Botswana: Makgadikgadi salt pans

🌊 The Boteti River — crossing without a prayer and a small herd of surprisingly helpful cows

We set off from Boteti River Camp heading north towards Planet Baobab, where we’d be using it as our base for exploring the Makgadikgadi Salt Pans. Before any of that could happen, however, we had a rather immediate problem to deal with: the Boteti River was sitting directly between us and where we needed to be, and it was not going to move out of the way on its own.

The Boteti River is one of the few perennial rivers in Botswana, fed by overflow from the Okavango Delta some 250 kilometres to the northwest. It forms the western boundary of Makgadikgadi Pans National Park and has been a critical wildlife corridor and water source for millennia, supporting enormous concentrations of zebra, wildebeest and predators along its banks, particularly during the dry season when every other water source in the region has long since given up the ghost. In the rainy season the river runs high enough to warrant a proper ferry crossing — a flat-bottomed pontoon affair that carries vehicles across one at a time. But we were visiting in the dry season, which meant no ferry, and the only way across was to simply drive through the water and hope for the best. The snag was that we had absolutely no idea how deep it was or where the safest crossing point might be, and getting a fully laden Land Cruiser stuck in the middle of an African river is the sort of thing that makes for a tremendous story afterwards but a very stressful afternoon at the time. Our Land Cruiser did at least have a snorkel fitted — a raised air intake that allows the engine to keep breathing even when the body of the vehicle is largely submerged — so we were at least mechanically equipped for a crossing of some depth. The question was just how much depth we were looking at.

Karen, displaying considerably more initiative than I was, went back to the lodge to ask if anyone could help. As luck would have it, one of the staff members there also worked as a ferry operator during the wet season and knew the crossing about as well as anyone alive. He very kindly offered to ride with us down to the bank and point us towards the best line through. We also received what turned out to be an unexpectedly useful second opinion from a small group of cows that had chosen that particular moment to wade into the river at roughly the same spot our guide was pointing to. Now, cows are not generally famous for their engineering judgement, but the fact that they were walking across without any apparent distress — and without disappearing entirely beneath the surface — gave us a reasonable degree of confidence. In we went. The riverbed was rocky and uneven, which made for a bumpy couple of minutes, and there were one or two moments where the water crept higher up the doors than felt entirely comfortable, but we never went deeper than the tops of the tyres. Two minutes later we were on the far bank, engine still running, dignity more or less intact. The cows didn’t even look up.

🦓 Khumaga Gate and into the park — zebras, wildebeest, and a moment of questionable judgement

No more than 200 metres from the river crossing, we reached the Khumaga Gate, the eastern entrance to Makgadikgadi Pans National Park. We paid our entrance fees — 190 pula per adult per day, roughly £11, plus 75 pula for the vehicle — and headed in. Makgadikgadi Pans National Park was formally gazetted in 1992, though the area had been a protected wildlife management zone for decades before that. It covers approximately 3,900 square kilometres and protects a remarkable mosaic of habitats: the Boteti River and its flanking woodlands to the west, open grasslands and fossil dunes in the interior, and the vast salt pans themselves to the east. It is one of the least visited of Botswana’s major national parks, which is either a selling point or a warning depending on your temperament, and on this particular morning the roads were entirely deserted despite it being the height of the dry season, which felt rather marvellous.

Once through the gate, we were immediately back on dirt roads, and the sand was, if anything, even deeper than anything we had encountered in the Central Kalahari. We followed the tracks running along the western bank of the Boteti River, and the wildlife along this stretch was genuinely extraordinary. Zebras were everywhere. Makgadikgadi supports one of the largest zebra populations in Africa, with an estimated 25,000 animals undertaking a seasonal migration between the salt pans and the Boteti River — a round trip of some 250 kilometres that constitutes the second longest mammal migration on the continent after the great Serengeti wildebeest migration. Alongside the zebras were large herds of blue wildebeest, various antelope, and an excellent array of waterbirds along the river margins: African fish eagles, yellow-billed storks, a preening spoonbill that posed so obligingly it was practically showing off, a lilac-breasted roller sitting on a dead branch in the sort of perfect light that makes photographers go slightly peculiar, and a flock of great white pelicans resting on a sandbank with the air of creatures who had absolutely nowhere else to be.

