Overview

After 3 nights at Sable Alley, we took a short charter flight — 20 minutes or so — to our second Okavango reserve. North Island Okavango is priced at a higher point than Sable Alley, and you could feel the difference immediately: more intimate (7 tents vs 12), better food, a higher level of service throughout. This isn’t a criticism of Sable Alley, which was excellent. North Island was just in a different register.

The camp sits next to a hippo pool. We woke up every night listening to them vocalize.

For general information on the Okavango, see the Okavango overview for background on the delta overall.

Getting There

The MackAir flight from Sable Alley was only 15–20 minutes, and allowed gorgeous views of the delta from above.

What We Saw

A typical day started with a game drive at around 6:45am, just before sunrise. By mid-morning it would start to warm up, and we’d stop around 9am for coffee, snacks, and a leg stretch before heading back to camp for lunch. The afternoon drive went out again around 4pm and ran through sunset and into dark.

The guiding at North Island required a different kind of skill than open-grassland safari. The Okavango’s heavy vegetation means you can’t just scan the horizon. Our guide Parks read tracks, listened for alarm calls, and watched which direction animals were looking. We were consistently impressed.

The wild dogs were the standout sighting of the entire trip. The African Wild Dog is one of the world’s most endangered mammals, roughly 6,000 left in the wild. A thriving pack lived about 30 minutes from our lodge, and we visited their den twice. The puppies were 5 weeks old, basking in the morning sun outside the den, occasionally getting up to play. The adult markings are extraordinary up close, which is why they’re also called Painted Wolves.

One morning we found a lioness with three cubs, an auntie standing watch while the mother returned. A waterbuck stood a quarter mile away, facing exactly in the lions’ direction, motionless, for minutes.

On our final afternoon drive we’d given up on seeing a male lion. We were rewarded for patience.

And on our last evening, after our sunset photos, when we thought we were done, a lioness walked right past our truck.

We had a second leopard sighting here, not as extended as the one at Sable Alley, but a young male walked right up to Tiffany’s side of the truck.

What started as a brief giraffe sighting turned into nearly an hour, including sundowner cocktails, just watching a group feed. We also caught one walking alongside an elephant herd, which we still can’t quite believe we photographed.

Elephants were everywhere, as at Sable Alley: in camp, in the water, visible from the charter plane window. One morning an elephant greeted us on the transfer from the airstrip at 11:15am. We also learned to give distance to males in musth. The telltale secretions on the cheek indicate a male ready for mating, and our driver went into reverse fast when we came around a corner to find one. Males in musth are just plain unpredictable.

We had two boat outings, one Saturday afternoon and one Sunday morning. The delta by boat is a different experience from the game drive: slower, closer to the water, surrounded by birds, and occasionally by hippos. We did a multi-hour trip through the delta. One hippo got skittish as we passed and crashed into the water closer than we wanted.

We timed our trip for a full moon, which we were glad of. A cold front also came through for 48 hours, lows in the 40s, cold enough that the hippos weren’t in the water at 7:20am. We’d never seen one so far from water before.

Where We Stayed

North Island Okavango — 7 tents, higher service level than Sable Alley, better food, more intimate feel. The fire pit extends out over the hippo pool. We’d book it again without hesitation.