The Okavango Delta, Chobe & the North

The north-west has one of the longest human records in southern Africa. The San lived here for tens of thousands of years, and the paintings of the Tsodilo Hills were added to over a very long period; farming peoples reached the Okavango panhandle more than a thousand years ago. From the late 18th century the Batawana, a Tswana group who broke away under their chief Tawana, built a state around Lake Ngami and the Delta that drew in the Bayei, the Hambukushu, the Basubiya of Chobe and the San as subjects.

European hunters and traders followed David Livingstone, who reached Lake Ngami in 1849, and ivory and ostrich feathers brought the region into the colonial economy. After the German war against the Herero in neighbouring South West Africa in 1904, Herero refugees crossed into Ngamiland, where their descendants still live. The Batawana moved their capital to Maun in 1915, and for most of the 20th century the north was remote, affected by the tsetse fly and kept apart from the rest of the country by veterinary fences built to control cattle disease.

Conservation changed everything. The Batawana created the Moremi Game Reserve on their own land in 1963, Chobe became the country's first national park in 1968, and from the 1970s Maun grew into a safari town. The Okavango Delta was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2014, and the region now sits within the Kavango–Zambezi transfrontier conservation area shared with Angola, Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

The north is Botswana's most mixed region. The Batawana are the ruling Tswana chiefdom of Ngamiland, with their kgotla in Maun; the Bayei, traditionally fishermen and makers of the dugout mokoro, live along the Delta's rivers; the Hambukushu hold the panhandle and include families who arrived as refugees from Angola from the late 1960s; the Herero keep their own language, cattle culture and the long Victorian-style dresses and horn-shaped headcloths of their women; the Basubiya live around Kasane; and San communities remain in the dry west and around Tsodilo.

The best-known craft is basketry. Women in Gumare, Etsha and the panhandle villages weave tightly coiled baskets from the fibre of the mokola palm, coloured with local dyes, and sell them through cooperatives and Maun's craft shops. Tsodilo's hills are sacred places where some people still come to pray.

Safari work has created a guiding culture of its own: many polers and guides are Bayei and Hambukushu who grew up on the water, and knowledge of animals and plants carries real standing. Local conversations turn on the flood, the cattle fences and hunting policy.

Maun, with about 85,000 people, is the region's town and one of Botswana's fastest growing: a spread-out place of cattle, donkeys, tin-roofed houses, supermarkets, air charter offices and 4x4 hire yards along the Thamalakane river. Kasane, far smaller, sits on the Chobe riverfront at the corner where Botswana meets Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe, and lives almost entirely from tourism and the border crossings. Shakawe, Gumare and Seronga are the main panhandle villages.

Tourism is by far the largest employer, from lodge cooks and pilots to guides and mechanics, and much of the Delta is leased to safari companies as concessions, some in partnership with community trusts. Outside it, people fish, farm floodplain fields of maize and sorghum, and keep cattle, whose exports are limited by the foot-and-mouth disease controls.

Life with wildlife is a daily issue. Botswana has the largest elephant population in the world, most of it in the north, and elephants raid fields and water points; hunting, banned in 2014 and later reopened, remains a heated national debate.

The Delta adds fish to the national menu: bream (tilapia) and catfish caught by line, net and trap from the channels, fried, grilled over coals or dried for the dry season. The floodplain also yields water-lily tubers and seeds, and wild fruits are gathered in season.

Daily meals follow the Botswana pattern — bogobe (sorghum or maize porridge) with beef, goat or chicken stew, greens and beans — and seswaa, pounded salted beef, is cooked for weddings and celebrations. Phane, the dried mophane caterpillars, are gathered in the mophane woodlands of Chobe and eaten fried or as a snack. Wild fruits such as the marula and the monkey orange are eaten in season.

The safari camps serve international food, often cooked with considerable ambition in the bush, and lodge dinners around a fire are part of the visit. Maun and Kasane have a few cafés and grills catering to guides, pilots and travellers, and the usual drinks are lager, Chibuku sorghum beer and home brews.

The Okavango Delta is the reason most people come. The river arrives from Angola through the narrow panhandle and fans out into a maze of channels, lagoons, papyrus and palm islands that floods most fully in the dry winter. Mokoro trips, poled by local guides, glide past water lilies, reed frogs and red lechwe; motorboats work the deeper panhandle channels, and scenic flights from Maun show the full pattern of water and game trails. Moremi Game Reserve, on the Delta's eastern side, combines water and dry land, with Xakanaxa, Third Bridge and the Khwai river among its best-known areas and lion, leopard, wild dog and buffalo common.

Chobe National Park covers the north-east. Its riverfront beside Kasane is famous for dry-season elephant herds crossing and drinking on the Chobe, best seen from a boat cruise at sunset with hippos, crocodiles and buffalo on the islands. Inland, the Savuti marsh is fed only in some years by the Savuti Channel, which has dried and flowed again within living memory; Savuti's lions are known for hunting large prey. The Linyanti swamps lie along the Namibian border.

In the far north-west, the Tsodilo Hills rise out of the Kalahari with thousands of rock paintings, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Lake Ngami, south-west of Maun, fills in good flood years and draws flocks of waterbirds, and the Gcwihaba caves lie deep in the western desert.