From the track we could see other vehicles driving directly on the sandy riverbank, which looked from a distance both adventurous and entirely manageable. I examined the situation for what I felt was an appropriate length of time — approximately thirty seconds — and concluded that if they could do it, so could we. This was, in retrospect, the sort of reasoning that has got people into difficulties since the invention of the motor vehicle. I found a gap in the bush and drove down onto the shore. For the most part it was fine, the bank sand being reasonably firm, but we did have one genuinely alarming moment when the front wheels broke through a soft patch and the vehicle began to sink. I floored the accelerator and we lurched forward and out of it, but it was considerably closer to a stuck vehicle than either of us would have liked. Worth it, though. The views along the river from that low angle, with the water reflecting the treeline and zebras drinking fifteen metres away, were properly spectacular. After about two kilometres of this we decided that discretion was the better part of valour, selected low-range four-wheel drive, pointed the nose at the bank and gave it everything we had. We made it to the top with what felt like about six inches to spare.

After a couple of hours driving through the park interior we came across a small group of oryx moving through the bush with that characteristic air of slightly contemptuous self-possession that oryx seem to specialise in, and found elephant tracks crossing the road — great dinner-plate impressions pressed deep into the sand — though the elephants themselves remained stubbornly absent. Eventually we reached the Makolwane Gate on the park’s northeastern edge and transitioned gratefully onto the A3, a smooth tarmac road that felt positively luxurious after everything we had been on for the past week. We turned east towards the village of Gweta and our next stop, Planet Baobab.

🐾 Planet Baobab — a concrete aardvark, a beer-bottle chandelier, and the finest rondavel in Botswana

Finding the entrance to Planet Baobab presented absolutely no navigational difficulty whatsoever. Opposite the gate, facing the road with an expression of great pink confidence, stood an enormous concrete aardvark. Not a tasteful, small-scale decorative aardvark. A very large, very pink, entirely unmissable concrete aardvark of the sort that announces its presence from several hundred metres away and makes you absolutely certain you have arrived at the right place. There was also a rather dashing little tower at the entrance gate itself, painted in vivid earthy tones. In the car park we spotted a couple of tuk-tuks that had clearly seen considerably better days — battered, dusty, sun-bleached — and spent a companionable moment speculating about their history. We never did find out.

Planet Baobab was established in the early 2000s and has become one of the most distinctive lodges in Botswana, cherished by travellers who value genuine originality over the beige-safari-chic that dominates much of the more expensive end of the market. The design takes its cues from the traditional architecture and material culture of the area’s original inhabitants — the Bakalanga people and the San Bushmen — and the results are quite remarkable. We arrived a little too early to check in, so we were directed to the bar. The bar alone justified the trip. The chairs were upholstered in cowhide. Suspended from the ceiling was a chandelier of considerable drama, constructed entirely from old beer bottles, which was either inspired or mildly alarming depending on how many drinks you’d already had. Various pieces of found-object art and handcrafted furniture filled the space, and the overall effect was of somewhere that had been put together with tremendous enthusiasm and a cheerful disregard for conventional interior design advice. We liked it very much.

When our room was ready we were shown to our rondavel. A rondavel is a traditional southern African round dwelling — the word comes from the Afrikaans — typically built with thick walls of mud and straw and a conical thatched roof. Planet Baobab’s rondavels were constructed in the traditional Bakalanga style, the walls finished in cow-dung render in the manner that has been used across Botswana for centuries. The technique sounds considerably less appealing than it looks in practice — the finished surface is smooth, slightly burnished and decorated with geometric patterns in natural pigments derived from local termite mound clay. Each rondavel had its own unique exterior design. Inside, the room was full of alcoves and niches moulded from mud and straw, each one serving as a shelf or storage space in a wonderfully organic way. It was compact but completely charming, and we were sad to know we’d only be spending a single night in it. But the best feature of our particular rondavel was just outside the front door: a baobab tree of frankly staggering dimensions. I reckoned it would take about ten people standing with arms outstretched and fingertips touching to encircle the trunk — baobabs can reach circumferences of up to 50 metres — and it had that quality that very old, very large trees sometimes have of making you feel pleasantly insignificant. We stood and stared at it for some time.

🌳 The baobabs — Gabriel, the tree of life, and a sundowner that nobody wanted to leave

We had booked ourselves onto an afternoon nature walk, and as it turned out, we were the only guests who had signed up, so it became a private tour. Our guide was Gabriel, a softly spoken and exceptionally knowledgeable man who led us around the resort and its surroundings for a couple of hours explaining the local ecology with what was clearly genuine passion. The focus was the baobabs, which were all around us in various sizes from elderly giants down to relative youngsters of a mere century or so.

