Botswana is a safari country built around water. Rain that falls in the Angolan highlands between November and March runs down the Okavango River and spreads into the Okavango Delta months later, so the Delta floods in the middle of Botswana's dry season. The floodwater pulls wildlife in from the surrounding Kalahari, and in 2014 the Delta became the 1,000th site on UNESCO's World Heritage list.
Most trips start in Maun or Kasane and move between camps by light aircraft. A typical route combines the Delta, where you can go out by mokoro (dugout canoe) and motorboat as well as by vehicle, with drier country: the Chobe riverfront and its elephant herds in the north, or the Makgadikgadi Pans, a salt-pan landscape with meerkats, brown hyenas and a zebra migration after the rains. Victoria Falls is close to the Chobe and easy to add at the end.
Camps here are small and spread out across large private concessions and Moremi Game Reserve, and most are unfenced. Botswana has long favored fewer, higher-paying visitors over mass tourism, which keeps vehicle numbers low in the Delta and also makes it one of the more expensive places in Africa to go on safari.
A good Botswana trip comes down to matching camps to the month you travel. A camp that is all about mokoro trips in July may be running game drives in November, and the Pans look completely different before and after the rains. We plan around those shifts so each stop is doing what it does best while you are there.
We also handle the logistics that trip people up: the order of light-aircraft hops, the luggage limit on those flights, park hours, and the road and border crossing to Victoria Falls. You get a route that makes sense on the map and a clear picture of what each camp is like before you book it.
Botswana protects a large share of its land for wildlife, and how you travel there helps pay for it.
Botswana has a dry winter and a wet summer, and the Delta flood runs on its own calendar.
The classic safari months. Wildlife gathers around permanent water, and the Delta floodwater peaks around July. Mornings and nights are cold in June and July, and by October the heat can reach 40°C. July and August are the busiest months.
Summer rains turn the country green. Many antelope give birth around this time, birding is at its best with summer migrants, and zebra and wildebeest move onto the grasslands of the Makgadikgadi. Some camps close and some roads become impassable, and January and February are usually the wettest months.
The rains taper off and the flood starts arriving in the Delta. The weather is less predictable, but rates are often lower and there are fewer people.
The Central Kalahari Game Reserve covers 52,800 km², about a tenth of Botswana, in open, dry country of grassland, scrub and ancient riverbeds.
After the summer rains, springbok, gemsbok and wildebeest gather in valleys like Deception Valley, and the black-maned Kalahari lions follow.
The Makgadikgadi Pans are salt pans in northeastern Botswana, left by an ancient lake. In the dry months they are a flat white expanse, and after the rains the grasslands fill with zebra and wildebeest.
They give a complete change from the Delta, with habituated meerkats, brown hyena and huge skies.
Chobe National Park in northern Botswana is best known for its elephants, which come down to the Chobe River in the hundreds in the dry season, easily watched from a boat.
It sits next to Kasane, a short drive from Victoria Falls, so it fits neatly at the end of a Botswana trip.
Linyanti and Selinda are large private concessions in northern Botswana, between the Okavango Delta and Chobe. In the dry season, elephants gather in big numbers along their rivers.
Only a handful of camps share them, and because they are private you can drive off-road, walk and go out after dark.
Moremi Game Reserve covers just under 5,000 km² of the eastern and central Okavango Delta, including Chief's Island.
It mixes permanent water, floodplain and dry land, so you can find nearly every Delta species here, with a few lodges inside alongside public campsites.
The Okavango Delta is a vast inland delta in northern Botswana, where the Okavango River spreads into the Kalahari. Its floodwater arrives in the dry season and pulls in wildlife from the surrounding dry country.
Camps are small, and you explore by mokoro, boat and vehicle.
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