Pet Topics

The Kalahari Desert covers over 360,000 square miles in Africa. Unlike many deserts, or even the common perception of a desert, it includes large areas of lush grazing land after rains fall. In fact, it’s considered a semi-arid desert, unlike the super dry deserts such as the Atacama Desert which receives only about 1 millimeter of rain each year.

Kalahari Desert

It as the name, but the Kalahari Desert isn’t a desert by the strict definition. Some parts of the desert receive about 250 mm of rain annually. It’s not regular or dependable rain, which gave the area its name. It’s known as either place without water or great thirst by the people in Africa.

The Kahalari Desert wasn’t always a sandy, dry place. It was once part of a lake called Makgadikgadi. This lake spanned nearly 80000 square kilometers. By comparison Makgadikgadi was about the size of Lake Superior. It was also about 30m deep on average. The last of the lake drained about 10,000 years ago.

Les Stroud, the Survivorman from television, spent six days in the Kalahari Desert filming one of his episodes. During his time there the surface temperature on the sand reached 107.6F, in the shade! Out of the shade, forget about it – 149°F. As hot as it was during the day, it was cold at night. Cold in the neighborhood of 44°F. If that he doesn’t get you, the cold will.

Drinking water is important in the Kalahari Desert. That’s generally true. It can become a matter of life and death in 140° Fahrenheit dry heat. Water was hard to come by for the survivor man. He resorted to every trick in the book to get some of this important resource. One was to create a urine still, where he could capture all the water from his urine. Okay then. He also found a few drops of water in the roots of plants that he chewed. In six days he was ready to return to civilization. There’s no doubt that even Les, trained and prepared in survival in harsh environments, would have died in only a few more days.

Kalahari Desert

That’s life in the Kahalari Desert. Not much of a vacation spot is it?