The baobab — Adansonia digitata to give it its proper name — is one of the most remarkable trees on earth, and Gabriel’s explanations made it abundantly clear why it has accumulated such extraordinary mythology across Africa over the millennia. They are deciduous, losing their leaves in the dry season, and when they do, the bare branches reach upwards and outwards in every direction in a way that looks exactly like roots, giving the impression the tree has been planted upside down. This has generated a rich tradition of folklore across sub-Saharan Africa — one common story holds that God planted the baobab the wrong way up as a punishment for its vanity. Gabriel told us this with a grin that suggested he considered it entirely plausible. The trees are succulents, storing water in their enormous trunks in vast quantities — a large baobab can hold up to 100,000 litres in its fibrous wood — which is how they survive the long dry season and also why elephants sometimes strip the bark from them to access the moisture within. In the wet season the trees produce the fruits that have earned the baobab its most celebrated title: the Tree of Life. The fruit is genuinely extraordinary from a nutritional standpoint — it contains six times more vitamin C than oranges, twice the calcium of milk, and more antioxidants than practically anything else tested. Gabriel handed us pieces to try. It was pleasantly tart, slightly chalky and surprisingly addictive. What makes it doubly remarkable is that rather than ripening and rotting on the tree in the conventional fashion, it dries naturally in its hard shell while still attached to the branch — sometimes hanging there for months — meaning it can be harvested in a stable, shelf-ready state requiring no processing whatsoever.

Gabriel also told us about the ways local farmers worked this arid land, which involved a degree of ingenuity and patience that made our occasional back-garden vegetable patch feel faintly embarrassing. After a couple of hours of walking and talking, he led us to a small pan at the edge of the resort, largely dried out but still attracting a few cows and horses. The Planet Baobab staff had meanwhile set up a folding table with a white cloth, snacks and a cooler containing beer, wine and soft drinks. A proper sundowner in the bush. We suggested that Gabriel and the young woman who had laid it all out should join us for a drink, which they were initially reluctant to do — the staff-and-guests dynamic can be a complicated thing — but after a bit of persistence they accepted. A security guard then ambled over with what could only be described as a genuinely alarming dog and settled himself by the waterhole to enjoy the last of the day’s sun. The dog turned out to be perfectly amiable once it established we were not a threat, though it kept a watchful eye on the snacks throughout. The sunset over the dried pan, with the silhouettes of the baobabs against an orange sky, was one of those moments that makes you quietly grateful to be precisely where you are.

🦔 Meerkats and the salt pans — Dutch company, ATV anxiety, and the second largest migration on earth

We woke to a fine morning at Planet Baobab. The day was deliberately unscheduled until late afternoon, so we took a long breakfast and checked out of our rondavel. With nothing to be getting on with until the salt pan trip assembled, we decamped to the bar — a decision requiring very little deliberation — and settled in for the morning. I worked through a backlog of admin on the wifi, which was extremely slow and prone to giving up entirely, so progress was measured in very small units. Karen, whose back had been absorbing considerable punishment from a week of corrugated dirt roads and deep-sand driving, went for a massage, which she declared to be extremely well-timed and thoroughly deserved.

By late afternoon we assembled in the car park for the trip out to the Makgadikgadi Salt Pans. Joining us were the only two other guests taking part: Alicia and Joshua, a young couple from the Netherlands who turned out to be tremendous fun and considerably better sports than the average tourist. We climbed into a 4×4 and headed west, the landscape becoming increasingly sparse and desiccated as we went. The Makgadikgadi is one of the most geologically ancient landscapes on earth. It is all that remains of the enormous Lake Makgadikgadi, which once covered an area larger than Switzerland — approximately 80,000 square kilometres — and ranked among the largest lakes ever to have existed on this planet. It began drying up tens of thousands of years ago as tectonic shifts altered the drainage patterns of the rivers that fed it, and today all that remains is a complex of salt pans, fossil shorelines and sandy desert. Scientists studying human mitochondrial DNA have proposed that this region, when it was still a vast and fertile wetland some 200,000 years ago, may have been the original homeland of anatomically modern Homo sapiens — quite possibly the cradle of our entire species — before changing climatic conditions drove early humans to disperse across the continent. Standing in what is now a flat white expanse of salt and cracked clay, that requires some imaginative effort to take in, but the science is surprisingly compelling.

What scrubby vegetation existed alongside the route was small and widely spaced, but people were somehow still farming out here, coaxing crops from soil that looked as though it would struggle to support a cactus. The dominant large bird in this landscape was the ostrich — the world’s largest living bird, capable of reaching 70 kilometres per hour and delivering a kick that has been known to kill a lion — and we saw large flocks of them striding through the dried scrub with that slightly ridiculous but oddly dignified gait that ostriches have made entirely their own.

