Botswana

How to organise your own safari to Africa

Safaris do not come cheap. Good ones, that is. You can spend a few days in Kenya for less, and see lots of game. You will be guaranteed "the big five", but there will be more people, tarmac roads, and lines of land rovers waiting their turn to view the animals. A good introduction perhaps, but not quite "getting away from it all". This page is not about Kenya, nor that sort of safari. It is about Botswana, and once you have been to this part of Africa, you are spoiled for anything else. Except Namibia and parts of Zimbabwe, or the more adventurous places (and more risky) which we have yet to visit. What is a 'real' safari? One where you travel to remote areas, where you have to go looking for game, and where you live under canvas. The camps should be small, so that you do not run the risk of seeing other vehicles when all you want to do is sit and watch birds. This does not mean you have to rough it. Far from it. Many camps are luxurious, and choosing and booking your safari can be easy and painless.

Young elephant at water hole - mock charge

We use Wilderness Safaris, who are based in Johannesburg. They are one of the biggest and the best. Ask for Yvette Salgado who will help you plan your itinerary, and can be relied upon for good, impartial advice. Some of the camps are owned by Wilderness, and even more are managed by them, but you are not restricted in your choice and can build your safari to order. Payment can be made direct, or we used their account at NatWest Bank in Jersey, paying in pounds sterling. The remarkable depreciation in the value of the rand will mean you can save a lot by booking direct via e-mail. After visits to Zimbabwe, South Africa and Namibia, in July 1998 we chose Botswana. Botswana is one of the most thinly populated countries in the world, with only 5 people per square mile. It has close, enduring links with Britain and remains an enthusiastic member of the Commonwealth. When full independence was achieved in 1966, Botswana was poor, but now its economy is strong thanks to diamonds, conservation and wildlife management. 17% of the land is protected as national park. Botswana boasts a rich inheritance in the Okavango wetlands (the world's largest inland delta), the Makgadikgadi salt pans, the stark openness of the Kalahari Desert, and the huge herds of elephant in Chobe. It is also one of the driest countries. There is only one permanent river that flows into Botswana, and none flow out of the country. The border with Zambia is the world's shortest - only 700m long.

Here's a picture of an impala with elephants at a water hole. Also, how big is an elephant skull?

Let's start with how you get around, what you do on safari and what the daily routine is like. You will want to see as much variety as possible, and so you should choose camps which are in different parts of the country. This means you will fly from place to place in small planes. On arrival at an airstrip, you are met by a guide and a land rover. Camp routine follows a regular pattern. You awake at about 6.00am. After cereals, fruit and tea you set off for an early morning drive. This lasts until about 10.30am when you return for brunch. Afterwards, you are free to siesta in the heat, read, or take a splash in the pool before showering in the late afternoon. This is a good time to wash, especially in the winter months when it is cold in the mornings and after sunset. Tea and cake is followed by another game drive. You will stop for drinks at sundown, then continue the drive with a high intensity spotlight to pick out the eyes of nocturnal animals. Dinner in the camp is about 7.45pm, and you turn in early after coffee around the camp fire. Accommodations range from 1940's style tents with bucket shower, canvas wash hand basin and outside toilet in a palisade, to luxury rooms with shower and inside loo on teak decking with every possible amenity. There are two or three members of staff for each guest. Here's Sam, a guide at Xigera. And here are local people near Jack's Camp on the salt pan.

Getting close (and noisy). Will the elephant break into our tent? Vicky is worried...

Two beautiful but hungry lionesses in the morning light

What will you see? Let's get one thing straight from the start. You will not see everything, and what you do see will take time and effort. If you must see cheetah, go to a cheetah sanctuary. If you have to see leopard, go to a managed game park. But if you want to see animals in the wild and have the thrill of finding them after searching for hours or days using the knowledge of your guide, this kind of safari is for you. You may also have congenial company during the evenings. Is it dangerous? No not really, providing you follow safety instructions. Once seated in an open jeep, animals cannot identify you as a human being and will allow you to approach very close indeed. These two lionesses were only a few feet away. They were hungry. The previous day, 9 lionesses killed an impala but the food was stolen from them by one lion. They were forced to look on, with their cubs as the lion ate the entire 25kg of meat, leaving them nothing. We watched, just yards away as the lion ate leaving only skull and horns. See my photograph of the lion eating if you dare, and here's another one. Lion kills, hunting with cheetah, and an aardvark sighting, are not everyday events but we did all of these in 2 weeks. Oh all right, I lied about the aardvark (but we did spot an aardwolf at night).

This lovely picture of papyrus beds in the Okavango reminds me that Botswana is not only all about animals. The Okavango delta covers 5700 square miles and contains over half the surface water in the country. The Okavango river never reaches the sea but dies after 110 miles in the desert sands of northern Botswana. Maun is the gateway to the wetlands and most visitors enter the delta here, the gateway to the Moremi game reserve. In mid winter during the dry season (July) the water reaches Maun. September is one of the best months to visit Botswana, but any time from July onwards is ideal. If you want to see migrating buffalo, you will have to go later, but remember that the dry season is mercifully free of mosquitoes in most places, which is a bonus if, like me, you react badly to Avloclor. Whilst on the subject of mosquitoes, I recommend you rely on prevention. Wear long sleeves and trousers after dusk. Button shirts at the neck and spray exposed skin with repellent. Wear arm and legbands impregnated with Deet, which you can buy in the UK from YHA shops. Malaria is nasty, and far more dangerous than hippos, so they say. One of the best ways of seeing the wetlands (and the quietest) is by punt. The local name for the punt is a mokoro, poled from the Cambridge end by a capitalist poler saving his tips to emigrate to the USA maybe.

