Barnie Louw walked in the footsteps of big-game hunters in an unspoilt Botswana wilderness area larger than Belgium. And realised the Kruger is really just an overgrown zoo.

Have you ever wondered what the areas on a map look like where nothing is indicated, or rather, where there’s nothing to indicate? You know, those areas that have a single colour, no dotted lines, circles or place names.

For example, if you look at the part of the Sahara north of Timbuktu on a large wall map of Africa, you’ll see what I mean – it’s just a solid, light green expanse of land.

Over the next few days we’ll see for ourselves what such a monochromatic area actually looks like on the ground, and I’m somewhat nervous. We’re hunched over a map of Botswana, opened up on the dining room table of the Cornwall Ranch, just across the Molopo River from the Bray border post.

With tanned trigger fingers, Heini and Jannie Strumpher are drawing the outlines of Mabenyane a Kalahari (“Jewel of the Kalahari”), this father and son’s concession area of 4 million hectares stretching from Tshabong in the south of Botswana, right around the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park and Mabuasehube almost up to the Ghanzi area and the Namibian border.

Yes, you’ve read correctly: 4 000 000 ha of mad, bad Kalahari, twice the size of the Kruger Park, larger than the Botswana side of the Kgalagadi, and as big as Switzerland – only without fences, roads and people (and yodellers and cuckoo clocks).

And it’s into the northern monochromatic part of this lion country that our group of 8 cars and 17 people will venture tomorrow …