Botswana Safari: Eleven Days in the Okavango Delta, Moremi and Chobe - Example Timeline | Boromlia
Eleven days on a self-drive Botswana safari in July: mokoro nights in the Okavango Delta, deep sand in Moremi, a night drive at Khwai, the Savute channel and the Chobe riverfront. With real park fees, distances and the wild dogs we nearly missed.
Maun, Where the Tar Ends and Everyone Is Buying Ice
We flew into Maun with a printed booking sheet and almost no cash, which was the first mistake. Maun is the staging post for the whole Okavango, and its airport is one of the busiest in southern Africa for light aircraft, mostly six-seaters ferrying people out to camps that have no road to them. The town itself is one long road, a Choppies, a Spar, a tyre place and about forty safari operators. Park fees for international visitors run BWP 270 per adult per day, roughly US$20 at 2025-26 rates, with children 8 to 17 at half price and under-eights free, plus a vehicle fee from BWP 115. The gates take cash. We spent the first afternoon at an ATM.
The Flood Arrives in July, Which Made No Sense to Us
Sitting on the bank of the Thamalakane with a warm beer, we finally understood the thing that had confused us for months of planning. The Okavango floods in the dry season. Rain that falls on the Angolan highlands between October and March travels more than 1,600 km to get here and takes roughly four months about it, so the water peaks between June and August, when Botswana itself has had no rain at all and the Kalahari is at its most parched. The flooded area is reported to be a little larger than Belgium. In June 2014 the Delta became the 1,000th site inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list. We booked July for the cheap flights and got the flood by accident.
Poled Out of Boro Standing Up in a Fibreglass Canoe
The mokoro station is at Boro, southwest of Maun. A mokoro is a shallow canoe poled from the stern by someone standing at the back, and almost every one in the water now is fibreglass. The originals were dug out of ebony, sausage tree or knobthorn, often trees more than a century old, and as tourism grew the replacement rate got alarming. The copies last longer, and locals reportedly find them steadier. Prices in 2025-26: a full day out of Maun with transfer, entry and a picnic lunch runs about US$150 to US$180 per person. One night is around US$220, three nights around US$320. Booked direct through the community trust the poling fee is a fraction of that.
A Night on an Island With Nothing Between Us and the Hippos
We took the one-night option and camped on a sand island somewhere northwest of Boro. No fence, no generator, no light once the fire went down. The water is clear enough to count grains of sand on the bottom and moves so slowly that we could not see it move at all. The polers navigate by reading the reeds. At around two in the morning a hippo came out to graze about fifteen metres from the tent and made a sound like a diesel engine failing to start. Nobody slept after that. On the walk at first light we were shown a set of tracks and told they were wild dog, from the night before. That was the closest we got for the next ten days.
The Scenic Flight We Booked for Dawn and Flew at Noon
This is the one we would do differently. We booked a fixed-wing scenic flight, about US$200 per person for an hour, and the operator moved us off the 07:00 slot to midday because a charter needed the aircraft. Midday over the Delta means flat light, no shadow on the water and thermals coming up off the sand. Two of the four of us were quietly unwell by minute thirty. It was still the best money we spent: channels braided like veins, hippo trails cut in straight lines through the papyrus, islands shaped like commas. Helicopters run from around US$490 for 45 minutes and fly with the doors off. Next time we pay more and lock in the first flight of the day.
Ninety-Nine Kilometres to South Gate, and a Reserve the Locals Made Themselves
South Gate, also called Maqwee, is somewhere between 92 and 99 km north of Maun depending on the source, and the tar gives out a long way before it. The booth took cash only and wrote the permit out by hand. Here is the history we had not known. Moremi was proclaimed a reserve in 1963 by the BaTawana themselves, under Elizabeth Pulane Moremi, widow of Chief Moremi III, because uncontrolled hunting and cattle were emptying their own land of wildlife. It is understood to be the first reserve in Africa established by the resident community rather than by a colonial administration. Moremi is also the only formally protected part of the Delta.
