Where People Are Only Visitors

Picture yourself in a different place. Picture yourself in Botswana. Today I’m going to take you on a short journey, a very short journey — six or seven minutes — into Botswana, to give you a little feel of the animal kingdom.

Botswana is where road signs warn of crossing elephants. Where piles of fresh dung and bulldozed trees suggest these signs are not a trick to excite travellers like you or me. Tourist information flyers are very explicit. It’s essential to keep your tent closed at night because hyenas can come and bite your face off. And in the night you hear the hippo. You hear the hippo croaking its commanding croak. You hear the elephants trumpet from a distance.

This is the animal kingdom. Botswana is the country where people are only visitors. Even the indigenous people are only visitors. Botswana is in southern Africa, it’s landlocked north of South Africa, east of Namibia. Also, in between it has a border with Zambia and Zimbabwe.

It’s a country dominated by desert. It’s a country dominated by the Kalahari Desert. A place that is very inhospitable, a place home to the San people. Very little human developments over these indigenous people. But the land is harsh. It wasn’t bulldozed for crops, like other parts of Africa.

It’s a place where animals rule. And elephants really do cross the main road through the country. You can be driving along, not even close to a national park, and you’ll see great herds of elephants migrating. And the wonderful thing about Botswana is that it keeps these ancient migratory routes open for animals that have lived there for millennia and millennia.

You might have heard of the great Wildebeest migration. It takes place in Tanzania, not Botswana. Well, about 20 years ago, researchers discovered the great zebra migration in the Kalahari desert. They have no idea how long this has been going on. They have no idea why or where — they don’t know really much about it, but there are upwards of 100,000 zebra gathering and moving, migrating as a great mass to a water source.

And for me, that really sums up the scale of Botswana. Botswana is huge. It’s big enough for a hundred thousand zebra to go unnoticed until the 21st century. Certainly unnoticed by us — I’m sure the San people have always noticed them.

Go To Botswana For An Immersive Safari

I would recommend Botswana if it’s your first safari, if it’s your last safari, it’s wonderful. But I would not recommend Botswana if you want to short safari. If you want to go see some animals, take some pictures, stay for one or two days, Botswana is way too wild for you. Botswana is the bush. It is real wilderness. It’s going to take you one or two days to get out there.

Botswana is where you go for a really long and immersive safari. I’m talking six, seven, eight days. If you can, two weeks. And the brilliant thing in the huge wilderness is that you won’t see any people. You can travel for days without seeing people. It’s just you, your guides and the people looking after you. Some of the places are completely inaccessible by road. The roads disappear. You can only fly in by light aircraft, stay for three days and then fly out.

Many Different Landscapes

And when you go for longer, which you need to in Botswana, a really great experience is combining the different landscapes. Because I couldn’t shoot as big as Botswana, it’s the animal kingdom — but within it, there are many different kingdoms.

The Kalahari is desert. So if you go to the central Kalahari, you’re going to see black-maned lions. You’re going to see desert-adapted elephants. You’re not going to see a lot of wildlife because it’s a desert and there’s not much water, but that wildlife is actually very easy to see because the landscape is flat and open. There’s nothing for the animals to hide behind. And your guides can take you straight to the waterholes, which is where the animals hang out.

Within the Kalahari ecosystem you have the world’s biggest salt pans. That’s where the zebra migration takes place in the early part of the year. That’s where meerkats are from, this region. So if you want to see meerkats in their natural habitat, you need to go to the salt pans, the Makgadikgadi salt pans, especially Nxai Pan.

Within the Kalahari, you also have the Okavango Delta. Now, it doesn’t rain, but what happens is, rainwater comes down from Angola and six months later, it floods from the Okavango River, floods the Delta, and creates this great oasis. It’s a place of deltas of rivers, of channels, of forest, everything thrives because there’s water. Thousands, millions of animals migrate there. Millions of animals live there because that’s where the water is. So you swap — in the course of a one hour flight — you swap the dry and dusty desert for the waterworld of the Okavango, where you go on canoe safaris, and motorboat safaris.

Once, Hunting Grounds For Kings

And then if you go further north, you get to the Chobe ecosystem. And the Chobe is a great forest. It’s a great woodland, home to the world’s largest elephant population. Now, close your eyes and try to imagine an elephant. Try to imagine 10 elephants, try to imagine 100 elephants. A hundred elephants is pretty hard, I struggle to imagine 100 elephants. Now try and imagine 100,000 elephants. That is how many elephants are in Chobe around May, June, July.

One hundred thousand, it’s baffling. You go driving and they’re just everywhere. Same as the giraffe. There’s so many, you cannot go a turn without seeing another herd.

Then kind of between these ecosystems, especially between Okavango and Chobe, you have the private concessions, Kwando, Linyanti, Savute… Now these are the really exclusive private areas to go on safari. They’re brilliant because they’re a mix of the habitats and they’ve got some grassland forest, waterway. They’ve got a bit of everything, which means they attract the biggest diversity of wildlife. Now, these areas used to be hunting grounds. They used to be hunting grounds for kings. Then they were hunting concessions where people could go hunt.

Now they are very much about conservation and protecting the natural habitat and they provide a very exclusive safari in places that you literally, you cannot drive there. The only way you can go there is to fly in. You cannot go there any other way. And you will be there in the animal kingdom, completely immersed, completely surrounded.

And you can stay in a luxury tent — but make sure you close it at night because yes, the hyenas can come and bite your face off.