11 September 2025
We travel south today and cross the border into Botswana. Our destination is the small city of Maun at the southern edge of the magnificent UNESCO World Heritage-listed Okavango Delta, the largest inland delta on earth.
Our border crossing into Botswana was relatively painless today (although we had been warned to expect much worse). They do a customs check on entering Botswana – particularly checking for fruit.
Now we have a long drive (387 km) south to Maun – the gateway to the Okavamgo Delta. The roads are sealed but we are warned that they are full of potholes. Time will tell if they rival those we experienced in Madagascar. Wian jokes that elephant could bath in these potholes – in Madagascar they quite literally could (if there were elephants there). There are also lots of 60kph zones that are policed quite strictly so it will be slow going.
Wild donkeys are everywhere in Botswana – apparently another group stopped counting at 250 spotted on the side of the road. We gave up after seeing a dozen in the first minute!
The roads are narrower and less well formed but other than that (and the donkeys and donkey carts) there is no perceivable difference from life in Namibia (at least at this stage). There are the same issues with livestock on the road.
There is a long stretch of road that was started 3 years ago and then they just stopped. Patches are still quite good but others not so much. The worst is where the drop off to the side is too deep that you can’t go off to the side. Often the sand is too loose to drive on anyway. Sometimes the paved bit is too narrow for vehicles and potholes have formed everywhere that you can’t avoid.
We stopped under a tree for a picnic lunch. Road improved markedly after that. We are driving around the Okavango Delta. We see where the river has gone deep underground to the Kalahari desert.
Most people will have heard of the ‘Big Five’ African animals: the lion, leopard, rhinoceros, elephant and Cape buffalo. The term was originally coined by big-game hunters who considered these five to be the most difficult and dangerous animals to hunt on foot. Today, it is widely used by tourists to describe the most sought-after animals to see on an African safari.
We saw Marabou storks flying but not close enough to photograph. It is exciting because this is the last of the ‘Ugly Five’. The “Ugly Five” of Africa are the warthog, hyena, marabou stork, vulture, and wildebeest, given this nickname because of their unusual or less conventionally “attractive” appearance.
My previous knowledge of Botswana so far comes from Alexander McCall Smith’s No 1 Ladies Detective Agency series, except of course for my zoology studies and numerous documentaries on the Okavango Delta. I did a bit more investigation:
Botswana, officially the Republic of Botswana, is a landlocked country in Southern Africa. Botswana is topographically flat, with approximately 70% of its territory being a part of the Kalahari Desert. It is bordered by South Africa to the south and southeast, Namibia to the west and north, Zambia to the north, and Zimbabwe to the northeast. With a population of slightly over 2.4 million people and a comparable land area to France, Botswana is one of the most sparsely populated countries in the world. It is essentially the nation-state of the Tswana people, who constitute nearly 80% of the population and descended mainly from Bantu tribes who migrated into southern Africa.
Botswana’s economy has generally experienced stable growth since independence from the United Kingdom in 1966. It is dominated by tourism and mining; Botswana produces more diamonds than any other country. Its gross national income per capita of about $20,158 as of 2024 (by some estimates the fourth-largest in Africa) gives the country a relatively high standard of living and the second-highest Human Development Index of continental Sub-Saharan Africa, after South Africa. Despite this, Botswana continues to grapple with high unemployment rates.
We arrive at our hotel in Maun to discover that there is another conference here, complete with marquees. We go for a walk around the hotel grounds and then across the river to a shopping centre. Then there is time for a bit of a rest and sort some photos before dinner at the restaurant. It is a lot nicer that it seemed from the outside with a thatched hut feel, and even a chap singing old fashioned songs.
Leave a Reply