The first stop was a group of meerkats. Meerkats — Suricata suricatta — are small members of the mongoose family, living in cooperative groups of up to thirty individuals and found across the Kalahari basin in Botswana, Namibia and South Africa. They are diurnal, spending the entire day virtually foraging for insects, grubs, scorpions, small lizards and the occasional small snake, to whose venom they are largely immune. This particular group was monitored daily by a local man who followed them from dawn until the meerkats went underground at nightfall, liaising with guides to report the gang’s whereabouts. He was there every single day, all day. It was either an extremely meditative way to spend one’s working life or an extremely testing one, and quite possibly both simultaneously.

He led us a short distance into the bush to where the gang was feeding, and the first thing that struck us was how completely unbothered they were by our presence. These animals are so thoroughly habituated to humans that you could crouch to within a foot of one and it would simply carry on digging for grubs without a second glance. We spent about twenty minutes crouched in the dust following them around, watching them excavate the ground with their long curved claws, squabble briefly over a promising hole, and periodically stand bolt upright scanning the horizon for raptors in that famous sentinel posture that makes them look permanently startled. They are enormously engaging creatures and it is easy to understand why they have become among the most photographed animals in Africa.

🏜️ ATVs on the salt pan — flat white forever and a cloud of someone else’s dust

After we returned to the 4×4, it was only a short drive to a small farm where our ATVs were waiting. Joshua and Alicia, both younger and considerably more compact than us, fitted easily onto a single machine and were clearly going to have a straightforward time of it. Karen and I did attempt to share a vehicle — a decision that lasted approximately four seconds before the difference in our respective sizes and the state of our various joints made it perfectly clear this was not going to work — so we each ended up on our own ATV. Joshua, who had ridden motorbikes, was away immediately with the casual confidence of someone who has always been good at things with engines. Karen, who had ridden on the back of bikes with her brother Ian over the years and driven a scooter when she was younger, was not far behind. I was somewhat more hesitant. The ATV had a sensitivity to its controls and steering that I hadn’t quite anticipated, and for the first couple of hundred metres I proceeded with the deliberate caution of someone acutely aware that the ground is hard and the nearest hospital is a very long way away.

And then we came out onto the salt pan, and everything changed. The Makgadikgadi is technically not a single pan but a complex of many — the principal ones being Sua, also written Sowa, Ntwetwe and Nxai — separated by sandy desert. The whole system extends across more than 12,000 square kilometres, making it one of the largest salt flat complexes on earth. The Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia, at around 10,619 square kilometres as a single continuous flat, is generally awarded the title of world’s largest individual salt pan, but what stretched out before us was not a statistic. It was a flat, white, featureless expanse extending to the horizon in every direction. The surface was pale and hard and absolutely level, and once we were out on it there was nothing whatsoever to hit, which was a considerable relief. The only real challenge was the enormous cloud of white dust thrown up by each vehicle, which hung in the still air and drifted directly back into the face of whoever was following. We learned fairly quickly to spread out laterally.

Our guide led the convoy in the 4×4 and we followed in a loose formation across the pan for about 45 minutes, stopping at one point so he could explain more about the ecology of the place. Beneath the surface of the pan, dormant in the dry salt crust, were the eggs of brine shrimps — tiny crustaceans that erupt into life when the rains come and the pan fills with shallow water, providing the primary food source for the flamingos that descend in their thousands. The pan supports one of only two breeding populations of greater flamingos in southern Africa, and in the wet season the whole thing transforms from the bare white expanse we were crossing into a shallow, shimmering pink lake. We found this almost impossible to picture from where we were sitting, surrounded by nothing but salt and silence. There were also, we were told, dormant frogs buried in the ground beneath us, capable of surviving years of complete desiccation and emerging within hours of the first rainfall. Life, it turns out, finds a way even here.

🌠 A night on the pan — bivvy bags, hot water bottles, and stars you could almost touch

We arrived at our spot for the night as the sun began its descent. A small cluster of other vehicles was already there, and the Planet Baobab staff had been busy setting up camp. We were not sleeping in tents. Laid out on the bare surface of the salt pan were individual bivvy sleeping bags with integrated inflatable mattresses — a well-designed outer shell combining a sleeping bag and mat in one weatherproof unit. We were told we could position them wherever we liked, and that if we wanted genuine solitude we could drag our bag a hundred metres from the group and sleep entirely alone on the pan. Including guides, there were perhaps fifteen people sharing a section of one of the world’s largest wilderness areas. By any definition, we were alone.

There was a portable toilet screen set up at the edge of camp, mentioned by our guide in the tone of someone covering the bases while privately acknowledging that most people would not make the walk in the middle of the night. He was right. At 3am with no artificial light within a hundred kilometres, the idea of leaving a warm bivvy and walking out into absolute darkness holds genuinely limited appeal, despite there being absolutely nothing out there to worry about. Probably.

