Last year I met a chap called Ralph who has Tarzan's hair and is officially the best-looking man on Earth. And he said I should go to Botswana, where he runs a safari company, because I'd love it.

It turned out however, that Ralph's idea of a safari is not what you'd imagine. Oh, he can do the elephant and giraffe stuff, but mostly he's based at a place called Jack's Camp, miles from anywhere on the edge of the Makgadikgadi, the biggest salt flats in the world.

You've probably seen photos of the salty wastelands in America or Australia but the Makgadikgadi is nothing like that. It's vast on a scale that simply boggles the mind. I'm talking about an area the size of Portugal which contains absolutely nothing at all.

Go to the centre, get in a Ferrari Enzo, put on a blindfold and set off in any direction that takes your fancy. And flat-out, at 200mph, it'd be over an hour before you even felt a ripple through the wheel.

There's just one problem. You can't actually drive an Enzo over these salt flats because they have all the structural rigidity of a crème brûlée. There's a seemingly firm outer casing of ice-white salt, but it's not that thick and underneath you have about a hundred and eleventy four billion dead sea creatures which, over five million years, have turned into slime.

Way back when, the rift valley was formed and created the largest inland sea in the world. And then the planet started to heat up - I have no idea how because the Range Rover hadn't been invented at this point.

Anyway, the water started to evaporate until one day, it was gone, leaving all the creatures dead and covered with a thin sprinkling of salt. That's what you have today and the only way of getting across it is on a quad bike.

Now, the quad bike has had a fair degree of bad press in recent years. First of all, we had Rik Mayall damn nearly killing himself when his turned over and then, more recently, poor old Ozzy Osbourne breaking what's left of his body in two when his pulled a wheelie, throwing him off the back.

If you want to kill your children, there's no quicker way that I can see than buying them one of those 50cc jobbies you sometimes see at garden centres. My son went on one the other day and in less than two minutes, he and it were in the swimming pool.

And yet, there I was, on the edge of the Makgadikgadi, on a bitterly cold pre-dawn morning in August, with my wife, my three children and two guides - the ridiculously good-looking Ralph and an 18-foot Zulu called Super. No, I'm not joking. Super is his real name.