What a place, what an adventure, what a challenge. First we need to say, that we did this two up on a heavy (old) bike. This is not recommended and unless you are comfortable in deep sand for over 50km. 4WD, ATVs and lightweight motorcross styled bikes are more suitable here.

We spent the night previous to entering the pans in Letlhakane and stocked up on water, food and fuel for the journey. You have to pay a small fee (or you should) at the starting point marked on our map below. Upon entering at this point you get your first taste of the next +100km. The sand is relatively deep but heavy, so it is navigatable. The ride from the starting point until Kubu is good fun. It is about 40km / 3 hours of riding through sand and most fun of all the wide open salt pans. This is why we were really here. These wide open pans are a dream to drive on, it feels more like the moon than anything here on earth. 

We spend the night on the famous Kubu Island, which was an Island a few thousand years ago when the pans where a lake. Kubu Island is littered with many beautiful Baobab trees. It was very special to spend the night sleeping under one of these many trees whilst star gazing. 

After Kubu we recommend going back South from where we came. There are a thousand ways to navigate these pans and a thousand opinions. We road North to Gweta. At Kubu Island we asked the Camp keeper about best tracks, he vaguely pointed on our GPS (we use Traks4Africa) and told us it would be fine. It wasn’t. It was really really rough. From a riding perspective it was the most difficult (not challenging) track I have ridden. The familiar deep sand with which you may have made your peace with the previous day soon disappears and is replaced with “fesh-fesh”, a powder like substance that covers everything. 

The track we took would have been too small for a car. We heard stories from other riders crossing the pan, but nobody found a magically track. For much of the route we avoided the track and made our own through the sand and on the pans. Navigating through thorny bushes and small villages we spent over 10h crossing an 80km strech of sand.

To add to this experience we where informed afterwards by locals, that there are many lions on the pans!