As the sun went down we gathered around the campfire with our drinks and watched the sky work through its sequence of colours across the pan. A flat, uninterrupted horizon makes sunsets more vivid — with nothing to break the sight line, the whole disc of the sun descends completely, and the colours spread across the full 360 degrees of sky without interruption. The Planet Baobab staff meanwhile got a barbecue going, the smell of smoke and grilling meat drifting across the pan in a way that made the wait considerably harder than it needed to be. While we waited, our guide described what this place becomes in the wet season: the zebra migration, which involves up to 25,000 animals moving between the pan and the Boteti River between November and April; the flamingos, which can number in the tens of thousands; the lions, cheetahs and wild dogs that follow the prey. In the dry season the pan looked entirely lifeless. In the wet season, apparently, it is one of the greatest wildlife spectacles anywhere on earth. We resolved to come back, though we were also entirely content to be here now.

Dinner arrived, and we ate and talked for a couple of hours, Joshua and Alicia proving excellent dinner companions with a good stock of travel stories. The stars came out in a manner that felt almost theatrical — a few, then thousands, then more stars than sky. With no light source in any direction, the Milky Way appeared as a dense, luminous band stretching from one horizon to the other, exactly as it must have appeared to every human being alive before the invention of artificial light. It was, if we’re being accurate, slightly overwhelming.

As thoughts turned to sleep, our guide remarked with a perfectly straight face that they had put bushbabies inside the sleeping bags to keep us warm. The bushbaby, or galago, is a small, large-eyed nocturnal primate found across sub-Saharan Africa, and the thought of one inside a sleeping bag raised several immediate questions. When we climbed in and found hot water bottles — proper rubber ones, wonderfully warm — we appreciated both the joke and the practicality in equal measure. The mattresses were more comfortable than they had any right to be, and with the bivvy zipped up and the hot water bottle doing its job the temperature inside was perfectly cosy.

We lay on our backs for a long while, looking upward. No sound at all except our own breathing and occasionally something unidentifiable calling across the pan from a very great distance. We fell asleep under more stars than either of us had ever seen.

🌅 Morning on the pan — wind, coffee, puppies, and a second breakfast entirely deserved

It was a beautifully restful night overall, though we both woke at different points during the small hours — partly because the wind picked up considerably after midnight and the bivvy rustled, partly because the cold eventually worked its way in once the hot water bottles had cooled, and partly because lying alone in the middle of one of the world’s largest salt pans under a full sky of stars is the sort of situation that makes sleep feel faintly wasteful. Each time we woke we lay still for a while looking up before closing our eyes again, which is as good a description of a successful night’s rest as we can manage.

The Planet Baobab crew had a campfire going by the time we emerged, slightly stiff and very keen for coffee. They handed us blankets and large mugs of hot, strong coffee, and we sat by the fire as Joshua and Alicia joined us — they had already been up for some time wandering the pan with their cameras in the grey pre-dawn light. Breakfast arrived shortly after, eaten around the campfire on the surface of the pan with the rising sun turning everything pale gold. It was, by any measure, an excellent breakfast location.

After breakfast we loaded back into the 4×4 and drove to the farm to return the ATVs. There was slightly more time available than the previous day, so we had a wander around while the staff checked the vehicles over. In a corner of the yard a dog had recently produced a litter of puppies — small, round and pleasantly unsteady on their feet in the way all puppies are — and Alicia, who had left her own dog back in the Netherlands with her mother and was clearly feeling the absence rather keenly, immediately sat down on the ground and got stuck in. Karen, meanwhile, had found the grandmother of the farm family sitting with a very small grandchild, apparently running an impromptu lesson of some kind. Karen has never in her life passed up the opportunity to get involved with a small child who might benefit from her input, and she sat down and joined in immediately. The child appeared more bemused than enlightened but took it all with considerable good grace.

Once the vehicles were checked and cleared, we climbed back into the 4×4 and returned to Planet Baobab, where we had a very long, very hot shower and a second breakfast that we felt we had entirely and completely earned.

About Makgadikgadi National Park

This Game Reserve is a salt pan with an area of 3 900 sq. kms. Situated in the middle of the dry savanna of north-eastern Botswana it is one of the largest salt flats in the world. The pan is all that remains of the formerly enormous Lake Makgadikgadi.

Lying southeast of the Okavango Delta and surrounded by the Kalahari Desert, Makgadikgadi is technically not a single pan but many pans with sandy desert in between. The largest is the Sua (Sowa), Nwetwe and Nxai Pans. The largest individual pan is about 1,900 sq miles (4,921.0 km2).

