Botswana: The Africa of our Childhood Dreams
There was a moment, in Botswana last month, when my group felt they had stepped into a child’s storybook Africa. As our jeeps emerged from a mopane wood, onto an open grass plain, we were suddenly beset by animals.
To our left a line of impala grazed, most iconic of all savannah Africa’s antelope, and with them, joining the herd for safety, was a single male wildebeest. Ahead of us stood a herd of Burchell’s zebras, shimmering silver as they do once the heat of the day begins to melt their black and white stripes together. In the edge of the trees vervet monkeys bickered and played.
As if this scene were not already Africa, next two giraffes swayed by, their blotched necks rising and dipping as they went. Then a wave rippled, muscle by muscle, beast by beast, across the plain, as a male lion, gold-maned and handsome, stepped from the woods into view. We had known he was coming. We had followed him for half an hour as he strode towards the plain, and had placed ourselves to see his effect on the countless herbivores in view, but still it was electric.
We left the lion and drove to a nearby wetland, expanding by the inch before our eyes as the waters of the Angolan uplands made their sluggish way across the plain. Here there were elephants, a female herd with young; and, as we took our coffee in the shade, the matriarch made a dummy charge at us, flapping her enormous ears in feigned rage, just to let us know whose wetland this was. But it was not hers alone. In a cordon of scrub to the left there were greater kudu, long-legged and lovely, and, beyond the elephants in the water, broad-backed, horse-faced waterbuck. Then, behind us, the red-billed spurfowl in a patch of forest began to cough in alarm and from the shade walked a square-headed leopard, rippling like a swimming snake through the leopard-length grass. You could not script such a morning, but it happened I promise.
This was just one of ten such days between the Okavango and Chobe on our Best of Botswana tour. Days on which a mother leopard and her four-month cub played for an hour in the amber evening light just metres from our jeeps. Days on which two prides of lions held each other at bay, in a battle of strength and will, neither daring to take the fresh-killed buffalo which lay festering in our track. Days on which cheetah brothers slipped through the kindly light of dawn, waving their improbable tails as they scent-marked every termite mound and tree. Nights on which springhares bounded on the pan, sending dust to dance in our headlight beams. Nights on which we lay in our comfortable camp beds listening to the eerie whoop of spotted hyenas and the demonic laughter of pearl-spotted owlets.
It would be hard to imagine a finer experience of Africa than Best of Botswana. The charm of this tour only begins with its abundant wildlife. Between safaris across the plains and through the mopane woods of Moremi, Savuti and Khwai, through placid herds of lechwe and past hippos grunting in the waterholes, there are amazing meals created and served by our always smiling camp staff. Each day it seems more improbable that Moussa the chef could have created such flavours over a flickering fire fed with elephant-felled mopane logs. Each morning Jimmy, caretaker of our tents, wakes us with hot water for faces and hands, and with a broad-smiled greeting and news of lions heard roaring in the night. And all day we bask in the company of Disho and Sugar, our incomparable hosts and driver-guides, raised in the delta and reading its moods and the movements of its far-off wildlife as a mother reads her infant’s face.
To crown it all, the sunsets. On one evening, elephants dust-bathing by the river toss silver silt into the air over their backs, setting it aflame in the rays of the dying sun. On another, giraffes lope by the sun’s ruby face as it touches the horizon, a scene so utterly African it seems a cliché. In our hands, as the sun sets each day, an ice cold beer, and later around the flames of the campfire, as our brilliant guides review the day and share tomorrow’s plan, the gin, wine and beer flow freely. To see the heart of savannah Africa, and lose your own heart to its wild embrace, there is no better tour than Best of Botswana.
Images courtesy of Lee Dixon & Pete Underhay
Join us on our next Best of Botswana tour to experience the magic for yourself. Contact the Wildlife team for more information.
