Sensational Salt Pans - Sun/Moon rises..

Barely awake, I glanced out of the tent door at eye level - straight onto a flat, grey, moonscape of a beach. A line of shiny gold water marked out the shallows of the shoreline, and beyond this, rippled grey waters stretched out to the edge of the bay. Up above, a solitary white star hung in a coloured sky streaked with orange, yellow, purple and deep blue. Alien shapes drifted around in the shallow waters, amidst the constantly changing colours. For a minute, I wondered exactly which planet I was on...

Pre-sunrise, with star and flamingoes

... until I noted a thoroughly earthly cowpat on the ground in front of me, and I remembered that this was pre-sunrise, Planet Earth, Easter Sunday. As the sun came up, a terrestrial cup of steaming coffee and a squished chocolate easter egg took the chill off, while the view over the flamingo-dotted water took my breath away!

Easter Sunday Sunrise

The day before, we had done a bit of work away from home over the Easter weekend, and had decided to camp in the bush - right on the edge of the great and mysterious Makgadikgadi Salt Pans. The pans are a magnificent relic of an ancient super lake, now a vast expanse of white/grey flatness, offering varying degrees of accessibility and deceptive treacherous surfaces. Not to be ventured onto without extreme caution!

In days gone by, when living in the area, this particular spot used to be one of our favourite haunts for a mini break. Not much more than half an hour away from a busy main road, it's a little enclave of utter nothingness, only really frequented by local cattle and herders. During the dry season you can cross white, crusty bays of salty surface, but at this time of year these bays are usually filled with water, and assorted water birds.

We picked a spot on the shore, overlooking the water and the flamingoes, parked our tent on the crusty surface of the salt pan, then just experienced the slipping away of the day into a clear, chilly autumn night. Flamingoes flying past at sunset...spectacular yellow moonrise... erie lunar-synched jackal cries ... swishing of wading flamingoes feeding in the shallow waters... slow drifting constellations up above... a general sense of oneness with the great Universe...

Moonrise

On the way back to the tar road, passing these tumbleweeds blown up against the fence, I couldn't resist photographing them.