Four days earlier, some pilots had come to the Pan and found it 1 metre deep with water. The Sink Monster must have visited the pan, because when we arrived, it looked like this.

Dry dry dry. It's an amazing landscape, very surreal. Some locals whizzed by on their bikes.

When you pull up a glider on the pan, it feels as if you're standing on some faraway planet, or you're in a movie set, or something. The wind was perfect, smooth, steady, and almost too strong.

We towed up with the last of the day's light casting soft colours on the distant thunderstorms.

We'd come for the legendary Pan Party, but there were only a few tired looking locals and some abandoned tents. Aah. The party was last night. We are one day too late. So we went out into the middle of the pan, and, as South Africans do, we had a braai.

There's quite an art to cremating meat for 7 people with a small bag of charcoal. First you have to find a rock for either side of the grid, and in this place you can walk for a long long way and find nothing. Then you need to get the coals glowing (I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll blow your house down). Then you have to drink lots of wine and regularly forget to turn the meat and fight with the foil-wrapped vegetables who smother the coals like cockroaches. We were hungry enough. It tasted great.

We slept under the stars. As usual, it got coldest at about 3 in the morning, when the wind changed direction and came whistling through. But that's part of what makes it special to be there .. it's remote, and harsh, and elemental.