If you want to know what animals and plants can be seen in Southern Africa, I recommend a field guide by Vincent Carruthers (ISBN 1-86812-675-7) called The Wildlife of Southern Africa. When you think of safaris, I suppose most people automatically think of mammals like baboons, hare, leopard, cheetah, lion, jackal, giraffe, zebra, elephant, hippo, warthog and various species of buck. Mammals occupy only 20 pages out of over 300 in this book. On your first safari you are bound to be enthralled by the sight of so many animals in their natural habitat day after day, and tick of each one that you have seen in the small book supplied by Wilderness. After a few trips, I do believe you will turn your attention more and more to birds and the flora and fauna. This gorgeous bird is a Malachite kingfisher. Other colourful birds which are favourites of ours include the Little Bee Eater, the Lilacbreasted Roller and the Purple Crested Lourie.

This comical bird is a Yellowbilled Hornbill (known locally as a flying banana) which hung around Jack's Camp looking for fruit and muesli. Photographing birds is a forlorn occupation. You need a huge lens to fill the image, or a very tame creature like this one. Too often what looks superb through the viewfinder turns into a tiny dot on your photo or slide. A word about photography. Forget compacts and zooms, unless you relish brown pictures of the bush. You need an SLR and a lens of about 300mm to get good results. Bigger than that is unwieldy, and you would have to use 1/500 or even 1/1000 sec exposure which means very fast film indeed and little depth of field. Smaller than 300mm and you are back to dots on your precious pictures which bear little resemblance to the rare animal it took 3 days for your guide to find. A few more tips: use Fuji film for the rich colours and fine grain. 400ASA is good. Avoid auto focus which has trouble locking onto the creature you are taking, and bleeps alarmingly, frightening the animals and annoying anyone else in the 4WD with you. Go for a manual SLR for choice, which will work even when the battery dies, and is resistant to the all pervading dust waiting to get in the works. Keep lenses clean and free from dust at all times. Take loads of film - at least 20 rolls for a 2 week trip.

So far I have talked only about land rovers, but walking is fun too. Your guide will not be allowed to carry a gun in most parts of Botswana, unlike this shot of Charles from Chitabee Trails. Going on foot can be dangerous, of course, and the night we spent tracking lion near Kariba in Zimbabwe stays in our minds as one of our riskier moments, especially when we were cut off by a herd of elephants and their young from our boat on the lake, and two young lion were approaching from ahead. Still, we lived to tell the tale, although skimming across Lake Kariba at high speed, dodging hippo and the maze of dead trees did not do much for my equanimity. Nor, for that matter on this walk with Charles did I relish wading groin deep (ooh that's cold) through a large waterhole in which elephant had just been drinking. Our legs sunk into mud knee deep, and I could not help wonder what reptiles lurked therein. As you can see from the grin Charles was wearing, he enjoyed putting us through such discomforts, and he wasn't the only one, as you will find out later on. Mind you, walking will not get you close to many animals. On the contrary, my experience is you can trek for hours and see nothing. Where have all the animals gone? Answer: they can spot you from afar, and make themselves scarce. If you get the chance of a walk, take it and don't be put off. The clean smell of the African bush, the sights and sounds, and the sheer closeness to nature in wide open spaces is an experience not to be missed.

Back to the experiences, and here is Vicky astride a quad bike on the salt pan near Jack's Camp. These bikes enable you to reach parts of the pan without causing damage to the crust. The headgear might look frightfully Lawrence, but keeping the dust from your hair took precedence over other considerations. After a long bike ride, we lay on the pan for a long time watching the stars. Shooting stars and satellites were visible too. The sky of Africa, at sunset and by night, with clear skies and no light pollution is awesome. Lying, quite quiet, hundreds of miles from the nearest town, gazing up at the constellations, puts your existence into some kind of perspective I find. Later that night, the staff of Jack's Camp orchestrated some carefully staged surprises. Firstly they served a 4 course meal with wine on tresle tables set up near a camp fire. The main course was freshly barbecued ostrich. Then we were taken on a disorienting walk, as an expert in astronomy pointed out our star signs in the sky. Finally to our consternation, all the iron bedsteads from our tents had been transported onto the salt pan, and set up 100 metres apart. There we were to sleep the night, in freezing temperatures, under the stars. Zipped into a bedroll with a hot water bottle was far warmer than you might have expected, but getting up in the night for a call of nature, given what might be walking about, took some courage. Here I am too.

Jack's Camp had style, and here we are enjoying sundowners after picking up dozens of stone age implements which litter the surface of the salt pan. There must have been literally thousands of early man living in this area, and hunting with stone arrows, or ripping flesh from bones with sharpened scrapers over a very long period of time. As a species, almost certainly we migrated from Africa into Europe and beyond, so perhaps we were delving very directly into our own pasts.

What pictures of Africa would be complete without some skies? Ok here's another sunset as well. This was taken from a boat using a 200mm lens, with a medium filter (for the technically minded). It does show how big a lens you would need for one of those imaging filling sun discs beloved of advertisers.

Finally, this is an image I have been trying to get right for some years. You need a sturdy tripod and an exposure of maybe 30 minutes or more. The aperture is trial and error, but this was taken with a 28mm lens wide open on 400ASA Fuji and I think looks quite good. Warn the lab before you get your film processed, and take the first shot on the reel in daylight, otherwise the automatic developing machinery will overcompensate, and your picture will come out muddy and brown. Pointing the camera directly south and using a fish eye lens is even more dramatic, but that's something to try in the future.

Thanks for reading this far. I hope you liked what you saw. Please email me with your comments and experiences. I hope you end up enjoying Africa as much as we do, and that your own trips to that continent prove as successful as ours have.

Last updated: 23/11/05