Botsalano game reserve lies alongside the road between Mafeking and Gabarone, very close to the border between South Africa and Botswana. It has a delightful campsite quite close to the gate, from where you can walk a little through the sandy dry savannah grass. The meerkats enjoy watching you.
At night the stars reach down to the ground in all directions. The constellation of Scorpio holds the brilliantly red star Aldebaran. The striated creamy white of the milky way stretches from horizon to horizon. The dark blots of the two Magellanic clouds are clearly visible to the naked eye. Frequent manmade satellites twinkle their way across the sky until they move into the earths shadow.
In quiet peacefulness on a canvas chair beside our tent we sit waiting for the next few shooting stars, mostly streaking across the sky, but a few slower bright white flares. There are always shooting stars to be seen here.
We don’t have a fire in this camp site. Any man made light would diminish the starlight.
With my naked eye I can see the blurred luminescence of Messier objects. Some are interstellar dust clouds, others are themselves uncountable stars. With my binoculars I can search among them for globular clusters. I find five, but my star recognition skills are not good enough to say which ones. We don’t want to destroy our night vision for the next half hour by consulting the star atlas.
We wait quietly for moonrise.