Above and Below

YOUR FIRST view of the saturated Okavango Delta is from above. The floodwater comes from Angola, where the spring rains fall from November to April. It takes months for the floodwater to reach Botswana, but by July, when you visit, the entire landscape is inundated. Flying at 3,000 feet, you can see the snaking tributaries feeding into successively smaller and smaller branches, spreading out like capillaries in the human body. All the rivulets and creeks started as hippopotamus trails, you are later told, the bodies of the large mammals clearing the papyrus to form tracks, which other animals begin to use; water is always looking for the path of least resistance, so it, too, uses these courses, widening trails into streams.

This is a place you have dreamed of visiting for a long time. You suspect you will fall in love with it, as you tend to with wild and remote corners of the world. You always feel something profound sinking your feet into such distant terrain, and here, there are also lions and elephants without the barrier of a zoo’s enclosure. After this trip, you will find it hard to experience a zoo in quite the same way. Once you have seen these animals where they belong, the sadness of seeing them in cages will overwhelm you. 

The Maun International Airport is not much more than a landing strip. After touching down on its single runway, you walk down stairs into its three-room terminal and, after clearing customs, are ushered right back through security to board a bush plane and hop back into the sky. You’ll spend a lot of time this week contemplating the landscape from above because, where you’re going, there are no roads. Here, bush planes are a common mode of transportation; a fleet of Cessna 208 Caravans operates like buses. The majority of the staff at the camps you visit are locals. When you ask where they are from, they invariably answer with the name of their village, followed by how long it takes to reach it by bush plane.

Wilderness, the tour company you travel with, began operating out of Maun in 1983. They were a pioneer of “photographic safaris,” catering to guests carrying cameras rather than guns. They’ve grown from their humble start with a single Land Rover and tents: Wilderness now operates more than 60 luxury camps, managing and supporting conservation of over 6 million acres of land across eight African countries. Its charitable arm, the Wilderness Trust, funds numerous initiatives focused on community development, conservation, and anti-poaching, including Children in the Wilderness, which provides environmental education for school kids in the countries wherein Wilderness operates, and CLAWS (Communities Living Among Wildlife Sustainably) Conservancy, a project that works to reduce human/wildlife conflict in the delta.

This incredible conservation story is why you chose Wilderness. Impact and travel, you have come to understand, present a complicated equation. The balance is particularly sensitive where ecosystems are fragile, animals are endangered, and people’s living comes from the land, putting humans in competition with fauna for meager resources. You believe in the holistic approach Wilderness has pioneered. Its complexity is necessary, you think, if travel is to be a positive rather than depletive force for the places and communities it impacts.

When you deplane at the desolate landing strip of Mombo Camp, the delta is so flooded that you take a fifth flight, a short hop on a Bell 206 helicopter. From there, you and your luggage are loaded into one of the modified, open-topped Land Cruisers you will get to know quite well this week and immediately taken on a game drive. Within 20  minutes of landing, you are looking at a large, male leopard. Though he is less than 15 feet away, he is invisible to you until your guide, Ona, points him out. Your eyes have to be trained, instructed on how to click into this landscape. Suddenly, his spotted shape pops out from the long, yellow grass, where he is resting after tiring himself out from mating.

Ona next drives you to a buffalo carcass that a pride of lions has been feeding on for two days. As you watch the five female cats eat, it is both quiet and not quiet at all. There are no human sounds, but you can hear every scrape of tooth against bone, along with the screeching sounds of the birds alerting nearby animals to the presence of predators. As the sun drops, you head back to camp — just as a pack of hyenas approaches to see if they, too, can scrounge their share.

All three camps you visit have a similar layout: Eight rooms, an open restaurant and bar, and common areas, including a spa and gym, are connected by raised, wooden boardwalks. Nothing is gated, so you are instructed not to walk on these boardwalks at night without a guide — advice that seems particularly sage after that same male leopard comes strolling through camp on your first evening. As spacious and comfortable as the interiors are (“tent” hardly seems an appropriate descriptor), at Mombo, wildlife viewing is the major amenity. It is Wilderness’ flagship for good reason: Situated at the northern tip of the Moremi Game Reserve, Mombo lies in an area enriched by nutrient-laden sediments carried in by the annual floods. These fertile conditions fuel lush vegetation growth, drawing herbivores and, in turn, predators, such as lions, leopards, hyenas, and jackals. Before your trip, you were told the wildlife in the Okavango is so abundant that it can spoil you for other safaris. If that statement is true, it seems doubly so for Mombo: On that first game drive, before even setting foot in camp, you have spotted all these animals.

