Botswana

From the vast hand of the Okavango’s vanishing waters to the parched emptiness of the Makgadikgadi Pans and the desert wilderness of the Kalahari, Botswana is a land of extremes. Botswana offers some of the best wilderness and wildlife in southern Africa, with the game-rich Moremi Wildlife Reserve, Chobe National Park and Central Kalahari Game Reserve.

Described as the river that never finds the sea, the Okavango fans out into a maze of channels in northwestern Botswana. The Okavango Delta is an extraordinary place: a thin skein of water over a thirsty desert. Fertile yet fragile, it’s a wilderness of matchless natural beauty created by seasonal cycles and the fickle ebb and flow of flood waters. It’s a wild paradise and one of those places that’s a must-see on anyone’s list, especially from a mokoro (traditional canoe) while gliding along the waterways. View an incredible variety of animals and birds at the heart of the Okavango in the Moremi Wildlife Reserve or to the northeast in the Chobe National Park. For visitors who enjoy being on the water, traverse the Chobe River on a houseboat.

The semi-arid earth of the Kalahari spreads out over 260 000 square kilometres like a gently sloping bowl of sand, grass and thorn trees. The Central Kalahari Game Reserve is bigger than some small countries and envelops visitors with a memorable sense of wild Africa. During the dry, cold winters the pans dry up, the grass dies off, the animals move away and the Kalahari earns its reputation as an inhospitable desert. In summer when the good rains arrive, the herds of springbok, gemsbok and wildebeest congregate to form one of the most spectacular migrations in Africa.

Stretching over 8 000 square kilometres the Makgadikgadi Pans National Park and adjacent Nxai Pan are a landscape of pans, grassland and beautiful savanna. In the rainy season the pans are filled with water, attracting herds of migrating animals, while in the dry months there’s sun-baked clay as far as the eye can see.

To the south, the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park, a super park that joins the Kalahari Gemsbok National Park in South Africa to the Gemsbok National Park in Botswana, is a vast, still sea of rusted dunes home to herds of gemsbok and the famous Kalahari lions.