The pans are salty desert whose only plant life is a thin layer of blue-green algae. Very little wildlife can exist during the harsh dry season of strong hot winds and only salt water. However, following a rain the pan becomes an important habitat for migrating animals such as wildebeest, one of Africa’s biggest zebra populations, and the large predators that prey on them. The wet season brings migratory birds such as ducks, geese and Great White Pelicans. The Sowa pan is home to one of only two breeding populations of Greater Flamingos in southern Africa.

Planning your visit to Makgadikgadi National Park

📍 Location	Central Kalahari region, northern Botswana. The park lies between Maun to the west and Nata to the east, along the Nata–Maun highway (A3 road)	🕖 Opening Times	Sunrise to Sunset, daily (approximately 6:00 AM – 6:30 PM)
🌐 Website	botswanatourism.co.bw
📞 Phone	+267 686 1265	📧 Email	info@botswanatourism.co.bw
ℹ️ Notes	Entry must be arranged through the Department of Wildlife and National Parks (DWNP). All visitors must be accompanied by a registered guide. Camping and lodge accommodation must be booked in advance. 4×4 vehicles are essential inside the park.

🎟️ Entry Fees

Citizens & Residents	SADC Nationals	International Visitors	Children (under 8)
BWP 30 per day	BWP 60 per day	BWP 120 per day	Free

🚗 Getting There

Makgadikgadi Pans National Park is most commonly reached by road. From Maun, take the A3 highway northeast toward Nata — the main park entrance at Khumaga is approximately 180 km away. From Nata, the park is roughly 130 km to the southwest along the same road. The A3 is tar-sealed, but all roads inside the park are sand tracks requiring a 4×4 vehicle. The nearest airport with scheduled flights is Maun International Airport, which connects to Johannesburg and other regional hubs. Light aircraft charter flights to private airstrips within or near the park are also available. There is no public transport to or within the park, so a self-drive 4×4 or a guided safari vehicle is essential.

Best Time to Visit Botswana

Botswana is a year-round destination, but the timing of your visit dramatically shapes your experience. From the lush, flood-filled Okavango Delta in the wet season to the parched, wildlife-rich landscapes of the dry season, each period offers something distinct. Understanding the seasons — and what they deliver — helps you match your trip to your priorities.

🌞 Dry Season: May to October

The dry season is widely regarded as the classic safari season in Botswana, and with good reason. As waterholes shrink and vegetation thins, wildlife concentrates around permanent water sources, making sightings dramatic and reliable. The Okavango Delta, Chobe National Park, and the Central Kalahari Game Reserve all deliver exceptional game viewing during these months.

May and June are transitional months — still pleasantly warm during the day but noticeably cool at night, particularly in the Kalahari. By July and August, temperatures settle into a comfortable mid-20s Celsius range during the day, though nights can dip close to freezing in some areas. September and October mark the late dry season: the landscape becomes increasingly arid, game viewing reaches its peak intensity, but daytime heat begins to build, often exceeding 35°C in October.

Birdlife is less prolific than in the wet season, but raptors and resident species are plentiful. Predator activity is high, with lions, leopards, and wild dogs often spotted hunting in open terrain. This is also the best time for mokoro (dugout canoe) trips on the Okavango and for walking safaris, as the bush is open and the risk of insects and thick vegetation is minimal.

What to pack: Lightweight, neutral-coloured clothing for daytime (khaki, olive, beige), a warm fleece or insulated jacket for early morning and evening game drives (essential May–August), sturdy walking boots, a wide-brimmed hat, high-factor sunscreen (SPF 50+), polarised sunglasses, insect repellent (DEET-based), a headtorch, binoculars, and a dust bag for camera equipment. Layers are critical — mornings and evenings can be bitterly cold even when afternoons are warm.

🌧️ Green Season / Wet Season: November to April

The wet season transforms Botswana. Rains typically begin in November and intensify through December and January, tapering off by March or April. The landscape turns vivid green, wildflowers bloom across the Kalahari, and the Makgadikgadi Pans — usually a vast salt desert — become a shallow lake teeming with flamingos and migratory waterbirds.

This is Botswana’s most dramatic birding period. Well over 500 species have been recorded in the country, and during the rains, migratory birds from Europe and central Africa arrive in force. Raptors, storks, kingfishers, and bee-eaters are among the highlights.

Wildlife can be harder to spot — animals disperse across the now-lush landscape with water available everywhere — but this is precisely when the Kalahari lions and other desert-adapted species are at their most active and visible. It is also calving season for many antelope species, which in turn attracts predators. The Okavango receives its summer rainfall locally, but the famous flood, fed by rains far to the north in Angola, typically peaks between June and August.

Accommodation rates drop significantly during the green season, and many camps offer substantial discounts. The downside is that some roads become impassable, certain areas are accessible only by light aircraft, and the heat and humidity can be intense, particularly in December and January.

