Page 76 - Discover Botswana 2022 ONLINE

VINCENT GRAFHORST’s passions are travelling and spending time in the wild. Photography is his quest, inspired by the beauty and splendour of the natural world, its epic landscapes and iconic wild animals. His aspiration is to create art, composed with natural light, colour, shapes and textures, out of amazing and dramatic moments in time and space, and display the un-paralleled beauty, diversity and grandeur of Nature at its most impressive. If this helps to engender an awareness and appreciation of Nature in others, thus conserving the natural world, he believes his art has achieved a higher purpose.
Top: Three members of a Barn Owl family in their favourite tree. Ghostly pale and normally strictly nocturnal, Barn Owls are predators of the night. These very successful hunters have excellent low-light vision, but it is their impressive hearing, aided by their satellite-dish-shaped faces, that enable Barn Owls to locate mice and other rodents even in total darkness. This species’ eerie screeching call, a long-drawn-out shriek, is unmistakable and a familiar night-time sound in the Kgalagadi.
Above: An adult Barn Owl (Tyto alba) taking a break on its nightly hunt.
stations or comfortable lodges with swimming pools. A campsite is a designated spot under an acacia tree, without water or ablution facilities. One must be completely self-sufficient, something that requires some serious planning and preparation.
The brave that do venture here appreciate the allure of this desolate and wild place, its power to instil a feeling of extreme timeless solitude. These remote empty spaces, endless horizons, epic skies and starry nights filled with the sounds of nature’s silence are something to treasure in our noisy over-populated world. So a visit, anytime of the year, is always most rewarding.
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FOOTNOTE:
The Kaa section of the park and the adjacent KD2 concession are best accessed via Hukuntsi and the village of Zutshwa. From Kaa, one can follow the trail down towards the Nossob riverbed to explore the other sections of the immense KTP.