In many ways Botswana is a distillation of all that Africa offers: grand scenery, gentle, on-the-ball people, wildlife at natural ease. Our private trips usually center around one of the world’s grandest scenes, the Okavango Delta, a world-unique phenomenon, the quiet yet dramatic meeting of a great river and an even greater desert. As Frans Lanting wrote in Africa’s Last Eden, the inland delta’s “very existence in the middle of the Kalahari Desert is nothing short of miraculous.... The very notion that such a place as wild and untouched as the Okavango even exists may seem like a dream.”

 

We introduce our private travelers to a number of out-of-the-way camps and lodges in the Delta, each with a particular charm and all with magnificent birds and game, which we view afoot or by canoe. The Delta’s lagoons and pacific waterways yield dramatically, in matter of a few feet, to unrelenting desert. After the Delta, we often visit a wonderful Kalahari camp, one of the continent’s classics, reveling in the experience of seemingly infinite dry wildness. Such contrasts alone are worth the trip to this enchanting country.