Bogged to the Axles Somewhere Short of Second Bridge
South Gate to Third Bridge is 58 km. Every guide says allow three hours. We took five and a half, and forty minutes of that was digging. The road runs to deep powder sand for long stretches and we went into it at highway tyre pressure because we did not know better. Down to about 1.2 bar, sand ladders under the back wheels, three of us pushing, and it walked out on the second attempt. Nothing came past in either direction for an hour. There is no phone signal in Moremi and no recovery service. We had a compressor and a shovel and had never used either one. We have now.
Third Bridge Is an Actual Bridge, Made of Actual Logs
We had assumed the name referred to a general area. It is a bridge: poles and logs laid across a channel, and it rattles under a vehicle in a way that makes everyone in the car go quiet. The campsite sits directly beside it. The sign about not swimming is not decorative. Crocodiles use the channel and hippos come up through the camp after dark, which is why the site rules keep tents back from the water. We cooked on a fire, ate at seven and were in the tent by half eight, because the temperature falls off a cliff once the sun goes down in July. Our thermometer read 4°C at first light.
Morning Seven, and the Moka Pot Loses Again
We carried a stovetop moka pot to Botswana. On a single gas ring in the wind it produced, across the whole trip, one acceptable coffee and about nine cups of hot brown disappointment. This was morning seven and morale around the burner was low. Breakfast rescued it. Eggs, tinned tomatoes and the last of the bread from the Spar in Maun, eaten on a camp chair at half six while a starling with a violet sheen worked the table for crumbs and something invisible screamed in the reeds. By eight it was fifteen degrees warmer and everything was back in the roof box. That was the rhythm for eleven days.
Xakanaxa, Twenty Kilometres and Two Hours Away
Xakanaxa is about 20 km from Third Bridge and takes roughly two hours, which had stopped surprising us by then. It is where the reserve turns properly wet and the birds go up a level. The Delta has over 400 recorded bird species and 71 species of fish. We parked at the lagoon and did nothing for two hours. Saddle-billed storks working the shallows on those absurd red and yellow bills. A heronry in the trees making a noise like a building site. Red lechwe crossing flooded grass at that bouncing half-swimming run. Two hours of sitting still beat the previous two days of driving. We did not learn from this yet.
Out at North Gate, Over the Bridge Everyone Photographs
We left Moremi at North Gate and came straight onto the Khwai bridge, a long low run of poles and logs across the Khwai River, which forms the northern boundary of the reserve. It looks like it will not hold a vehicle. It holds a vehicle. Everybody stops halfway across to take the same photograph, us included. Khwai village sits on the far bank. What lies beyond it is not national park but a community concession, and that one administrative fact shaped the next three days more than anything else on the trip.
Camping at Khwai, Where the Fee Goes to the Village
Khwai is a community-run concession, so there is no park entrance fee at all. Camping runs about P350 per person per night across most of the sites, with no separate international rate, and the money goes through the Khwai Development Trust back into the village. After four days of government gate fees this felt like a different country. Our site had a long-drop, a bucket shower on a wooden frame and no fence of any kind. Elephants came through twice while we were pitching and paid us no attention whatsoever. We stayed a second night, which meant unpacking a bag we had been living out of for a week.
A Night Drive, Which Is the Whole Point of Being Outside the Park
Driving after dark is not permitted inside Botswana's national parks and reserves. In a community area like Khwai it is, with a licensed guide and a spotlight, and that is the reason Khwai ends up on so many itineraries. Three hours, a lot of dust, one blanket each and cold enough that the shorts were a bad call. We got a genet walking a branch like a tightrope, two spotted hyena on something already mostly eaten, a scrub hare doing its trick of running directly under the wheels, and a leopard's eyes at maybe eighty metres that turned and were gone before a single camera came up. No dogs. Four people back at camp had seen dogs that morning.
