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Super was going to be tail-end charlie for our 250-mile trek. But first, he had a health-and-safety lecture to deliver, Botswana style. Two weeks later I'm able to quote the whole thing verbatim. It went like this..."Let's go".

There were no helmets, no high-visibility jackets, no disclaimers to sign, no lectures on what to do if you were to be hit in the face by a giant meteorite and no reason that Super could see why our seven-year-old shouldn't drive her bike the whole way if she wanted to. Which she did, very much.

An hour into the journey we stopped at random and began to poke about in the salt. Pretty soon, we'd found several early-iron-age pots and a little while later, a human leg bone. My eldest daughter also found a couple of diamonds.

I turned out to be very bad at archaeology, mainly, I suspect, because my head is very far from the ground. At one point I dropped my iPod and it took me damn nearly half-an-hour to find it again. Anyway, I was genuinely surprised to find so much history just lying around and asked Ralph why it hadn't been hoovered up by tourists and thieves.

He was genuinely incredulous, pointing out that in the last 5,000 years, no more than a few dozen people have been onto the flats at all. He gave me odds of a billion-to-one that any human had ever stood where I was standing. Slightly weird feeling that.

We set off again and after another hour the view was incredible. Because there was nothing in it. Nothing. Can you imagine that? Utterly, absolutely flat white ground and an utterly absolutely flat blue sky. No clouds. No distant hills. Nothing. Except a bad smell.

This, it turned out, was coming from a dead aardvark which had been drawn onto the pans by the heat haze, which he'd mistaken for water. And then he'd fallen through the salt and got stuck. Which is pretty much what we did, next to his rotting corpse.

Wisely, Ralph had provided us with Yamaha Bear Trackers, a light, two-wheel-drive machine that, in theory, glides over the surface leaving almost no clue that it's ever been there. Unfortunately, when you do break through, you must rely on the rear tyres alone to get you out. And they can't.