Kieliekrankie Wilderness Camp

Kieliekrankie is a small wilderness camp set high on a red dune in the South African section of the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park, a vast arid reserve straddling the border with Botswana. Its handful of cabins look out across an endless sea of dunes and sparse camel thorn, giving guests an immense, uninterrupted view of the Kalahari and some of the darkest, most star-filled night skies in the country.

The camp is deliberately remote and self-catering, without a shop or restaurant, so visitors stock up at the larger camps before arriving. Each unit has its own outlook over the landscape, and a waterhole below the dune draws game to within easy view.

This is dry-country wildlife at its most striking. Gemsbok, springbok and red hartebeest move across the dunes, and the Kgalagadi is famed for its black-maned lions, cheetah and raptors. The stillness and the scale of the desert are as much the attraction as the animals.