Botswana Has More Wild Dogs Than Almost Anywhere and We Found None
By this point it was the running joke of the trip. Botswana holds the largest or second-largest population of African wild dogs on the continent, reported at somewhere over 1,300 animals in around 130 packs, roughly 30% of a global total estimated at 3,000 to 5,000. Khwai is one of the most reliable places on earth to find them. We drove from 06:15 to 12:30, then again from 15:30 until the light went. We found tracks twice. We found a den site that a guide told us had been abandoned in June. We found four separate vehicles of people who had seen dogs within the last day. We did not find dogs.
Mababe Gate and the Sand Ridge That Doubled Our Fuel Bill
The run north from Khwai to Savuti goes through Mababe Gate and then along the Magwikhwe sand ridge, which is an ancient shoreline and drives like a beach. It is the stretch the self-drive forums warn about. Low range, second gear, tyres soft, and consumption close to double what we had been getting. We had been told there is no reliable fuel between Maun and Kasane on this route, so we were carrying 40 litres in jerry cans on the back and had been quietly anxious about them since Third Bridge. We rolled into Savuti on about a quarter of a tank and never opened the cans. We would carry them again.
The Savute Channel, a River That Switches Itself Off
We crossed the channel bed on a sand track and it took a minute to work out what we were looking at. The Savute turns itself on and off on a scale of decades. Livingstone came through in 1851 and called the marsh a "dismal swamp". By the late 1880s it had dried out completely. It flowed again in 1957 and drowned the standing trees, whose bleached trunks are still there. It stopped in 1982 and stayed stopped for roughly 30 years. In 2008 the water came back, and by 2010 it had spread out onto the marsh again. The usual explanation is tectonic: deep faults tied to the East African Rift system shifting the gradient at the source.
Thirty Elephants at the Waterhole and a Marsh That Was Mostly Dust
We had pictured Savuti as marsh. What late July gave us was dust, pale grass and the Gubatsa Hills sitting on the horizon like something left over from a different landscape. The pumped waterhole near the campsite did all the work. Bulls came in one after another from mid-afternoon. We counted more than thirty animals in sight at once, including a group that stood in the road for twenty minutes with no interest in moving and no intention of being hurried. Elephants here also work the camp taps, which is why the ablution blocks have steel cages bolted around the plumbing. We watched one testing a tap with the tip of its trunk for a good while.
Out at Ghoha Gate and Down to the Chobe Riverfront
North out of Savuti through Ghoha Gate, then a long dull transit, and then the landscape changes completely the moment the Chobe River appears. Ihaha campsite sits on the bank. After ten days of sand tracks there was water on the left the whole way. The numbers here are hard to hold on to. Botswana is reported to have around 130,000 elephants, the largest population of any country, and the Chobe district carries the densest concentration of them anywhere in the world. In the last hour of light we stopped counting at about two hundred along four kilometres of riverfront. Buffalo in the hundreds. Puku, which we saw nowhere else on the trip.
Three Hours Sitting Still on a Boat, Which We Should Have Done More Of
We did the standard Kasane sunset cruise, three hours from about 15:00. Prices in 2025-26 start around US$40 per person, about US$55 on the smaller deluxe boats, with the roughly US$20 park fee charged separately on arrival. It was the cheapest thing we did in eleven days and it produced more than anything else. Elephants swimming across to Sedudu Island with only trunks and foreheads above the water. Hippos yawning at the boat out of pure habit. A crocodile on a sandbank that did not move once in three hours. We moved camp seven times in eleven days. Next time we will move four.
The Dogs, for About Ninety Seconds, at the Wrong Camera Setting
Last morning. Roof box packed, driving out towards Kasane airport, on the riverfront road at ten past six, and a pack came out of the scrub and crossed in front of the bonnet. Nine or ten of them. That ridiculous mottled coat, ears like satellite dishes, moving at a trot that looked lazy and was covering ground faster than we could follow. Ninety seconds, maybe less. The camera was still on the settings from the previous evening and every frame came out at a thirtieth of a second. We have exactly one photograph of the African wild dog, the animal we had spent eleven days and four campsites looking for, and in it four of them are a brown smear. It is on the wall at home.