Botswana safaris. One country, known completely.
Botswana is the only country we plan. Everything from a mobile camp under canvas to a house you take over entirely, put together by people who have slept in the places they send you.
Everything on this site, somebody here has actually seen.
The Delta when the flood is up. Elephant coming down to the Chobe at dusk. The Makgadikgadi with no horizon in it, and the black-maned lions of the Central Kalahari. These are the places our team moves through in an ordinary working year, which is why we can tell you what a camp is like this season rather than what it was like when somebody wrote the brochure.
Botswana has run its tourism on a high-value, low-impact model for decades. Fewer visitors, smaller camps, more ground left alone. What that means in practice is that the country has a limited number of beds, most of the best land sits under private concession, and getting into the right camp in the right month usually comes down to who you know there.
Four ways to travel the same country.
What changes between them is where you sleep and how you get between places. The planning, the guides and the person you can call at three in the morning are the same whichever one you pick.
What comes with every journey, at every price.
The same person throughout
One Travel Designer from the first conversation to the call after you get home. They have travelled the routes they are selling you and slept in the camps they suggest, so you can ask them what the beds are actually like.
What is quoted is what is paid
Park and concession fees, internal flights and transfers, game activities, accommodation, meals, laundry, drinking water, and every gratuity to guides, trackers, camp staff and drivers. Nothing is added at the end.
We own no camps
An operator that owns property has beds to fill, and that shows up in the advice you get. We own none, so when we tell you a camp is not worth its rate this year there is nothing behind it.
A Safari Host on Signature and Grand
Someone who meets you at Maun or Kasane and stays with you: transfers, check-ins, flights, the dietary note that has to reach the next camp. You mostly notice them on the day something goes wrong and nothing appears to.
Someone awake in Maun
A duty manager on the phone at any hour, on WhatsApp if that is easier. Charter delays, weather, a health question at two in the morning, a charger left behind two camps ago.
The small things
Binoculars sized for smaller hands. A bean bag already in the vehicle if you shoot. The anniversary nobody told us about, handled quietly with the camp beforehand. None of it appears on the invoice.
Three, to give you the shape of it.
Each of these is a private departure and can start any day of the year. Think of them as a shape rather than a package. Almost nobody travels one exactly as written.
The water that floods the Delta in July fell as rain in Angola in January. It arrives six months late, in the middle of the dry season, across a thousand kilometres of sand.The Okavango flood
What travelling with us is like.
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Every safari we sell pays for a year of school.
For each journey booked, we cover a year of secondary schooling for a Motswana child from one of the communities bordering the areas our guests travel through. It is attached to your booking rather than to a general fund, which means we can tell you whose year it paid for, and we write to you once a year to do exactly that.
Tell us what you want this journey to feel like.
Not just what you want to see. Send a few lines about who is travelling and roughly when, and we will come back to you with something written for you rather than pulled off a shelf.