Jack’s Camp

Adjacent to San Camp on the Makgadikgadi Pans in northeastern Botswana, Jack’s Camp is the more established and somewhat more architecturally ambitious companion to San Camp, with a permanent canvas camp of eight tents furnished with greater visual elaboration — the colonial safari aesthetic of antique specimen cabinets, Victorian natural history maps, and the accumulated objects of a fictional Edwardian explorer’s Botswanan expedition — that creates a specific historical narrative for the stay without the extreme minimalism of the smaller camp. Jack’s Camp was one of the first camps to offer the Makgadikgadi as a serious safari destination rather than a stopover, and its four decades of operation on the pan have given it an institutional relationship with the ecosystem and with the San community that the camp’s cultural programme draws on with considerable depth.

Walking with San guides on the pan and in the adjacent mopane woodland, swimming with the wild meerkats that have habituated to human company at a colony near the camp, quad biking on the salt surface, and the extraordinary astronomical experience of the pan’s unobstructed night sky provide the activity programme. The fossil beds at the pan’s edge, where the bones of mammals that walked the Makgadikgadi’s prehistoric lake shore are exposed by the wind, give the natural history programme a geological time depth that complements the pan’s present-day ecological character. The seasonal flamingo and pelican influx during the flooding months provides visual spectacle on a scale matched by few natural events in southern Africa.

Jack’s Camp’s conservation relationship with the San Bushmen guides and the surrounding Basarwa community reflects the camp’s founders’ long-standing commitment to maintaining the San people’s economic and cultural connection to the pan landscape, expressed through employment, land use agreements, and the ongoing transmission of traditional ecological knowledge through the guide programme that has made the camp’s walking experiences with San trackers one of the most substantively cross-cultural encounters available in the southern African safari landscape.