In Ghanzi District, the landscape of the Central Kalahari Game Reserve and nearby D’Kar offer two different perspectives on the region. The reserve extends across several districts, including Ghanzi District; D’Kar is 35 kilometres north of Ghanzi.
Landscape in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve
The Central Kalahari Game Reserve encompasses large clay pans, fossil river valleys, vegetated sand dunes and woodland areas. These landscape features belong to the same reserve, which extends across several districts. Ghanzi District is one of its administrative regions. If you associate Kalahari landscapes mainly with sand dunes, you will also find clay pans, fossil river valleys and woodland areas here. The landscape described, then, cannot be reduced to a single form.
D’Kar and the Kuru Festival
Nearby is D’Kar, a small village where several extended Bushman families live. The Kuru Traditional Dance and Music Festival is held there every August. D’Kar therefore offers both a glimpse of village life and a recurring event associated with a particular month. If you would like to plan your trip around the festival, check the date for the relevant year before making your plans.
Choose your accommodation search area
If you are looking for accommodation, first decide whether Ghanzi District or Botswana as a whole is the focus of your trip. The district is the regional search area; Botswana is the broader context. This distinction helps you separate regional attractions around the reserve and D’Kar from other natural and cultural highlights elsewhere in the country.
Botswana in a broader context
At the national level, the Okavango Delta and Tsodilo offer further natural and cultural highlights of Botswana. The Okavango Delta lies in the northwest of the country and is a large, gently sloping alluvial fan, also known as an inland delta. It is one of the few large inland deltas with no outlet to the sea; its water seeps into the desert sands of the Kalahari Basin. The World Heritage area encompasses most of the delta as well as more than two million hectares of largely undisturbed wetlands and seasonally flooded grasslands.
Habitats in the delta include rivers and lagoons with year-round and seasonal water, permanent swamps, and seasonally and occasionally flooded grasslands. There are also riparian forests, dry deciduous woodlands and island communities. Highlights of activities in the Okavango Delta include game drives and speedboat trips. The countrywide overview thus brings together a range of habitats and activities.
Tsodilo: Rock formations and cultural heritage
The Tsodilo Hills are massive quartzite rock formations in northwestern Botswana, near the Namibian border. They rise between ancient sand dunes to the east and a dry fossil lakebed in the west of the Kalahari. Large rock paintings are found in their rock shelters and caves; they apparently date from the Stone Age through to the 19th century, although they have not been precisely dated.
Tsodilo preserves archaeological evidence, rock art and continuing traditions that document the development of human culture and the relationship between people and nature over many millennia. The Hambukushu and San communities revere Tsodilo’s waterholes and hills as a sacred cultural landscape. In contrast to the Okavango Delta, the focus here is on rock formations, rock art and cultural significance; the delta is shaped by its waterways and diverse habitats.
Discover more destinations: Ghanzi, Kgatleng District, North-East District, Kweneng District, Southern, Kgalagadi District, Northwest, North-West District.
Back to the main travel overview: Botswana.