What to pack: Lightweight, breathable clothing in neutral colours, a lightweight waterproof jacket or packable poncho, quick-dry trousers and shirts, sandals for camp use, open-toed shoes are not advisable in the bush, a wide-brimmed sun hat, high-factor sunscreen, heavy-duty insect repellent (malaria risk is higher during the wet season — consult your GP about prophylaxis), long-sleeved shirts and trousers for evenings, a small dry bag for electronics, and binoculars for exceptional birding.

🌊 Okavango Flood Season: June to August

While the Okavango Delta receives some local rainfall in summer, its defining annual event is the arrival of floodwaters that have travelled hundreds of kilometres from the Angolan highlands. These waters, flowing down the Cubango and Cuito rivers and into the Okavango system, reach the delta between June and August — right in the heart of the dry season.

The result is extraordinary: a vast inland sea of papyrus channels, lily-covered lagoons, and palm-studded islands appears in an otherwise arid landscape. This is the time for mokoro excursions, motor-boat trips through the waterways, and wildlife watching from both land and water. Elephants, hippos, crocodiles, red lechwe, and sitatunga are all reliably seen. Fish eagles call overhead, and the air carries the scent of wild sage and water.

Camps and lodges within the Delta — particularly those on private concessions — offer some of the finest wildlife experiences in Africa during this period. Water levels vary by year, and some areas flood more extensively than others, but the combination of a peak dry season and a peak flood makes June to August the most iconic time to visit Botswana’s most celebrated ecosystem.

What to pack: All the dry-season essentials apply (warm layers, neutral clothing, sun protection, insect repellent), with the addition of a lightweight waterproof jacket for mokoro trips and boat excursions, water shoes or sandals with straps (for boarding and disembarking from mokoros), and a dry bag or waterproof case for your camera. Quick-dry fabrics are particularly useful here.

☀️ Shoulder Seasons: April–May and October–November

The shoulder periods bookending the main dry season offer a compelling balance of conditions, and experienced travellers often rate them among the best times to visit.

April and May see the tail end of the rains. The Delta and surrounding areas remain lush and green, wildlife is active, and migrant birds are still present before their departure. Temperatures are moderate, the humidity has dropped, and — crucially — the tourist crowds of peak season have yet to arrive. Accommodation is often available at lower rates than the July–September peak.

October is arguably the most dramatic single month for game viewing. As the dry season approaches its end, waterholes are at their lowest, and wildlife density around remaining water sources is extraordinary. Heat can be extreme — regularly above 35°C in Chobe and the Kalahari — but the reward is some of the most intense predator-prey interactions of the year. The first rains, when they come in late October or November, trigger an explosion of life: the air fills with insects, swallows return, impala begin giving birth, and the landscape shifts almost overnight from dusty brown to green.

What to pack (April–May): Neutral, lightweight clothing, a light fleece for evenings, waterproof layer, sun protection, and insect repellent. What to pack (October–November): Focus on heat management — breathable, loose-fitting clothing, a hat with full brim, high-factor sunscreen, electrolyte tablets, a reusable water bottle, and cooling neck scarves. Insect repellent becomes increasingly important as the rains approach.

🦁 Best Time for Wildlife Viewing

For the most reliable and concentrated game viewing, visit between July and October. The dry season strips the landscape bare, forcing animals to gather at predictable locations — rivers, pans, and permanent waterholes — making dramatic sightings almost inevitable.

🐦 Best Time for Birdwatching

The wet season (November to April) is Botswana’s birding peak. Migratory species swell the resident population, and the greening landscape supports a staggering diversity of species. The Okavango Delta, the Chobe riverfront, and the Makgadikgadi Pans are all exceptional birding destinations at this time.

🌺 Best Time for the Okavango Delta

The flood season (June to August) combines peak water levels with peak dry-season conditions, making it uniquely spectacular. Wildlife retreats to islands within the Delta, concentrating sightings, while the waterways allow exploration by mokoro and motorboat.

💸 Best Time for Value

The green season (November to April) offers the lowest accommodation rates, sometimes 30–40% below peak prices, with some camps offering additional incentives to fill beds. For travellers with flexibility on timing, this period delivers genuine value — particularly if birding, Kalahari lions, or the Makgadikgadi flamingos are priorities.

🧳 General Packing Essentials for Botswana

Regardless of season, certain items belong in every bag: a valid passport and visa documentation, yellow fever certificate if travelling from an endemic country, malaria prophylaxis (consult your GP well in advance), comprehensive travel insurance including emergency medical evacuation cover, a photocopy of all key documents stored separately, US dollars or South African rand for smaller lodges and tips, a plug adaptor (Botswana uses the large three-pin South African plug, Type M), and a torch or headtorch for camp use. Safari vehicles in Botswana are generally open-sided, so even in warm months, the wind chill on an early morning drive is significant — never underestimate the value of a warm layer.