After two nights at Mombo, you take another helicopter to Jao Camp, built on an island amid the vast floodplains. Set high above the water, the camp feels like a collection of dramatic treehouses, constructed of steel and wood using local techniques. The architecture is on a scale so grand that it almost matches the landscape. The opulence of the spaces showcases the luxury experience Jao provides, which is unparalleled by any other camp you visit. Soaring ceilings, lavish outdoor showers and indoor soaking tubs, heavy curtains drawn around your bed at night to keep in the warmth provided by pellet stoves, mattresses topped during turndown with heated blankets rather than hot water bottles. While you (truly) appreciate all the creature comforts available for the discerning traveler, you still find the landscape to be the greatest luxury on offer.

At Jao in July, wildlife viewing is done at water level. By motor boat or mokoro (a traditional canoe), you follow the tributaries and hippo trails, the submerged landscape teeming with birds; close to a thousand species call this area home. Your guide, Rams, is an expert birder. There is not a single call or flap of wings, however brief, that he is unable to identify. As you move through the water, you see crocodiles sunning themselves on small islands. With Rams’ instructions, you easily spot the two rounded ears and tiny nostrils of the hippos, their enormous bulk concealed beneath the surface. A male hippo blocking the pathway under a bridge necessitates a detour. He is nursing an injury; a recent fight has left him with a gaping wound, and he is not expected to recover. It is sad, Rams tells you, but he won’t go to waste.

From Jao, you take a helicopter into the bush to visit CLAWS Conservancy. Focused on protecting lion populations and farmers’ livelihoods, the project collars the cats and sends text message alerts when the lions are going to intersect with livestock, allowing farmers time to move their cattle to safety. CLAWS additionally operates a communal herding program, with human herders and guard dogs protecting the livestock in collective boma (portable enclosures), where the herds also receive veterinary care. In the areas where these programs operate, conflicts have been reduced by half, leading to growth in the lion population and reduced loss of livestock.

At the boma, the herders show you the cattle, accompanied by the scrappy dogs that sound the alarm when lions are near. But it is the theatrical performance you see here that will stay with you. A troop of actors, residents of nearby villages, have trained to educate local farmers about what CLAWS does. Their production includes acting, dancing, and singing. The roles of animals and humans are performed with an intense commitment and verve that makes you think about the origins of theater, how it must have begun with plays like this, with people using their bodies both to entertain and to tell important stories. 

The last camp you visit is DumaTau. It is in the Linyanti, a region sandwiched between the delta and Chobe National Park in the very north of Botswana. From the camp, a not-too-distant treeline marks the Namibia border. DumaTau has a similar feel and layout to Mombo but is built along the waterfront of the wide Linyanti River. During the day, elephants wade into the water to eat grasses growing in the marshy land surrounding the river’s channels. At sunset, the herds all cross back together to return to the forests. Inland, the landscape is denser and drier than at the other camps you have visited. It is filled with the scrubby remains of mopane trees. A favorite of the elephants’, many trees have been stripped bare of their leaves.

Your guide, See, tells you how, as a middle schooler, he took part in Children in the Wilderness, the education program supported by the Wilderness Trust. All kids who complete the program get the chance to visit a Wilderness camp as guests, an experience that left its mark on See. Although he went on to study computer engineering, he eventually decided that life at a desk was not for him and returned to Wilderness to train as a guide. On your first drive, he takes you to see the carcass of an elephant, which a pride of lions, including four cubs, has been feasting on for a few days. As you arrive, you encounter a male lion lazing on the road, his belly distended from gorging himself on elephant meat. He is so near that you can feel your breath catch in your chest, experiencing yourself as prey in too-close proximity to a predator. You find you can only look at him directly through the lens of your camera. 

Every night of your trip, you have been amazed by the stars. The sky here is so dark that the Milky Way spills across the expanse in a way you haven’t seen since you were a child. Walking between dinner and your room, you keep pausing to throw your head back and gawk. On your last night, See takes you to the edge of camp and uses a laser pointer to show you the constellations, recounting their Indigenous stories. Alpha and Beta Centauri are two lion brothers; the four stars of the Southern Cross are the giraffes that the brothers are chasing. See describes one cluster of stars as campfires, and then a second one. The fact that there are two, he says, speaks to how vital fire is in his culture.

What he says makes you think about something you experienced the night before, returning to camp after seeing the lions. It was dusk, and the sky darkened as you drove. The road snaked tightly between the mopane trees, between which the colossal shapes of elephants kept appearing, like phantoms. Your vehicle startled a herd, and they trumpeted a warning, the sound so enormous it left you shaken. When you finally approached the camp, the smell of the fire smoke provided an immediate and intense sense of relief. It was a feeling of safety and home, a rightness so deep it can only be described as primal.