you would think that the pan would be completely dry but the truth was that it wasn’t. The wetter the pan surface became the harder it became to pull the trailer. The surface was now wet clay that stuck to everything and the tires of the trailer was completely covered and slick. The bottom of my shoes also had clay stuck to it in a thick layer and I could not grip properly. This made pulling the heavy trailer quite hard work and I had to stop every 400-600m to catch my breath and drink water.
I planned to do at least 20km the first day and then another 20km the second to get me to Khubu Island, a famous spot on the edge of the Sua pan, so I struggled on for the last couple of kilometers until I reached a total of 20km for the day. By the time I stopped the pan surface was a soaking mess of clay covered by a layer of salt. At least I was so far onto the pan that I hardly saw any footprints of animals around which meant I would sleep without worrying too much.
One of my big concerns for this walk was dangerous wild animals. And although I asked people that has been to the region about dangerous animals on the pans and was informed that I didn’t need to worry I still had a lot of people (people that have obviously never been to the area) asking me about lions and telling me to be very careful. So it was something that was always on my mind. O and seeing a massive footprint of some kind of predator about 4km into the walk didn’t help put my mind at ease.
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