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The Kalahari, January 1998.
The great thing about the Kalahari is that it hates you. It doesn’t have a welcome mat or a lei to drape over your shoulders or a glass of complimentary sangria. It doesn’t have a hospitable grin or an information centre or translation earphones or a scenic walk. Between you, me and the vultures, the Kalahari loathes us. It makes no bones about it, or, rather, it does make bones about it. It is not generic, you understand, it is personal.

It wants you dead. In the Kalahari the only good tourist is an ex-tourist and there are plenty of good old boys that could do a lot with your corpse. Apart from all the usual Attenborough things that are waiting to mug you, there are hordes of ingenious little fellows eager to turn you into a resource. Ticks that can lay dormant for decade underground and, catching a whiff of your carbon dioxide, emerge to suck you dry. Spiders the size of a fingernail that can turn your leg into an agonising black bolster, a beetle that has a binary arsenal in its bottom and can deliver a payload of boiling acid. And there are more thorns here than anywhere else on earth. Things with thorns have thorns on their thorns and they all have poison tips. Everything has a unique and ingenious and unambiguous way of telling you to sod off. Forget all that slow-motion-sunset in-touch-with-your-spirit Van der Post nonsense, there is no romance here. The Kalahari is an amoral, unregulated market force, a pure vicious capitalism practiced by professionals. I love it here. I love it as the last truly honest place on earth.

“Owing to local custom, we don’t wash underwear,” said the footnote on the laundry list in my tent. Now you see this is the sort of tradition you want, a timeless prohibition on wringing out strangers’ smalls. In the mists of time, some wise man called together the tribe and said, “Look, in a few thousand years, strange pale men will arrive wearing Clavin Klein tanga briefs, just don’t have anything to do with them.”

Twenty hours ago, I got a huge aeroplane with a thousand other people at Heathrow and flew to Johannesburg, then got on a smaller plane with half a hundred people and flew to Maun in Botswana, and then on to a tiny plane with just God, a girlfriend and the pilot, who had thighs like hippopotamus babies, and we flew to the big tree on the left in the middle of the Kalahari desert. Botswana is the flattest country in the world; if Dolly Parton lay on her back in Botswana, she would be a triangulation point.

San Camp squats in a reef of palm at the edge of the world. I am sitting on my canvas chair holding the laundry list. There is that delicious moment where your clothes, eyes and ears are still tuned into concourses and crowds and the 20th century, but your skin knows you are somewhere else, the weird sense of being suspended between two utterly different places. And this place could not be more different from everywhere. The camp is the Stewart Granger Memorial Collection of 1940s safari tents, with no running water or electricity but with four-poster beds and mosquito nets and cambric sheets and bucket showers and paraffin lamps and butlers. Through the tent flaps I can see the Makgadikgadi Pans run over the horizon like the mother of all Norfolk beaches.

This is one of the least-known places on earth. It is still a black hole. When it rains three million flamingos live here, the biggest, pinkest migration of Barbara Cartland wannabes on earth. But now it is dry and nothing lives here for hundreds of miles, and it is why I came. You can see the curve of the earth here. Turn 360º and nothing crosses the eye but the bowl of the sky. It is nothingness that’s attracts. This is God’s own minimalism.

The best way to get across the saltpan is to fly like the kites and the crows, otherwise it is a quad bike. Fat-wheeled two-man lawnmower things. And you need kit. Kit is very important on holiday. This is the best. You have to cover yourself completely. The cocktail of sun and salt can flay you and peel your eyes like a blind grape, so we looked like crosses between Lawrence of Arabia and Mad Max. It is a vast style improvement on beach wear or ghastly Babygro ski wear.

We set off early in convoy, four bikes carrying bedrolls, food and water, a long-range desert patrol driving Indian-fashion. This is low-impact trespass. You leave as little behind you as possible. We are guided by Ralph Bousfield, who owns the camp. He is the guide straight from Central Casting by way of Mills & Boons, a fifth generation white African; all his ancestors were wanderers, explorers and hunters, and washed their own underwear. His father holds one of the few Guinness world records that Roy Castle didn’t attempt: shooting 43,000 crocodiles. Ralph has lived here in the bush since he was three. He smoulders like a cross between Daniel Day-Lewis and an Ibiza deckchair attendant, and has an unsentimental awe and as deep a knowledge of this place as anyone. It is winningly half western-scientific and half bushman-folklore.

The Makgadikgadi was once a great inland sea. Around its edges are incongruous dunes of seashells, thousands of miles from any coast. Neolithic axes, arrows and scrapes glint blackly on the crest. There is the clock-stopping frisson of picking up something that was last touched 10,000 years ago by a man who looked over the horizon and could not imagine that his chipping this flint would lead to jumbo jets and skyscrapers. Holding the arrowhead somehow closes the circle. There are also tiny beads here, glass and stone and ostrich shell that the bushmen have used as decoration for thousands of years. Some of them are Phoenician and Roman and even Chinese; beads were currency for salt. The salt cakes that glisten like icing sugar on the pan have been traded by the red people – the bushmen – for millennia.

We bowl across the scorched earth. As the day heats up, the mirages swim and eddy. Topiaried bay trees appear to hang above shimmering lakes – actually families of ostriches. We pass flocks of swallows that fly in rages formation in bas-relief on the parched earth, and perfectly preserved in salt where they fell to earth with exhaustion. Past the elephant tracks that walk in a circle and then enigmatically disappear, past the skulls of zebra and on and on. You can open the throttle and close your eyes and travel Zen-like, knowing there is nothing to crash into until you fall off the edge of the earth.

There are small epiphanies to be had, sudden revelations of the true nature of our place on the wheel of things. Here you lose contact with time, space and direction. You hum along, travelling without perceptively moving, while all the power and conceit of commerce and position evaporate, the delicate network of friends and plans and diaries, all the human hierarchy of achievement and aspiration ebb away.

