Grassland and a wooden fence at Mboroba, in the Okavango Polers Trust community area, Botswana

Safaris & Activities in Botswana

Game drives, boat cruises, mokoro, night drives, walking and the pans — and, more usefully, where each one is actually permitted.

Parks and reserves Where to stay

Grassland and a wooden fence at Mboroba, in the Okavango Polers Trust community area, Botswana. Photo: Parakh Hoon, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The single most useful thing to understand about Botswana safari activities is that what you can do is decided by the land you are standing on, not by how much you are paying. A national park permits one set of things, a leased concession another, and community land another again. This overview runs through the activities that genuinely exist here and where each is possible.

The rule that governs Botswana safari activities

Inside national parks and game reserves, driving is daytime-only, on established tracks, at 40 km/h. Night drives, walking safaris and off-road driving are generally not permitted inside them. In private and community concessions on Wildlife Management Area land, those same activities are commonly allowed, because the concession sets its own rules within the terms of its lease. That is why a trip that combines a park with a concession offers more than either alone. Our parks and reserves pages explain the tenure picture behind it.

On the water

Mokoro. The traditional dugout canoe, now generally fibreglass, poled from the stern through shallow channels and flooded grassland. It is quiet, low and eye-level with the water, and it is the classic Okavango experience. It is also seasonal and water-dependent — where and when a mokoro can be poled depends on the flood, which arrives at the Panhandle around March to May and reaches the southern and eastern Delta around June to September. No camp can guarantee it year-round.
Boat cruises on the Chobe. The defining activity of the north, and the best way to see elephant, buffalo, hippo, crocodile and waterbirds at close range. Options run from large sunset cruises to small specialist photographic boats with low seating and gimbal mounts.
Motorboat and barge trips in the deeper Delta channels and the Panhandle, which is also where the permanent papyrus swamp — and therefore any realistic chance of sitatunga — actually is.
Fishing. Tigerfish and bream in the Panhandle, the Chobe and the Zambezi system, generally catch-and-release at camps. Closed seasons and permit requirements apply and change; check current regulations rather than trusting a brochure.

On land

Game drives. The staple, in open or semi-open 4×4 vehicles, morning and late afternoon. In hot conditions animals rest through the middle of the day, so early and late is not a scheduling quirk but the point.
Night drives. Available in concessions and community areas — Khwai, Linyanti, Selinda, Kwando, the Kalahari concessions and private reserves such as Northern Tuli — and not inside Chobe, Moremi or the other state parks. This is the way to see brown hyena, aardwolf, genets, civet and hunting leopard.
Walking safaris. Guided, armed, small-group and on foot, again on concession and community land rather than inside the parks. A walk is about tracks, plants, insects and the texture of the bush rather than a species list.
Horseback safaris and mountain-bike safaris. Both are established in the Northern Tuli reserve in eastern Botswana, whose rocky, open country suits them, and horseback riding is also offered in parts of the Delta and at Mokolodi. Riding among plains game and elephant demands genuine competence, and operators set experience requirements.
Photographic hides. Sunken or ground-level hides at waterholes, notably in the Tuli and Kalahari concessions, giving low-angle work impossible from a vehicle. Some are bookable as a wilderness-camping category inside parks.

Birding

Botswana’s birding calendar is the inverse of the big-mammal calendar. The green season, roughly November to March, brings intra-African and Palearctic migrants and resident species in breeding plumage. The Okavango records 482 bird species in the World Heritage listing and the wider Ramsar system over 650.

The southern carmine bee-eater colonies of the north are the flagship spectacle: birds arrive in the northernmost zones around August and September, breeding runs August to January with laying completed by November, and most leave the region in March — so the practical window for colonies in northern Botswana is roughly September to November, which usefully overlaps peak dry-season game viewing. Colonies are easily disturbed and readily abandoned, so approach is a guide’s decision, not a guest’s.

Pans, desert and the Makgadikgadi

Quad biking on the salt pans, in the dry months when the crust bears weight.
Sleep-outs on the open pan, bedrolls under an unobstructed horizon — the pans’ distinctive offering, weather and season permitting.
Meerkat walks. Habituated groups at private concessions in the Makgadikgadi allow visitors to sit among them at close range, best in the dry season when groups are reliably at known burrows and emerge to warm up at first light. An accuracy note: these are not the animals from the well-known television documentaries. The Kalahari Meerkat Project is based at the Kalahari Research Centre in the Kuruman River Reserve in South Africa, not in Botswana. Botswana’s habituated groups were habituated separately by camps in the Makgadikgadi. The experience is genuine; the association is not.

Guided walks with San communities

Guided bush walks led by San (Basarwa) guides are offered in the Central Kalahari, around Ghanzi and D’Kar, and at several Kalahari camps. At their best they are a serious ethnobotanical and tracking education led by people with unmatched knowledge of that country, and Botswana Tourism itself promotes them around Ghanzi. At their worst they are staged.

The questions worth asking an operator are who owns the enterprise, whether guides are employed and paid year-round, and whether guests are asked to photograph people dressed for the visitor rather than for the day. San communities in Botswana have a contested and often painful relationship with conservation land policy, and a walk is not a neutral cultural product.

Scenic flights

Fixed-wing and helicopter flights over the Delta, usually from Maun or a camp airstrip, are the only way to grasp the shape of the system — channels, islands, floodplain and the line where water stops. Helicopters with doors removed are the standard choice for photography. Flights are also occasionally the practical way to reach or leave a camp when a route floods.