A road and roadside buildings in Maun, Botswana

Botswana Itineraries

Route shapes that hold together, the distances between them, and the honest arithmetic of how long each leg really takes.

Self-drive Botswana All destinations

A road and roadside buildings in Maun, Botswana. Photo: Graf-flugplatz, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Most itinerary pages on the internet differ from one another only by a number in the title, which is a poor way to plan a trip to a country where the shape of the journey matters more than its length. Our Botswana itineraries are organised by how the trip is put together — flown, driven, mixed or crossing a border — with duration as a variable inside each rather than the top-level category.

How we organise Botswana itineraries

Ten days flying between concession camps and ten days driving from Maun to Kasane share almost nothing: different costs, different bookings, different luggage, different risks, different times of year to attempt them. Sorting by days alone hides that. Sorting by trip shape puts the real decision first.

Fly-in. Land at Maun or Kasane, transfer by light aircraft between all-inclusive camps on leased concessions. No driving, no self-catering, guiding and vehicles provided, activities set by the concession’s rules — which usually means night drives, walking and off-road tracking are available. Strict light-aircraft luggage limits, soft bags only in practice. The most expensive shape and the least logistically demanding.
Self-drive. Your own or a hired 4×4, public campsites, park entry paid at the gate, full self-sufficiency for fuel, water, food and recovery. Access to Moremi, Khwai, Chobe, the pans and the Kalahari, but not the water Delta or the private concessions. Cheapest per day, most demanding, and the shape most exposed to road and flood conditions.
Combined. A driving leg plus one or two flown camp nights, or a guided mobile camping safari plus a lodge stay. This is where most well-designed first trips land, and it is the shape a fly-one-way approach serves best.
Cross-border. Botswana with Victoria Falls, Namibia, or a Cape Town or Johannesburg stay attached. Adds visa, vehicle-documentation and border-hours questions that a single-country trip does not have.

The itineraries

The four duration routes below are published. The remaining shapes are still in preparation, and we link them here as they go live rather than putting up placeholders.

Botswana in 7 days — realistically one region done properly, or two with flights.
Botswana in 10 days — the standard two-region trip.
Botswana in 14 days — where three regions and a genuine change of landscape become possible.
Self-drive Botswana in 14 days — the same fortnight driven rather than flown, which is a different trip and not a cheaper version of the same one.
Okavango and Chobe — the classic pairing, and the one the fly-one-way approach was invented for.
Botswana and Victoria Falls — Kasane’s 80 km border run, and what it adds and costs.
Botswana and Namibia — the Trans-Kalahari, or the Zambezi Region into Ngoma and Mohembo.
Family safari — age limits at camps, malaria, driving days and what children actually tolerate.
Botswana in 3 weeks — north, pans and Kalahari, the only length at which the Kalahari fits without wrecking the rest.
Green-season Botswana — November to March: birds, newborn antelope, the Kalahari at its best, and lower rates against harder game viewing and closed tracks.
Photographic safari — hides, boats, low-angle vehicles, helicopter doors off, and the seasons that suit each.

Fly one way, drive the other

The most useful structural trick in Botswana planning is refusing to choose. Drive one leg and fly the other: for example, drive Maun to Moremi and Khwai in your own vehicle, then fly out from a Delta airstrip to a concession camp, or drive north to Kasane and fly back to Maun rather than repeating 600 km of tar.

It works because the two shapes fail in opposite ways. Driving is exposed to road conditions but cheap and flexible; flying is expensive but unaffected by mud, and it converts a long backtrack into an hour. It also lets a single trip include both the drivable eastern Delta and the water-based concessions, which no single-shape itinerary can. The costs are real: vehicle logistics have to be resolved, and hire companies charge for one-way returns.

Build in buffer days

Botswana punishes itineraries with no slack, and 2026 demonstrated it. Following the 2025/26 rains, Moremi Game Reserve closed and reopened only on 13 April 2026, with restricted access: Third Bridge closed until further notice, the Khwai–Xakanaxa route deemed inaccessible, Khwai–South Gate difficult and suitable only for experienced off-road travellers. Operators were advised to build buffer time into itineraries, and mobile safari operators cancelled bookings.

Two separate mechanisms close routes here and they are routinely confused: rain, roughly December to March, waterlogs black-cotton soil; the Okavango flood, roughly May to August, puts water across tracks months after the last rain. In 2026 both arrived together. So: keep at least one spare day before any international flight, avoid single-track routes with no alternative on the last leg of a trip, and check gate and route status immediately before travelling rather than at booking. Our self-drive pages cover the routes and wildlife and seasons explains the flood cycle behind them.