Travel in Botswana: a delta reached by air and by mokoro

How visitors reach the north and the delta

Botswana's tourism runs on two northern towns. The World Travel Guide describes Gaborone, the capital in the south-east, as where many international visitors begin, with Maun and Kasane as the places travellers continue to, Maun for the Okavango Delta and Kasane for Chobe. The Botswana Tourism Organisation describes Kasane as the entrance to Chobe National Park and a point of departure for the Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe, Livingstone in Zambia and the Caprivi Strip of Namibia. The Kazungula Bridge, which the US Commercial Service guide of December 2025 lists among the country's assets, links Botswana and Zambia across the Zambezi.

Inside the delta, distance is measured in water. UNESCO's statement for the property records that tourism in the inner delta is limited to small, temporary tented camps with access by air, monitored for environmental standards, and Wikipedia's article on the delta says the region has been run on a high-cost, low-volume model meant to limit damage while raising spending per visitor. A UNESCO report of 2014 counted 2,129 tourist beds in the area, and in 2017 the delta received 52,638 visitors, 43,363 of them from abroad.

Accommodation runs from hotels, luxury lodges and safari camps to budget guesthouses and public camping grounds, in Wikipedia's tourism article, and the main tourist areas have both private lodges and public campsites. Restaurants serve game meat and local dishes as well as continental and Asian food; the local staples, seswaa and bogobe, are described in the culture article.

The record beside this article gives left-hand traffic, and Air Botswana flies domestic and regional routes in Wikipedia's account. Botswana Railways carries freight for the mining sector and also runs passenger trains.

When to go and what the seasons do

The year has two halves, and the delta runs against both of them. Britannica gives summer as October to March, with almost all the rain falling in storms between December and March and temperatures reaching about 34 °C in the far north and south-west, and winter as April to September, with frequent frost at night. Wikipedia's article on the delta describes December to February as hot and wet, with daytime highs that can reach 40 °C, and October as the hardest month for visitors, often above 40 °C and only occasionally broken by a cloudburst.

The flood comes in winter. Rain falls on the Angolan highlands in January and February, reaches the delta about a month later and spreads across it from March to June; levels peak between June and August, when the delta swells to about three times its permanent size and animals gather from the surrounding dry country. UNESCO names June and July as the peak of the dry season and the arrival of the floodwater as the trigger for the large herds of elephant, buffalo, red lechwe and zebra. Nights in the delta can drop close to freezing in that season. Wikipedia's tourism article describes the delta in the rainy season as a maze of waterways, islands and lakes. Elsewhere the end of winter brings wind: Britannica describes a windy season from about late August to early October, when the winds carry Kalahari dust and announce the summer. The same account notes that malaria, bilharzia and sleeping sickness are limited in most of the country by the dry environment and the lack of surface water.

What the Okavango and Chobe offer

The mokoro is the local boat. The Botswana Tourism Organisation describes it as a canoe used in the shallow waters of the delta, with the poler standing in the stern, and traditionally dug out from the trunk of a large straight tree such as ebony or kigelia. Other ways in are game drives, walking safaris, scenic flights and fishing, all listed in Wikipedia's article on the delta, which dates modern safari tourism there from the first camps built in the late 1960s.

About 40% of the World Heritage property lies inside the Moremi Game Reserve, on the eastern side of the delta, and the rest is divided into Wildlife Management Areas and controlled hunting areas run by community trusts or concession holders. Wikipedia's tourism article records complaints from the villages of Khwai, Mababe and Sankoyo that the reserve's resources have been dominated by international visitors and foreign companies, and describes many facilities as enclave tourism that brings little activity to the surrounding area.

Chobe National Park, in the north, is the country's first national park, in Wikipedia's account. The World Travel Guide singles out its "famed elephant herds", and UNESCO's statement of 2014 puts the national elephant population at around 130,000. Wikipedia's article on the delta records that rhinoceroses were moved out of the northern delta after poachers killed 92 between 2020 and 2021.

Where the Kalahari reserves lie

The south and centre are reserve country of a different kind. The Central Kalahari Game Reserve, established in 1961, covers 52,800 square kilometres, with giraffe, brown hyena, cheetah, wild dog, leopard, lion, gemsbok, kudu and red hartebeest among its wildlife in Wikipedia's tourism article. The removal of San communities from the reserve from 1995 remains a matter of record and dispute, and after the change of government in 2024 a San man whom the previous government had refused burial there was buried inside it, according to the BTI.

The Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park joins Botswana's Gemsbok National Park with South Africa's Kalahari Gemsbok National Park. Wikipedia gives the total area as 38,000 square kilometres, about three-quarters of it in Botswana. In the north-centre lie the Makgadikgadi Pans, Nxai Pan among them, salt flats whose eastern side the Nata River floods each year, according to Britannica.

Which places carry the country's history

Tsodilo, near the Namibian border in the Okavango sub-district, is a small group of quartzite hills rising from old dunes on one side and a dry lake bed on the other. It was inscribed on the World Heritage List in 2001 for over 4,500 rock paintings in an area of about 10 square kilometres. UNESCO's statement notes that compulsory guided tours have kept vandalism and graffiti to limited reports despite rising visitor numbers, and that the Hambukushu and San communities revere the hills and their water holes as a sacred landscape.

Several towns of the east carry the Tswana states' past. The Botswana Tourism Organisation describes Old Palapye as a site with artefacts from the Middle Stone Age, the Late Stone Age and the Early Iron Age, and as the capital of the Bangwato under Khama III from 1889 to 1902. Serowe, where Seretse Khama was born in 1921, holds the royal cemetery on the hill where he was buried in 1980, and the writer Bessie Head lived there and set her best-known novels in it. Kolobeng was the site of David Livingstone's mission from 1845. Mochudi, settled by the Kgatla in 1887, lies near Lowe, the place where Tswana tradition says the first people emerged from the earth.

Gaborone itself is young. It was built on crown land and declared the capital in 1965, and Britannica records a national museum and art gallery there. Wikipedia's country article lists the Gaborone Dam, the Mokolodi Nature Reserve, the Gaborone Yacht Club and golf courses among the attractions near the capital. In the north-west, the basket-weaving villages of Etsha and Gumare are a stop for visitors interested in crafts; Etsha was settled in the late 1960s and early 1970s by more than 4,000 Hambukushu refugees from Angola, according to Wikipedia's article on the delta.

What visitors need to know before arriving

Entry rules are set by Botswana and summarised for British citizens by the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office. A passport must be valid for at least six months after arrival and have three blank pages, and must be stamped on entry, since an unstamped passport raises suspicion of illegal entry. Holders of British passports may visit for up to 90 days without a visa. Children aged 17 or under must travel with an original or certified full birth certificate, and an absent parent must sign an affidavit of consent. Travellers from countries with a risk of yellow fever must show a vaccination certificate, and cash of 10,000 pula or more must be declared. Regional rules differ: the BTI records that citizens of Botswana and Namibia can cross between the two countries on an identity card.

Practical facts come from the record and the sources. The currency is the pula. Clocks keep Central Africa Time, two hours ahead of UTC, and Wikipedia's article on time in Botswana records the zone in use since 1903 with summer time tried only once, in 1943 and 1944. Plugs follow the British BS 1363 and older BS 546 patterns at 230 volts, according to the record. The common greeting is dumela, in the World Travel Guide.

Public holidays cluster around two dates. Independence Day falls on 30 September and the Botswana Day holiday on 1 October, and Sir Seretse Khama Day is kept on 1 July, followed by Presidents' Day later in July; Easter brings Good Friday and Easter Monday, and Ascension Day is also a holiday. The full calendar is on the holidays page.

How tourism is organised and who gains

Wikipedia's tourism article dates the industry's growth to the 1990s, when the end of apartheid stabilised the region, and to a Tourism Policy adopted in 1990 to attract high-spending visitors from Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand. Tourism accounted for 4.5% of formal employment under that policy, with most management posts held by expatriates, and created 23,000 jobs in 2005 by the same article's count. In 1999, 843,314 visitors arrived, more than 720,000 of them from other African countries, and the country had 2,100 hotel rooms with 3,720 beds and an occupancy rate of 53%. Tourism revenue in 2000 came to $313 million. Statistics Botswana counted 407,651 tourist arrivals in the fourth quarter of 2024. Wikipedia's economy article puts tourism at about 13.1% of GDP in 2019 and below 10% by February 2024.

The government has tried to spread the benefit. Community-based natural resource management schemes give villages a stake in wildlife areas, and Wikipedia's economy article gives the Khwai Development Trust in the village of Khwai as an example, though Wikipedia's tourism article notes that a lack of resources and skills has kept many dependent on outside partners. The Rediscover Botswana campaign of 2020 aimed at domestic tourism, and the US Commercial Service guide records a wider effort to add cultural tourism and mid-range options to the high-end safari trade. The Botswana Tourism Organisation lists curio and craft shops in Gaborone, Francistown, Maun and Kasane, and at safari camps in the Okavango and Chobe regions, where the baskets of the north-west and other crafts are sold.