Botswana: Nine Attractions and Natural Wonders

Space, water, and wildlife

Botswana is a large, flat, dry country — most of it Kalahari sand — with a small population and a deliberate tourism policy of few beds, high prices and big wilderness. The result is some of the least crowded and best- managed safari country in Africa, built around one extraordinary feature: an inland river delta in the middle of the desert.

The nine below are almost all national parks and reserves, reached by light aircraft or long gravel drives, usually as part of a fly-in safari or a self-drive 4x4 trip. The dry season, roughly May to October, concentrates the wildlife at the water; the green season brings the pans to life and lowers prices.

1. The Okavango Delta

The Okavango rises in the Angolan highlands, flows into Botswana, and simply stops — fanning out into a 15,000-square-kilometre maze of channels, reed beds, and palm islands that vanishes into the sand and the sky. The flood arrives in the dry season, drawing elephant, buffalo, lion, wild dog, and huge concentrations of birds and antelope onto the islands.

Visitors explore it by small plane, by 4x4 on the larger islands, and — the classic way — by mokoro, a shallow dugout canoe poled through the papyrus. In 2014 the delta became Botswana's second UNESCO World Heritage Site, and the 1,000th site on the list.

2. Chobe National Park

In the northeast, Chobe is famous for elephants — tens of thousands of them, part of a regional population of well over 100,000, the largest on the continent. In the dry season they and vast herds of buffalo come down to drink on the Chobe riverfront near Kasane, where a sunset boat cruise comes close to the action and to hippo, crocodile, and fish eagles.

The park's other faces — the Savuti marsh, with its famous lions, and the remote Linyanti — are drier and wilder. Kasane is an easy add-on to Victoria Falls, just across the border.

3. Moremi Game Reserve

Moremi covers much of the eastern side of the delta and was proclaimed in 1963 at the initiative of the local Batawana people, whose regent Elizabeth Pulane Moremi was concerned at the toll hunting was taking. It mixes permanent water, seasonal floodplain, mopane woodland, and dry acacia, which means an unusually full range of wildlife: all the big cats, wild dog, reintroduced rhino, and around 500 bird species.

The Khwai area on its northern edge is one of the reserve's few camping areas and a gateway to the neighbouring community land.

4. The Makgadikgadi Pans

The Makgadikgadi is the bed of a vast prehistoric lake — a group of salt pans covering around 16,000 square kilometres of blinding, cracked white nothing. In the dry season visitors drive far out onto the crust and camp under a sky with no horizon. When the rains come, the pans flood, and one of Africa's largest zebra migrations and big flocks of flamingos arrive.

Kubu Island, a granite outcrop studded with baobabs rising from the pan, is a sacred site and an unforgettable camp.

5. Nxai Pan and Baines' Baobabs

North of the main Makgadikgadi pans, Nxai Pan is a fossil lakebed that greens up in the rains and fills with springbok, zebra, giraffe, and the lions and cheetahs that follow them. Its landmark is a cluster of seven ancient baobabs — "Baines' Baobabs" — that the explorer-artist Thomas Baines painted in 1862; the trees have changed remarkably little since.

It is a national park, self-drive with a proper 4x4 and full supplies, or visited from a Makgadikgadi lodge.

6. Kubu Island

Kubu Island is a low outcrop of grey granite covered in baobabs, with a dry-stone wall and more than 300 stone cairns left by people who lived here long after the great lake had dried. It sits in the southwestern part of the Sua Pan, and reaching it is a long drive across the crust from the village of Mmatshumo.

The whole island is a national monument, and its basic campsite is run for the benefit of the local community; campers must be fully self-sufficient.

7. The Central Kalahari

At roughly 52,000 square kilometres, the Central Kalahari Game Reserve is bigger than Switzerland — a near-empty expanse of sand, grass, and fossil river valleys such as Deception Valley, where the black-maned Kalahari lions, cheetah, and huge herds of springbok and oryx gather after the rains. It is the ancestral land of the San, whose right to live and hunt here has been the subject of long legal battles.

It is deep self-drive territory — days between fuel, no shops — or visited from one of a handful of remote camps.

8. The Tsodilo Hills

Four hills rise abruptly from the flat Kalahari in the far northwest, about 40 kilometres from Shakawe, and they hold one of the highest concentrations of rock art in the world — more than 4,500 paintings across some 500 sites, made over thousands of years. The San, who consider the hills sacred — a place where spirits reside — call the tallest "Male", the next "Female", and a third "Child".

It became Botswana's first UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2001. A small museum, a campsite and guided trails lead to the main painted panels.

9. Mokoro and mobile safari

Beyond the individual parks, the way Botswana is experienced is itself part of the appeal. The mokoro trip — gliding silently through the delta reeds at eye level with the frogs and lilies — is unlike any vehicle safari. And the country's classic trip is the "mobile", a guided expedition that moves camp every few days between the delta, Moremi, the Savuti, and Chobe, sleeping in walk-in tents on unfenced sites.

Both bring travellers closer to the wilderness, and to the sounds of it at night, than a lodge ever can.

Botswana is expensive and logistically demanding, and that is the point — the reserves are quiet and the wildlife is not habituated to crowds. A ten-day fly-in safari linking the delta, Moremi, and Chobe is the classic first trip.