Kubu Quad Bike Safaris

A unique opportunity to combine nights at Jack's Camp with an epic quad bike journey across the pans with nights spent sleeping out under the stars amongst the boulders and baobabs on Kubu Island. One of the most graphically beautiful spots in Botswana, it is full of intriguing detail, such as stone walls, trade and Bushman beads. It is also close to what is probably the biggest greater and lesser flamingo breeding site in the world.

The best way to get across the saltpan is on a quad bike; this is a low-impact trespass. Setting off early in convoys, bikes carry bedrolls, food and water. Here you lose contact with time, space and direction. You hum along traveling, while all of the power, conceit of commerce and positions evaporate. The delicate network of friends, plans and diaries - the human hierarchy of achievement and aspiration - ebb away. As the sun begins to drop, you will see a smudge on the horizon - Kubu Island, a 2.7 billion year old granite fist that rises unexpectedly out of the vast and empty Sowa Pan.

The camp staff will get there first, boiling a cauldron of water bubbles for the shower suspended from a tree. The dining table is set and the drinks tray, with Beefeater and Georgian fobs on bottle labels, stands waiting. A mobile drinks chest is set up by the trusty team and guests are able to lean back in their safari chairs while toasting their toes around the roaring camp fire. Dinners are three course culinary extravaganzas, laid out on white damask tablelinen, decked with fine glassware and bone-handled silver. It is an embarassment of riches in this extraordinary and desolate domain.

The Makgadikgadi was once a great inland sea. The remaining salt pans are the size of Switzerland, a fact that is difficult for many to comprehend. Around the edges are incongruous dunes of seashells, thousands of miles from any coast. There are tiny beads, glass, stone and ostrich shells that the Bushmen used as decoration for thousands of years. Some are Phoenician and Roman and even Chinese - beads were currency for salt. 30,000 flamingo fledge in the vicinity when water is good and although the mud mound nests are deserted at the times of the year when Kubu is visited, it is still an extraordinary sight.

After days of luxurious desolation, guests mount their quad bikes to journey back to Jack's Camp for evenings of surreal and sumptuous relaxation. The most important aspect of these trips is that it gives the guests a chance to truly understand the Makgadikgadi Pans.

Listed is one set itinerary - 5 night Kubu Safari. However, fully customaziable itineraries are available. Please contact Global Basecamps to build your very own itinerary.