Place to stay · Kgalagadi District
Kalahari Rest Lodge
Private game lodge near Kang on the Trans-Kalahari Highway, with air-conditioned chalets, campsites, a restaurant, bar and pool. A sensible overnight between Gaborone and Namibia.
Kalahari Rest is a privately owned game lodge near Kang, the village on the Trans-Kalahari Highway between Sekoma and Ghanzi. Almost everybody who stops is on the long haul between Gaborone and the Namibian border, and that is the reason to book it: a bed, a meal and a swim roughly where the day’s driving runs out. Bill and Marinda Sieberhagen are the hosts.
What to expect
The chalets are en suite with air conditioning, a mini fridge, a small kitchenette and satellite TV. The main lodge has the restaurant, the bar and the pool. Wi-Fi is free around the lodge. Campers get a pitch with its own washing-up point and a 220V plug, which matters if you are running a fridge off the vehicle.
It is a game farm, so there is more to do than sleep. Game drives go out early in the morning and late in the afternoon. The lodge lists giraffe, zebra, eland, hartebeest, wildebeest, kudu, waterbuck and impala on the property, and says cheetah, leopard and brown hyena are seen too.
Practical details
- Phone and WhatsApp: +267 73 774 009. The lodge asks for bookings by WhatsApp message.
- GPS from the lodge: S 23 30.822, E 22 36.729.
- The lodge sleeps 44 people in all.
- Power comes from a generator and solar panels.
- Lunch has to be arranged ahead at reception. Firewood is sold there.
Good to know
Kang is also where you turn off for the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park to the south-west and the Central Kalahari Game Reserve to the north-east, so the lodge works as a staging night for either as well as a highway stop.
The lodge takes hunting parties as well as tourists. If that bothers you, ask what is happening on the dates you want before you pay the deposit, as they do not refund it.
Last updated 12 October 2026. Sources: Kalahari Rest, Kalahari Rest, accommodation, Kalahari Rest, contact, Wikipedia, Kang, Botswana.
Steak, no power until six and a hyena you won't see
Nobody plans a holiday around Kalahari Rest. A writer for SA4x4 magazine came across it in 2012 on the dull haul from Damaraland back to Gauteng and gave it one paragraph at the very end of his story, mostly about the steak. A guided group spent the last night of a Botswana tour here, written up in 2023, only because the convoy took a wrong turn and never reached the Khama Rhino Sanctuary.
Twenty-five kilometres, whichever way you point
The magazine put the lodge 25 km west of Kang. A camper on the 4x4 Community forum said about 20 km north. Both mean the same turn-off, because the highway leaves Kang heading north-west, and the lodge’s own GPS point sits about 25 km from the village in a straight line. It matters for one reason. You are well clear of the big fuel stop at Kang, which one poster in that 2013 thread told people to avoid unless they “sleep like the dead”.
Beef, and a wait for the air conditioner
Three unconnected writers over ten years agree on supper. The 2012 magazine piece rated the steaks with the best its writer had eaten anywhere. A forum member the next year called the food basic but tasty. A couple driving from the Kgalagadi to Khutse in 2022 copied down the menu: T-bone, sirloin, rump, fillet, or chicken schnitzel if you insist.
The one complaint I can find is about power, and it is one traveller’s account. A Cape Town camper who took a chalet in spring 2015 had to wait until six in the evening for the power to come on before the air conditioner would work, on a day he called very warm. The lodge now lists solar alongside its generator. Ask whether that runs a chalet at three on an October afternoon.
Four women, the youngest of them 70
Everyone on this road stops at the same few places, so the other guests are half the evening. The 2022 couple wrote less about the lodge than about four women they met there, travelling in two vehicles to join a guided self-drive through the Central Kalahari. The youngest was 70 and the oldest 81. They told the couple they would rather die in a desert than in an old age home.
People coming out of the park bring stories too. On his drive up to Kang the 2015 camper had passed two young male lions on a kudu they had caught in the road, about 5 km outside the Mabuasehube gate.
The predators on the list
The lodge says cheetah, leopard and brown hyena are “also to be spotted” on its land. None of the trip reports I have read mentions seeing one here. They are plausible, though. Cheetah Conservation Botswana puts the country’s cheetahs at about 1,700, by its reckoning a quarter of the world’s wild total, and says more than 70 per cent of them live outside the protected areas, which is to say on farmland. Brown hyena are thought to number fewer than 10,000 anywhere, and the southern Kalahari holds one of the two biggest populations left. Gus Mills, who spent twelve years as a researcher in the Kgalagadi and wrote the standard book on its hyenas, found they do four fifths of their moving about at night and kill very little: live prey made up about 4 per cent of what they ate. The rest was other animals’ leftovers, with insects, wild melons and desert truffles on the side. Mark and Delia Owens, in Cry of the Kalahari, wrote of a lone brown hyena sending a full-grown leopard up a tree. You would need luck to meet one before dark.
