Southern Africa, Botswana

The Okavango Delta

If we had to pick the most miraculous African place of all, it might well be the Okavango Delta, where the 1,000-mile-long Okavango River gives up on its search for an outlet to the sea and seeps life-givingly into the sands of the Kalahari, one of the world’s most uncompromising deserts, creating a vast and mesmerizing oasis. As Frans Lanting wrote in Okavango: Africa’s Last Eden, “The [Delta’s] very existence in the middle of the Kalahari Desert is nothing short of miraculous . . . like a dream.” Botswana’s wilderness is expansive and—to our scurrying senses—timeless.

Based from serene luxury lodges and camps in Botswana, we safari in the Delta’s complex waterways by mokoro, or canoe, and on foot, accompanied by well-versed guides. At some point we may experience “one of the Okavango’s delights,” as Lanting wrote, “the sheer surprise of seeing an elephant emerge from underwater.”

I had long dreamt of visiting the Okavango, after hearing it praised for years for the diversity and density of the wildlife that fills its range of landscapes…. marshes, rivers, lagoons, islands, and flood plains, dense forest, grasslands and bush…[and] everywhere, large populations of animals.Micato safarier Andrew SessaThe Houston Chronicle