Camp Life

Southern Africa has myriad game parks to choose from. Bill Stephens and crew spent four weeks exploring campsites in six of these parks, across four countries.

- Bill Stephens

WHAT sounded a tad crazy proved to be a memorable road camping safari with the overarching highlight being the huge variety of fauna and flora in six of the region’s game parks.

Five vehicles, three towing trailers covered well over 7 000km as the entourage explored these parks.

A lot can go wrong in a convoy like this but fortunately, our only hiccup was two punctures and a tank being filled with diesel instead of unleaded. Fortunately, the unwanted tank of diesel happened in Upington and was detected and drained before any damage occurred. A close shave for the owner of the Land Cruiser. Lesson learnt: watch the nozzle with a beady eye or you could be left fuming.

We departed Cape Town on 1 June, our route taking us through Upington with the first overnight stop on a delightful farm 50km north of Upington. Riana and Paul provided great transit Kalahari hospitality.

We then spent two nights in Rooiputs on the Botswana side of the Kgalagadi. A great unfenced, spacious camp with basic ablutions and water facilities, it was one of our favourite campsites thanks to great night sounds and the chance of a visit by a passing lion. Rooiputs offered decent value at P1 040 including park entry fees for our five vehicles.

We moved on to Mata Mata which was busy and relatively crowded. In general, game was scarce in the Kgalagadi. The park is extremely dry at the moment, having experienced a relatively dry 2018/19 summer. However, between us we did spot cheetah, lion and an African wild cat, which we were very fortunate to see.

Two campsites for two nights in Mata Mata cost R1 900.

After crossing into Namibia, we travelled mostly on gravel for about 300km to Mariental. The road is extremely dusty with limited visibility when passing oncoming traffic. The road surface is reasonable, with some rocky patches and one of our convoy’s punctures happened on this stretch of road.