🗓️ Overall Best Time to Visit

If you can visit Botswana only once and want to see as much as possible, June to September is the optimal window. The dry season is in full effect, game viewing reaches its annual peak, the Okavango flood is at or near its height, temperatures are manageable, and access to most areas is straightforward. July and August represent the sweet spot: the flood is up, the animals are concentrated, the nights are cool and star-filled, and the safari experience is as close to flawless as Africa offers. That said, Botswana rewards visits at any time of year — the green season has its own profound beauty and energy, and the shoulder months offer a quieter, more intimate experience of one of the continent’s most extraordinary wild places.

Where to stay

Planet Baobab

The accommodation at Planet Baobab is truly original, reflecting the traditional building methods of the original inhabitants of the Makgadikgadi Salt Pans in Botswana. You can choose between a traditional Bakalanga hut, built from mud, and a traditional grass hut, made in the way the Bushmen used to. Because both these types of huts at Planet Baobab are made from natural materials indigenous to the Makgadikgadi area in Botswana, they are perfectly temperature-controlled without the need for air-conditioners.

The Bakalanga mud huts are en suite and equipped with linen. The interiors of these huts reflect what Planet Baobab is about: true creativity. The walls are smeared with cow-dung in traditional Botswana style, and adorned with art made with natural pigments found in the many termite mounds in the area.

The traditional grass huts at Planet Baobab are constructed in the manner used by the first inhabitants of the Makgadikgadi – the Bushmen of Botswana. These huts are not en suite, but you are guaranteed a very comfortable night’ sleep on two single traditional mopane and cow hide beds. If you need the comforting presence of light the paraffin lamp will be welcome. If you want to sleep in your own tent, Planet Baobab has lovely shaded camping sites, each with braai area and shared ablution blocks.

Boteti River Camp

Located on the outskirts of Khumaga village, Boteti River Camp is easily accessible whether driving from Maun, Nata, Kasane, or Khama Rhino Sanctuary making it a not-to-be-missed and easy addition to any Botswana safaris offering fantastic contrasts with the Okavango Delta, Moremi Game Reserve, Chobe National Park and the Central Kalahari Game Reserve. At Boteti River Camp, you will get to explore one of the world’s largest salt pans and observe Botswana’s unique rural culture in a friendly, comfortable and serene setting.

Each chalet includes

Twin beds (extra beds on request for children only)
Family chalets: 2 single beds and 1 bunk bed
Desk
Coffee-/tea station
Air-conditioning
Mosquito nets
Ensuite bathrooms with outside showers and toilets

Campsites

1. Khumaga
A small-scale campsite with ten camping pitches by the Boteti River. Due to the water, the campsite is known for the large migration of zebras, predators and scavengers. It is quite possible to spot wild animals along the Boteti river. In addition, antelopes can simply walk across the campsite.

You can obtain wood for the campfire from the locals.

Various self-drive 4×4 trips visit Khumaga. The campsite can easily be fit into the route from Maun to the Khama Rhino Sanctuary, or the Kori campsite in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, for instance.

Khumaga Campsite: P100/P150/P250/$50 per person per night for citizen/resident/SADC/international. Half-price for kids 8-17 yrs, P20/P40/P60 for kids 5-7, under 5s free.

SKL Camps: +267 686 53 65/6, reservations@sklcamps.co.bw, res@sklcamps.co.bw.

Accommodation facilities:

Shaded camping pitches
Hot showers
2 ablution blocks
Shared braai
Fireplace
Laundry facilities

2. Tree Island

There are three campsites at Tree Island spaced about 50 m apart and quite private because of the trees in between. Tree Island is very obvious from a distance – a raised mound full of trees, distinct from the flat grassland surrounding it.

Site 1 is probably the best as it has the best views, though sites 2 and 3 are also nice. All sites have a bush toilet and bucket shower (bring your own water) but no other facilities.

Contact the Department of Wildlife and National Parks (DWNP) to book Tree Island Campsite or to pay conservation fees. Pay in advance and receive a voucher, or pay in cash at the park gates.

Department of Wildlife and National Parks: Botswana Parks and Reserves Reservation Office, +267 397 1405 or +267 318 0774, dwnp@gov.bw. Office hours 07:30-16:30 on weekdays. Closed weekends.

3. Baines Baobabs
A small-scale campsite with a couple of camping pitches by the famous Baines Baobabs. The campsite is situated in the Nxai Pan National Park.