As the sun begins to drop, we see a smudge on the horizon Kubu island. This is what we have come to see, a granite fist in the flatness. It rises like a green baroque elfin city. I have seen few things in life that are well and truly awesome. Kubu island is one. Filigreed with baobab trees like fat red ballet dancers bigger than buses, older than God – well, older than Christ. The place is a natural wonder that beggars both wonder and any received concept of what’s natural. It has been the holiest secret of the Kalahari bushmen for longer than anyone knows, a place of power and ritual. Kubu is suspended from heaven, above the crisp linen earth, or perhaps it is just a 1970s record cover from a bad Dungeons and Dragons band.

The camp boys have got here before us; a cauldron of water bubbles for the shower suspended from a tree. The dining table is set and the drinks tray, with Beefeater, and Georgian fobs on bottle labels, stands waiting. Our bedrolls have been arranged on the high places and there is this goat.

I asked for the goat, a young goat, not a kid but under a year. It is tethered to a tree, a rangy, brindled, flop-eared, devil-eyed billy that could have been a regimental mascot. This goat is so old it remembers colonialism. The smiling cook produces a knife that you couldn’t cut atmosphere with, it is blunter than a head butt. I get out a Swiss army knife that has a bit of an edge. Killing, skinning and butchering a bad-tempered goat the size of a healthy Shetland pony with a Swiss army knife is not something I suggest you try at home. There is a lot of laughter and joking and blood splattering. Finally, by torchlight, I take a twitching haunch, cover it with rock salt and smear it with wild sage, and we’ve got dinner.

As the last of the sun departed for South America, clouds began to appear in the east, piled on top of each other. Like an angry cook spooning mashed potato, they rose and rose until the stratospheric winds whipped and flattened their tops into the characteristic tropical anvil nimbus. Storm clouds. But it was too early for rain, far too early. Round the camp fire, someone joked that killing a goat was trepidatious, hubris in such a holy and mystical place. We went to bed and lay and watched the stars that the bushmen believe are the camp fires of their ancestors. We smelt the evaporating heat and dust of the pan, cosy with hot water bottles and down pillows.

The first thick drop fell at about midnight. The next six hours were the most terrifying of my life. That is not a relative statement, it is an absolute. If you have never been in a tropical thunderstorm, forget everything you know about rain, it is not the same phenomenon. European rain is flushing a loo compared to this African Niagara. The storm cleared its throat across the pan and then broke directly overhead, the thunder and lighting simultaneously strobing and crashing. The water hissed and sang like a fusillade of rifles. The fear started as trepidation with a side order of concern that you could see off with the dose of common sense and half- remembered school physics. The bedroll flooded and the person I was with sobbed, and the crack and flash zigzagged hour after hour, echoing through the towers of rock. I saw the faces of my children flashing on the back of my screwed-up eyes and I wished I didn’t, that granite is conductive rock with an unhealthily high metal content, and this place was the highest point for hundreds and hundreds of miles. There was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.

My bowels, which for days had been cast in stone, decided they needed to do what the rest of me couldn’t, and evacuate. Let me tell you that squatting naked, like a gargoyle on the roof of Chartres, with terrified diarrhoea is an image that will leach into my nightmares until I join the goat. The pan was lit up in faltering jags as if by an omnipotent arc welder. The baobabs ululated and leapt. Shards of light danced as if the sky was shattering crystal. It went on and on and on, lulling, then thundering down again. Slowly, though the storm ebbed, the lightning exhausted itself and was put back in the box, and the wind rose, keening like a vixen.

The relief was like the end of an awful disaster movie. The sopping discomfort, a blissfully welcome token of life. We lay and hugged each other, teeth chattering, until the false dawn gingerly broke over the crags. I have no embarrassment in saying that I prayed with a more heartfelt fervour than I devoutly hope I ever have to again. Unfortunately, it was probably to the wrong god.

As the pan slowly heated up, and somehow the boys managed to make breakfast, and the rest of our crew emerged, we laughed with relief and I had the silly urge to shave with a mirror propped on a rock. I smiled at the face in the mirror, scraped at the pepper-and-salt stubble, and gave myself a very close shave.

On the way back, we stopped to collect salt. Under the thick layer of crystal, families of small beetles scurried. How could they possibly live here in salt? The beetles are tiny, resilient, lonely, a single-species ecosystem. I put a couple in a film box and brought them back to London.

I spent a happy day collecting dung (hyenas’ is white, aardvarks’ is made up entirely of termite heads) and watching love beetles, which looked like pairs of Tiffany earrings and marched around joined at the groin in permanent coitus. We ate snot apples, disgusting bushman treats that fill your mouth with slimy, vaguely fruity, viscous gob as if a sheep with influenza had sneezed in your mouth. And there is the letterbox tree, the biggest tree in southern Africa, a point of reference for hundreds of miles. Among the name of the first white explores carved in its multiple trunks, you can just make out Livingstone. We went tracking with the bushmen. They follow invisible spore with the assurance of traffic wardens walking down Piccadilly, and become the animals they track. “Here are three lions. Mother, two young, one male, one female. They haven’t eaten.” I’m sorry, why am I following hungry lions just as it is getting dark?

The Kalahari is a place of extremes and metaphor and allegory, it shuffles your deck, rearranges the cerebral furniture, messes up your priorities. It is the perfect unrest cure.

Back in London, I took the beetles to the Natural History Museum. They knew the species – Pogonus – but the beetle does not have a specific name. We don’t know how it lives or what it eats or why it is there. It will probably get into the collection in about 50 years or so. They could call it Gill’s condiment bug, but I think I’d rather they named it the “God, I know how you feel” beetle.

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