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Accommodation in Botswana
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Botswana runs its safari country on a simple rule: few people, high fees, wild land. The parks and the private concessions around them are unfenced, the camps are small and mostly reached by light aircraft, and the animals still move as they always have between the Okavango, the Chobe river and the Kalahari. It is the most expensive safari destination in the region and, for most people who make the trip, the best.
A first visit usually joins two or three of four regions. The Okavango Delta is the water: a river that never reaches the sea, spreading into channels and islands, with the flood arriving oddly in the dry season because the rain that feeds it fell in Angola months earlier, between May and August. Moremi and the Khwai river on the delta's eastern edge hold the densest game. Chobe in the north is the elephant river. The Makgadikgadi and Nxai pans to the south east are salt flats, meerkats and the zebra migration.
The dry season from May to October is the classic time. The green season, December to April, is hot, wet, much cheaper and the best time on the pans. Most camps are fly-in from Maun, on hops of twenty to forty minutes.
May to October for cool clear days, thin bush and game concentrated at water, with the Okavango flood at its peak between June and August. December to April is the green season: hot, wet, considerably cheaper, with newborn animals, migrant birds and the pans at their most alive.
Most delta and Moremi camps are reached by light aircraft from Maun, with flights of twenty to forty minutes between airstrips. Khwai, the Chobe river front and the pans can also be reached by road, and Chobe is about an hour from Victoria Falls. A typical trip is a circuit of two or three camps with three nights in each.
By design. Park and concession fees are high and camps are deliberately small, which is what keeps the land empty and the game viewing uncrowded. Green-season rates are considerably lower than the dry-season peak, and some camps offer stay-longer rates. There is no guest service fee on Spekboom.
The Okavango, Moremi, Khwai and Chobe are malaria areas, with the highest risk in the wet summer. The Kalahari and the pans are lower risk but not risk-free. Speak to a travel clinic before you travel.
