Did you know?
San (also known as 'Bushmen') can eat up to 104 species of insects as part of their diet.
Often, when you walk with a ranger in Africa, your eyes get used to skimming the horizon, the wide spaces, in search of what scientists quirkily call the 'charismatic megafauna' – the Big Five.
The Khomani San are a group of San, Southern Africa's aboriginal people, who live in the southern Kalahari.
When you're tracking with the Khomani San in their sacred grounds of the southern Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park, you suddenly find yourself on a 'belly safari' – concentrating on the world of small things.
It's that half-light just before dawn, and you're walking in the dunes with all senses on high alert
You and your guide move quietly: here the tiny spoor of an ant lion, there the prints of a ground squirrel, and here, the tsamma melon it bit open for those nutritious seeds.
Every movement of the night is written in the red Kalahari sand.
Your tracker may point out the trudging spoor of a tired, thirsty oryx looking for a cool spot at the top of a dune, and lower down, the massed footprints of an opportunistic hyena pack that followed it in the dark.
The best trackers don't only look at spoor. They decode the almost invisible signs an animal leaves behind – a broken strand of grass here, a browsed twig there.
They can see which way the wind was blowing, and whether an animal was tired or injured. They can tell when the spoor was made, and predict where the animal was headed and why.
Tracking with the Khomani San (who usually prefer to call themselves 'Bushmen') opens your senses to the Kgalagadi wilderness, the sweet smell of grasses in the morning, the busy twitter of white-browed sparrow weavers, the delicate patterning of a millipede, and the tracks of a honey badger.
And then it's breakfast time back at !Xaus Lodge, the high-end community-owned accommodation, where over fresh coffee and a delicious spread you can reflect on a morning spent wandering in a desert world of magic – in the company of ancient-knowledge bearers.