Botswana

Okavango Delta

UNESCO World Heritage Site: the world's largest inland delta, where rains from Angola's highlands travel 1,200 km south and fan out across the Kalahari into a permanent maze of channels, lagoons, and islands teeming with hippos, crocodiles, and rare antelope like the sitatunga. Explore by mokoro canoe, 4x4, or fly into a remote luxury camp deep in the delta, one of Africa's most reliable areas for African wild dog sightings.

Chobe National Park

Home to the highest concentration of elephants in Africa: river cruises bring you alongside colossal herds drinking at the Chobe's edge, hippos surfacing metres from the boat, fish eagles overhead. Inland, the Savuti Marsh is prime predator territory: large lion prides hunt buffalo and elephant calves with a frequency rarely seen elsewhere.

Moremi Game Reserve

Set within the Okavango Delta, Moremi spans both land and water: floodplains, mopane forest, and lagoon edges, giving it an exceptional density of lion, leopard, cheetah, wild dog, and elephant. Game drives here feel genuinely wild: far fewer vehicles, far more space.

Khwai Conservancy

A community-run wildlife area bordering Moremi Game Reserve, centred on the perennial Khwai River. Animals congregate here in extraordinary numbers year-round: lion, leopard, wild dog, elephant, and some of the finest general game viewing in northern Botswana. Unlike the national parks, Khwai allows night drives and off-road driving, opening up sightings that the park simply can't offer.

Elephant Sands

Where elephants rule. A remote, unfenced bush retreat built around a natural waterhole that draws enormous herds, sometimes dozens at a time, drinking just metres from where you sit. There are no barriers: elephants move freely through the camp, trunks reaching over the edge of the pool after dark while guests watch from the open-air bar.

Khama Rhino Sanctuary

A community-run conservation success story near Serowe, one of the few places in Botswana where you can reliably see both black and white rhino on guided walking safaris. The sanctuary has steadily grown its population while returning tourism income directly to surrounding villages, and rangers know each animal by sight.

Central Kalahari Game Reserve

One of the largest protected areas on earth, twice the size of Denmark, and one of the most remote, with a silence and sense of untouched wilderness unlike almost anywhere else in Africa. Black-maned Kalahari lions, cheetahs, and vast migrating herds of springbok and gemsbok roam the ancient fossil river valleys, and guided bush walks with San trackers reveal a desert that, to the untrained eye, looks empty.

The Khoi-San Culture

The San are the original people of southern Africa: hunter-gatherers whose culture stretches back over 70,000 years, and Botswana's Central Kalahari is one of the last places where it remains alive. On guided encounters, San trackers read the desert sand like a book: identifying animals by footprint, finding water where there appears to be none, starting fire in minutes from materials gathered off the ground.

Trans Kalahari

The great Botswana road trip: crossing the Kalahari from east to west through open savannah, dry riverbeds, and vast, unbroken emptiness. It rewards those willing to slow down and go further, with encounters and landscapes that never appear in a standard itinerary.

Makgadikgadi Salt Pans

An ancient lake bed that dried out thousands of years ago, leaving one of the largest salt flats on earth, a blinding white expanse stretching to the horizon in every direction. Quad bike across the cracked surface, have close encounters with habituated meerkat families at the pan edges, and sleep under some of the darkest, most star-filled skies on the planet.

Tsodilo Hills

UNESCO World Heritage Site, known as the "Louvre of the Desert." Over 4,500 San rock paintings trace human presence across more than 100,000 years, depicting hunting, rituals, and spiritual visions across three hills the San have called sacred since the beginning.