Southern Africa

This trip had been on our list for a long time, and we were uncertain how to approach it. Southern Africa is not a place you figure out on arrival. The logistics are real: multiple countries, small charter planes between camps, concessions and reserves with unfamiliar names, and a planning horizon of months rather than weeks. We used an organizer, and we’d do it again.

What we weren’t prepared for was how completely it would exceed our expectations. We’d done safari before — Tanzania in 2013 — and thought we had a reasonable frame for what to expect. The Okavango Delta reframed it entirely. This is not the open grassland of the Serengeti, where you can see two miles in any direction and spot a cluster of vehicles to know where the lions are. The Okavango is flooded, vegetated, and intimate. The camps are tiny. The concessions are vast. And the guides have to work — reading tracks, listening for alarm calls, watching which direction an animal is looking — in a way that the Serengeti doesn’t require.

We spent nine days in the bush across one camp in Zimbabwe, near Victoria falls, and then two camps in Botswana’s Okavango Delta. We bookended the safari with three nights in Cape Town at the beginning, and wrapping up with four nights in the Cape Winelands. The safari and the winelands are genuinely different trips that happen to share a continent — and both were worth the journey.

What We’d Tell You Before You Go

Safari planning is genuinely complex — which camps, which concessions, which time of year, how to sequence it. We used Next Adventure and found them excellent. The difference between camps matters more than it appears from a website, and a good organizer will steer you toward the right fit. We outlined this trip differently from others:

• Our basics section explains for how we organized the trip, why we picked August, and some information on packing.
• The Okavango talks about the Okavango in general, across the two different camps.
• For each of the three camps we have separate articles, Victoria Falls, Sable Alley, and North Island.
• We have 2 separate articles for our “bookend” South Africa visits, Cape Town and Cape Winelands.
• We have an article that is general observations on South Africa.

Read something before you go. For the Okavango and Botswana, the history worth understanding is particularly around the San people and the complicated governance of the delta’s concessions. For South Africa, the history of apartheid is not background noise; it’s present everywhere you look. Kevin recommends Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime (in audiobook — hearing him switch between languages is the point) and Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom as entry points. For anyone who wants to go deeper, South Africa: The Rise and Fall of Apartheid is dense but rewarding.

August is the dry season in Botswana, which means animals concentrate around water sources and sightings are more reliable. Cape Town in August is winter, which means some activities are weather-dependent and the beach is not in play. We’d make the same timing choice again for the safari; Cape Town in better weather would be worth a separate trip.

The Okavango Delta is not a national park. It’s a network of private concessions, each managed differently, some community-owned, some not. The camps are small — seven to twelve tents — and spread far apart. You will fly between them on 12-seat charter planes. This is part of the experience, not an inconvenience to manage around.

An Okavango safari is expensive. The price includes everything — flights between camps, all meals, game drives twice daily, guides, sundowner drinks in the bush. There is no à la carte. The two camps we stayed in were priced differently and felt different; both were worth it, and the more expensive one (North Island) delivered noticeably more on every dimension.

Honest Verdicts

One Thing We Didn’t Expect

The guides. We knew the animals would be remarkable. We didn’t anticipate how much the quality of the guiding would shape the experience. CJ at Sable Alley is of the San people, one of the most ancient cultures on earth. His grandfather lived as a hunter-gatherer. CJ grew up watching that world close.

He perceived things in the bush that we would never have registered: which direction animals were looking, what an alarm call meant, what a footprint’s orientation told him about where something had gone. Sitting in a game vehicle next to someone carrying that knowledge is not something you can prepare for in advance.