The Hidden Journey of 20,000 Zebras

Botswana's Nxai Pan National Park is so remote, a huge zebra migration that takes place each year here wasn't even documented 10 years ago. Today, it's easily reached by helicopter.


About 20,000 Burchell's zebras are believed to make their way across 500 kilometers as part of the annual migration. That would make it the longest mammal migration in Africa.


African Bush Camps guide Kenneth Mungomba (left), and the company's founder, Beks Ndlovu, are experts at tracking the wildlife of Botswana's Nxai Pan National Park.


The seasonal Migrations Expeditions camp offers a feeling of real adventure, with just six guest tents under the shade of umbrella thorn acacia trees.


Mungomba drives safary guest across a savannah landscape sapped of all moisture ahead of seasonal rains. Along the way, Kangaroo-like Springhares, cute bat-eared foxes, regal gemsbok and tough Kalahari lions are all encountered.

These giant Baobabs trees have changed little in the 160 years since English explorer-artist Thomas Baines famously painted them.


"The distance covered by the zebra was a total shock to all of us involved, " Robin Naidoo, a senior conservation scientist at World Wildlife Fund, said at the time. "Nobody knew that something of this scale was occurring. "

The chopper rose smoothly from Maun Airport and we hurtled ahead over Thamalakane River. I knew it was a 'river' only because I could see a bridge -- there was nothing about the sandy ribbon of dust to suggest it had ever been touched by water.
It was hard to imagine that, just 30 kilometers (18.6 miles) away, the world's largest inland delta sprawled northwards, stretching beyond Namibia's Caprivi Strip border.
This is Botswana's Nxai Pan National Park -- part of our planet's biggest expanse of salt pans. It's an isolated region where the 600 square kilometers of Okavango Delta finally seeps away into the insatiable sands of the Kalahari Desert -- aptly known to early travelers as "the great thirstland."
It's so remote that the thing I was here to see, the world's longest annual mammal migration, which sees 20,000 zebras cross these pans, wasn't even documented until a decade ago.