Walking in the wild of the Okavango Delta
The shrill call of a hyena pierced the night air of the Okavango Delta.
I jolted awake. It sounded close, within the perimeter of our camp.
The hyena’s characteristic “whooping” call — a quick crescendo rolling from a low to high-pitched frequency — signaled it was on the prowl, sending secret codes to its pack somewhere in the dark.
I gripped my sleeping bag and listened again.
Silence.
Our guides, members of the local village, had reassured us that animals in the African bush wouldn’t disturb us in our tents — no elephants trampling through the campground or big cats clawing their way inside.
Still, I was unsettled.
We had made our camp on an island in the Santantadibe Channel, one of five main channels in Botswana’s Okavango that has water throughout the year, our guides said. It was July, winter in southern Africa, the dry season.
We were deep in the African bush. Our group had driven more than two hours over rough terrain from the nearest town, Maun, before being ferried in canoe-like boats (“mokoros”) through the delta’s narrow waterways to our campsite for the next two evenings.
The landscape was wild, fierce, free.
En route, a hippo stubbornly planted itself in the middle of the waterway, blocking safe passage. “River horses” are like icebergs: The vast majority of their hulking mass sits below the water line, a danger belied by curious eyes and ears that poke inquisitively (and cutely) from the surface. It refused to budge despite the repeated, aggressive slapping of mokoro poles against the water’s surface. We exited the boats for the riverbank and walked around, not wishing to tempt fate.
Later that night, as I listened for hyenas, I recalled the pride of lions that had roared with an authoritative rumble in the distance just after sundown. A wildebeest carcass, partially devoured, lay by the water’s edge a quarter mile downstream. The remains, less than a day old, joined the hippo skulls and other bones nearby, a testament to the unyielding forces at work in this thriving ecosystem.
Adrenaline waning, eyelids heavy, I drifted back to sleep in the tent’s relative safety.
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At daybreak, our group set out on a hike through the bush.
Tall, yellow stalks of dry grass crunched underfoot, while hippos’ deep-bellied grunting and snorting punctuated the serenity. Lone, slender palms loomed overhead, beset by the gnarled, blackened skeletons of trees that had perished years ago.
It’s thought that many of the Okavango’s 150,000 or so islands began as termite mounds, which pepper the relatively flat landscape here. Most tower over the average person, resembling oversized witches’ hats.
The typical delta is a wetland that forms when rivers dump their water and sediment into another body of water like an ocean.
But the Okavango, in northwestern Botswana, is extremely rare. It’s one of the world’s few inland deltas, an oasis in the midst of the Kalahari Desert. The rivers that create it never reach the sea, instead spreading across the flat desert expanse and evaporating into the sand.
The Okavango’s size fluctuates dramatically with seasonal floods, its wetlands doubling in size from roughly 1,200 square miles to 3,000 sq. mi., transforming it into the world’s largest freshwater marsh ecosystem. At its peak, the floodplain swells to roughly half the size of Massachusetts, The Nature Conservancy estimates.
This “Jewel of the Kalahari” is fed by rains from the Angolan highlands, two countries away to the northwest, eventually reaching the delta during Botswana's dry winter — and offering a lifeline to abundant wildlife that seek its life-sustaining resources.
Indeed, the delta is home to some of the world’s most endangered large mammals, including the cheetah, white rhinoceros, black rhinoceros, lion and African wild dog, according to the UNESCO World Heritage Centre.
Botswana also hosts the world’s largest population of elephants, at around 130,000, according to National Geographic.
We saw herds of them cut through dense vegetation en route to various watering holes, at times tossing dirt on their backs with a sort of lazy yet rhythmic conviction, screening themselves from the sun. Others munched away endlessly on green shoots near the water, or chased away mischievous baboons who strayed too close with loud trumpeting.
Giraffes, lumbering gracefully in the distance, had the appearance of meandering, spotted tree trunks with curious, watchful eyes. Scores of zebra, wildebeest and springbok evaluated our every movement with extreme intensity, readying a speedy retreat if anything seemed amiss.
Fresh lion tracks encircled the wildebeest carcass from the prior day, which had been picked clean by vultures, hyenas and other scavengers. Our guide said the lions almost certainly saw us walking across the bush, scouting from a camouflaged hiding place.
The landscape felt like paradise in the absolute middle of nowhere, an unspoiled slice of Africa in which we, somehow, felt like the only visitors.
As we cut through the bush, each step was electric with nervous curiosity: What might be waiting ahead?
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Botswana’s rich floodplain was a stark contrast to the aridity of neighboring Namibia.
Many parts of Namibia, one of the driest countries in sub-Saharan Africa, get just 10 inches of rain per year, according to NASA. Its president declared a national state of emergency in May 2024 as the nation experienced its worst drought in 100 years.
Remnants of death are scattered across its landscape.
In Deadvlei, the scorched, blackened limbs of acacia trees that perished almost a millennia ago grope the desert air like haunted skeletons, entombed in cracked, white clay at their feet.
As towering dunes of red sand encroached on the Tsauchab River, they choked off the trees’ access to water and left behind a graveyard of gnarled fossils that refuse to decompose in the dry environment.
Deadvlei — or “dead marsh” — is part of the Namib, considered the oldest desert on earth. The dunes here are also among the world’s tallest; one, the aptly named “Big Daddy,” which looms over Deadvlei, rises more than 1,000 feet.
On the Skeleton Coast, mountains of golden sand, windswept into ephemeral works of art, tumble into the rolling surf of the Atlantic.
The husks of warped, rusted ships claimed by the salt and sand lay discarded on the shore. Nearby, the weathered, abandoned homes of former diamond miners are testaments to the inexorable passage of time and decay, to the Namib’s power to simultaneously destroy and forge something eerily beautiful.
Even here, life has found a way to survive with little rainfall.
Fog is the primary source of water for the Namib Sand Sea, a section of the desert that spans about 13,000 square miles of coastal Namibia, writes Kathryn Hansen, managing editor for NASA Earth Observatory.
“[It’s] the only coastal desert in the world to contain large dune fields influenced by fog,” Hansen writes. “This moisture results in relatively abundant and diverse vegetation, particularly on the rocky hills or mountains … that rise above the desert.”
And, there are some pockets where wildlife thrives.
In Namibia’s northern reaches, near the border with Angola, lies one of the nation’s crown jewels: Etosha National Park, a sanctuary for all sorts of big game, from lions to elephants, zebras, wildebeest, giraffes and rhinos, among others.
That thriving ecosystems could permeate a seemingly inhospitable landscape continued to amaze as we trekked across Africa’s southwest.
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There are signs that the Okavango’s relative bounty may be at risk.
Developers, commercial agriculture and other forces are pushing into remote areas of Angola that help sustain water flows to the Okavango, according to NatGeo. For years, those areas had largely been off-limits due to landmines that remained after Angola’s civil war (1975-2002), which have been steadily cleared away by government, communities and nonprofits, it said.
The Nature Conservancy warns that scores of water infrastructure projects, like hydropower dams, commercial irrigation and municipal water storage, are also being considered, which might divert floodwaters and upend the ecosystems that depend on it — including the Okavango.
Untamed expanses like the Okavango, relatively insulated from human influence, seem to be rarer and rarer these days. It was a privilege to be able to experience its wildness. To dilute that would be to forfeit something invaluable.