Makgadikgadi Pans and the Okavango: Botswana's Water Paradox

The Makgadikgadi Pans are a vast system of salt flats in north-eastern Botswana, among the largest in the world, and they are the dried floor of an enormous ancient lake. For most of the year they are a white, cracked, almost featureless crust that stretches to the horizon. After good rains, parts of them fill with shallow water and can draw huge flocks of flamingos, while herds of zebra and wildebeest move across the surrounding grasslands.

A few hundred kilometres to the north-west lies the Okavango Delta, one of the largest inland deltas on Earth: a maze of channels, lagoons and islands where a river from Angola spreads out into the Kalahari and simply disappears. Together they tell one of Botswana's most remarkable stories: in one of the driest countries in Africa, the landscape is shaped by water that has vanished, and by water that arrives in the dry season and never reaches the sea.

What are the Makgadikgadi Pans?

The two largest pans are Sua (also spelt Sowa) in the east and Ntwetwe in the west, surrounded by many smaller pans, grassland and scattered islands of higher ground. Together they cover well over ten thousand square kilometres. The surface is a crust of salt and clay so flat that, on a hot day, mirages dissolve the horizon and it is hard to judge distance at all.

This is not a lifeless place. Around the edges, grasses grow on old lake sediments, and ancient baobabs stand on the higher ground. Baines' Baobabs, a group painted by the artist Thomas Baines in the nineteenth century, still stand; Chapman's Baobab, once one of the largest trees in Africa and a landmark for travellers, collapsed in 2016. Salt and soda ash are extracted at Sua Pan, a reminder that the pans are also a working landscape.

The ancient lake: Lake Makgadikgadi

The Makgadikgadi Pans are what remains of Lake Makgadikgadi, a vast lake that once covered a large part of what is now northern Botswana. Old shorelines and beach ridges can still be traced around the pans, and Stone Age tools found in the area show that people lived beside its waters.

The lake was fed by rivers that today flow elsewhere, including the ancestors of the Okavango and parts of the Zambezi system. Geologists generally explain its disappearance through a combination of earth movements, as faulting linked to the wider African rift system tilted the land and diverted rivers away, and long-term shifts towards a drier climate. Exactly when and how quickly the lake shrank is still researched, with different studies proposing different timelines, but the broad picture is clear: what you see at Makgadikgadi is the memory of water.

Flamingos and the zebra migration

In years of good rain, water collects in the pans, fed by local rainfall and by seasonal rivers such as the Nata, which flows into the northern end of Sua Pan. Shallow, salty water allows tiny organisms to bloom, and greater and lesser flamingos can gather in very large numbers, using the pans as one of the few breeding sites in southern Africa. In dry years they may not come at all. That unpredictability is part of the pans' character.

On the western side, zebra and wildebeest move seasonally between the Boteti River, which offers water in the dry months, and the fresh grazing of the pans' grasslands after the rains. It is one of the larger zebra movements in southern Africa, and it depends entirely on rain falling in the right places at the right time.

The town of Nata, on the main road at the northern edge of the pans, is the gateway for many visitors, and a community-run bird sanctuary near the town has long been a place to see the flooded pan when the water comes.

The Okavango Delta: a flood in the dry season

The Okavango River rises in the highlands of Angola, where it is known as the Cubango, crosses a narrow strip of Namibia and enters Botswana, where it fans out across the flat Kalahari sands. Rain falls in Angola in the summer, but the water takes months to travel downstream and spread across the delta. As a result the flood reaches its greatest extent in the middle of the year, during Botswana's dry winter, just when the surrounding land is at its driest. Animals converge on the water, and the delta's character changes with every season.

The delta never reaches the sea. Almost all its water is lost to evaporation and to the transpiration of plants, and some soaks into the sand. Many of its islands began as termite mounds, on which trees took root and around which salts and soil accumulated. In exceptionally high flood years, water flows out of the delta's lower end and down the Boteti River towards the Makgadikgadi, briefly reconnecting the two great water stories of northern Botswana.

The Okavango Delta was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2014, the thousandth site on the list. It is also home to people whose lives are built around its water, including Wayeyi, Hambukushu and San communities, for whom the mokoro, the traditional dugout or poled canoe, the channels and the changing flood are matters of livelihood and knowledge, not scenery.

Why this matters on foot

The walk's planned route crosses Botswana from the south through Gaborone and Francistown, then north past the edge of the pans towards Kasane and the Zambezi. Beyond Francistown, settlements thin out and water and resupply become serious questions, which is exactly why the story of vanished and seasonal water matters so much to a walker.

Leon hopes to make a short trip to the Makgadikgadi from the walking line and, if time and money allow, a longer journey to the Okavango. Under the expedition's rule of pause, travel and return, any such trip begins and ends at the exact recorded point on the line, and transport never counts as walked distance. The aim is not another game drive but to understand water, adaptation and whose livelihoods depend on it, ideally through local ecological knowledge.

Read on about the meaning of rain in our article on the word pula, and about the people who share land with Botswana's elephants in living with elephants. You can back the walk and follow updates in the journal once Leon leaves Cape Agulhas in December 2026.

Frequently asked questions

How were the Makgadikgadi Pans formed?

They are the bed of an ancient lake, Lake Makgadikgadi, which dried out as earth movements diverted the rivers that fed it and the climate became drier.

When do flamingos come to Makgadikgadi?

Usually after good summer rains, when the pans hold shallow water. Numbers vary greatly from year to year, and in dry years few or none may come.

Why does the Okavango flood in the dry season?

Its water comes from rain in the Angolan highlands, which takes months to flow downstream, so the flood peaks during Botswana's dry winter.

Does the Okavango River reach the sea?

No. It ends in the Kalahari, where almost all its water evaporates, is used by plants or sinks into the sand.