Spend time with habituated meerkats in Botswana’s vast salt pans, where the silence is profound and the horizon endless.
The Makgadikgadi Pans are like another planet—an endless white crust of salt that stretches to the horizon, interrupted only by ancient baobabs and the occasional springbok. Amid this stark beauty, a surprise: meerkats. These charismatic, highly social animals have grown accustomed to human presence in parts of the pans, allowing for remarkable close-up encounters.
You’ll walk with your guide at dawn, as the clan begins to stir. As the sun rises, the meerkats emerge, standing at full attention and scanning for danger. If you sit quietly, they may even climb atop you for a better view—a moment that feels like fiction. Their tiny world, full of complex communication and familial bonds, unfolds around you like theater.
This is one of those rare wildlife experiences that’s both whimsical and deeply humbling. Rewild includes it not just for its charm, but because it offers an entirely different lens into Botswana’s wild heart—one that’s slow, quiet, and joyfully unexpected.
