Cyclists must have designed Botswana. It is surely the flattest place I've ever driven through, apart from Cambodia. There is nothing to avoid on the road so they are laid straight for hundreds of kilometres through undeveloped, uninhabited bush with only a few small settlements sprinkled miserly over the arid countryside to break the roadside trees, a beautiful blend of autumn colours. If there is a hill it's rarity will be amplified by the conglomeration of cell phone and radio towers jostling for position to pass signal to the remotest locations.

We left early on the road to Nata and being one of the most travelled road by South African overlanders and game enthusiast, the road is debated much and amusingly on the internet forums:

We debated visiting the Nata Bird Sanctuary, but on hearing there was no water in the pans (many Southern African countries seem to have had such dry summers) we decided to press on. We turned at Nata onto the road to Maun and 20km down the road realised we weren't going to find out of Nata for a long time. We headed off on a dirt track through the bush on the road to Kubu island and after about 25km we ended up in the pans. The flora slowly disintegrates from the arid scrub by the road to sandy grasslands to the white emptiness of the salt pans - as the guidebook suggest - unnerving in their emptiness with mirages that tempt disorientation. We followed a track around the edge of the salt pans and reached the road again 10km from Nata, after having to bundu bash quite a long way when we lost the path and using 4x4 to get out of the deep sand - a lot of fun!

You are bound to see elephant even on the side of the main road that borders Chobe and we saw a herd of 10 including a calf on our way through to Kasane, something to break the boredom of a long road from Nata, which although in the process of being reconstructed, had little to offer. In Kasane we looked at 3 campsites: Toro, Kubu and Thebe costing P90, P87 and P93 respectively and stayed at the latter on the merit of being more private but fuller, having a private boma at each site and being closer to Kasane and Chobe for the next. And so, full on spaghetti bolognaise and the fruits of home, we settled to camp for the first night.