After years of making some of television’s most extravagant motoring adventures, Andy Wilman does not choose a famous Alpine pass when asked to remember his best drive. His answer is far less polished: a fast, dusty return across Botswana’s Makgadikgadi Salt Pans after the cameras had stopped rolling.
That memory says something important about travel. The car mattered, but not as much as the people, the landscape and the circumstances that turned an ordinary return to camp into something he still remembers years later.
The best part happened after filming
The crew had finished work around Kubu Island during the final Grand Tour special and needed to get back across the salt flats. What followed was not a staged sequence but a convoy moving quickly enough to keep one another in sight across an immense, almost featureless landscape.
The Makgadikgadi Pans are remnants of an ancient lake, and their hard white surface can appear deceptively simple. Conditions change, soft ground can catch vehicles and distances feel different when there are few landmarks to judge them against.
Why the place stayed with him
Wilman describes the experience less through speed than through atmosphere. Dust, open space, the knowledge that the day’s work was over and the shared momentum of the group turned the drive into something spontaneous.
That is often how memorable journeys work. The moments that stay are not always the ones planned most carefully; they are the ones in which several ordinary elements suddenly line up.
Botswana remains accessible, but not casual
A marked route toward Kubu Island can be driven in the dry season with the right preparation and local knowledge. Wildlife, huge skies and the contrast between salt, scrub and distant vegetation give the drive a scale difficult to understand from photographs alone.
Remote travel still demands respect. Fuel, water, weather and surface conditions matter, and the romance of isolation should never be confused with the absence of risk.
A quieter definition of the perfect drive
Wilman now talks just as warmly about driving to southern Italy with his wife and dog in a Porsche Macan. After years of spectacular television journeys, comfort, company and time seem to have become more important than difficulty.
That shift feels familiar in yachting too. The most memorable passage is not always the longest or roughest one; sometimes it is simply the day when the route, the people and the place make everything else feel unnecessary.
