Earlier this year, our founder Andy swapped his desk for the floodplains of Botswana. He travelled in May, right at the time when the Okavango Delta was beginning to fill. It's a season that transforms the landscape into something altogether different, and Andy was there at the perfect time to see the best of it.
What followed was a journey of water, wildlife and a few unexpected discoveries. In this post, Andy shares his first-hand reflections from the Selinda Spillway and Xudum, bringing to life the sounds, smells and sights of Botswana in flood season. Our Botswana expert, Kirsty, knows how to design holidays to Botswana that will tick all of your boxes. So have a read of the below and do get in touch if you think Botswana could be for you.
"I arrived at the Selinda Spillway in the Okavango Delta at the same time as the annual flood. The word “flood” conjures up images of rushing waves and destruction, but the Okavango flood was nothing like this. The water slowly, gently, but implacably pushed its way across the landscape. It was imperceptible but inevitable: like a game of Grandma’s footsteps, the water level never rose when I was looking at it, but if I turned my back, when I looked round again, surprise! the water was lapping at my feet. It turned the Spillway into a verdant Hall of Mirrors, where subtle changes in elevation meant the plain of wild grass I passed through yesterday (think Gladiator. Or maybe Theresa May) still looked like a plain, but six inches of water now washed the base of the grass stalks, turning a savannah into a swamp.The Delta is vast and the camps and lodges limited in number: you might have up to a thousand square kilometres literally to yourself. So the rarest sightings were of other people and vehicles. Despite the remoteness, the Delta in flood time was a place of ceaseless noise. At night, the reed frogs were my constant backing musicians. They sounded like each child in a primary school had been given a different individual xylophone block, with no two identical notes, and told to play it in syncopated rhythm with their friends. The resulting sound was more harmonious than you might think (underpinned by the bullfrogs providing the bass section) and was the Delta’s equivalent of a white noise app, lulling me to sleep. Bird cries were ever-present, from the “tink-tink-tink” of the Blacksmith Plover, to the piercing single note of the African Fish Eagle (every description you will ever read of the African Fish Eagle’s cry will describe it as “piercing” – but wait until you’ve heard it yourself and then tell me there’s a better way to describe it!). The grunting of hippos, the deep rumblings of elephants, the rough bark of the lion, and the harsh alarm snort of any number of plains game species all imposed themselves on my senses at some point.
So, it sounds like a busy place, right? Well, yes, but it’s also vast (I may have already mentioned this!), so the landscape comfortably absorbed all these animals. Some were easy to see: both lodges I stayed at have local elephants who’ll pass through at some point in the day, often pausing for a drink from the swimming pool. When you encounter that same elephant in the bush, you’ll wonder how the largest land animal can be so quiet and so hard to spot despite only being a matter of yards away. Hippos were in most pools of water, and plains game in herds of anything from a few specimens to hundreds of animals drifted across the savannah, swamps, and islands. We worked hard to get our predator sightings. My spotter found the tracks, and in tandem with my guide, used their experience and intuition to deliver that perfect leopard sighting: thankfully, I’m told this is the outcome more often than not!
That longed-for leopard sighting
The immutable cycle of the water flooding in and receding is like the breathing of a huge lung, with the water as the animating oxygen. And in flood season, getting out on the water is a privilege. Drifting languidly past a bathing elephant is a cliché, but at the heart of every cliché is a truth, and until you’ve drifted languidly past a bathing elephant, you can’t appreciate just how special it feels. I was cynical, now I’m converted! I wasn’t drifting in total silence (see above) but I closed my eyes and really listened: not a single human-made sound (except possibly the clinking of ice in my gin & tonic). Where have you been lately where you can completely escape human sound? To see the Delta from the water gave me a sense of the braiding of the waters, how those subtle elevation changes shape the shifting river. It was Heraclitus who said “No-one enters the same river twice”, and that’s especially true of the Okavango. Earth tremors are continuously shifting the sands and redirecting the waters from one year to the next. So, the limpid flow I was in, gently swaying the grasses and water lilies, may well not exist in a year: I made sure to enjoy it whilst I could. One smell dominates my memory of the Delta: wild sage. In the same way that the scent of wild garlic crushed underfoot in a UK woodland is a stronger, more vital version of kitchen garlic, wild sage is brighter and sharper on the nose than the cooking herb. There are huge patches of wild sage, so the fresh, herbaceous, minerally scent was a frequent companion on my travels through the Delta. Other smells passed across my palette: the unmistakably bovine pungency of buffalo, the petrichor-like musk of the damp soil at dusk, and the occasional taste of corruption in the air as a nearby (usually unseen) animal carcass performed its function as a buffet for those unfancied creatures like carrion beetles: unfancied yet without which the ecosystem would grind to a halt. Circle of life and all that!
Sightings on the Delta
I split my time between the Selinda Spillway and the Xudum (Kudum) Concession in the south. Xudum may be a familiar name as the Xudum Pride of lions was one of the stars of the Big Cat 24/7 series filmed here. There’s nothing better to keep you in your place than meeting a lion cub that already has more Instagram followers than you can ever hope to achieve! The landscape really changed as I moved south from the Selinda to Xudum. On the spillway, it was tight and close, a mix of woodland, small plains and frequent islands, somewhere where the horizon feels quite near. Moving south, it uncurled like a loosening fist; the woods disappeared, the plains stretched out (Theresa May would take hours to cross some of them on foot), the islands grew in size, their shores fringed with trees, including the iconic tall palms. The horizon pushed back, the sky grew. The water continued to play tricks, deep enough in places to come pouring through the Land Cruiser, but then absent for wide stretches of floodplain. The waters were still rising, so perhaps in a few weeks those wide stretches will be more flood than plain. I feel lucky to have seen these two sides of the Delta: I have more of an appreciation of just what a varied landscape this is.That landscape is primarily thanks to three animals. Hippos for forging water channels as they move around, allowing the floods to spread across the plains and opening the way for other species to follow them. Elephants for (amongst other things) not digesting their food very well: thus a seed consumed from a tree is excreted, undigested and ready to germinate, often many kilometres away, ensuring the diversity of the ecosystem. The final animal I’m not sure you’d ever guess unless you knew it. A clue: you’d need approximately two million of them to equal the weight of one elephant. The humble termite. To paraphrase a little, in the beginning there was sand. A vast plain of flat, featureless sand, shaken to a level surface by the aforementioned earth tremors. Then along came the termites, building their termite mounds: sturdy things that take up to eight years to complete and can survive, proud towers rising metres above the ground, for over a hundred years. As the floodwaters swirled around the termite mounds, they slowed and deposited sand against the edges of the mounds. Those islets became islands, watered annually by the floods and seeded by passing birds. They held back the floodwaters, allowing pools to form and nutrients to be retained by the earth. Trees and bushes grew on the islands, and so an attractive habit for animals was born. What a reflection to finish on, that this epic, fecund, wild, vivacious Eden is all thanks to an insect about the size of your thumbnail. It’s like great oaks coming from tiny acorns, but on a global, visible-from-space scale and I love that."Andy, HA Founder
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Andy’s journey through Botswana was carefully planned by our very own Botswana expert, Kirsty. She knows the Delta inside out and brings her love of the region to every holiday she designs. If Andy’s reflections have got you picturing yourself drifting past elephants or listening to the chorus of reed frogs at night, why not get in touch with Kirsty? She’ll chat through what matters most to you and start shaping a Botswana adventure that’s yours and yours alone.
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