A sea of sand, grass and sky

The reserve sits in the Kalahari Basin, the world's largest continuous stretch of sand, and the land here is flat and gently undulating, draped with grasses and bush over low sand dunes and patches of bigger trees. The signature feature is the pans: wide, empty saltpans that look, in the heat and distance, like lakes—so convincingly water-filled that one of them gave the famous Deception Valley its name. Scattered across the plains are shallow fossil river valleys, remnants of rivers that once drained toward the ancient Lake Makgadikgadi; Deception Valley itself began forming some 16,000 years ago.↗↗

Silver terminalia, Kalahari sand acacias and apple-leaf trees dot the grasslands, and in the south and east the vegetation thickens into mopane woodland. Above it all, the sky is the other great character of the place—vast and wide by day, and at night genuinely awe-inspiring, with stars so brilliant and close they seem to dominate the land. The climate is hard and variable: rainfall swings between roughly 170 and 700 millimetres a year, temperatures can drop below freezing in winter and climb past 40°C in high summer.↗↗