March-April 2024

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Giant animals and endless flat landscapes.​

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Botswana has built a deliberate reputation as the world's premier luxury safari destination, with plenty of uber-expensive lodges where guides point out the animals to you and your dinner can cost more than an entire local family earns in a month.

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Yawn.

 

But plan carefully, and there are some amazing cheap or even free adventures to have here, no guide required.

 

We entered Botswana with our self-sufficient 4x4 truck as part of our Coast2Coast2Coast Africa Overland Expedition, determined to camp and avoid the luxury tourist infrastructure. What we found was a mix of epic nature, woefully underpaid tourism workers, and generally indifferent and at times aloof locals. Even though we were camping, sleeping in the dirt, spending days without showering and weeks without laundry, it felt difficult to ignore the way locals watched us with a mix of curiosity and resentment. We may be minimalists by our own standard, but having a car makes us seem super rich by local standards. Most tourists come into this odd country and pay $500 USD/night or more to stay in a lodge, where local workers might earn only $5 USD per day! It's easy to understand the resentment. Maun, a well-regarded city among the international travel community, was quite a letdown to me, with no downtown, endless steakhouses and luxury lodges, and locals living in mud and squallor and barbed wire. Sorry, but it's not honest to glorify every aspect of travel!

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Needless to say, some locals were absolutely incredible. We had many fun card games, conversations, and exchanges with locals in Gaborone and the Khwai area especially.

 

We had tons of scorpions crawling around our campsite in Maun. There was a leopard and hyenas and plenty of hippos in Khwai, right in our camp, no fences or guides around. And let's not forget the meerkats of Gweta, along with snakes, bush babies, giant water beetles, and some of the world's best birding.

 

We skipped Chobe and Moremi, due to high fees and reports that wildlife populations are actually higher outside these parks, such as in Khwai.

 

Memorably, we watched a sunset in Kasane sitting outside our vehicle and when we got in our car to leave, we noticed two lionesses with three cubs had been watching us, 100 feet away, the whole time! We certainly could have been killed, as attacks by lions, elephants and leopards are regular occurences in this wild nation.

 

My advice? Plan your trip carefully, and don't be afraid to ignore all the places that everyone else goes to and pays a fortune. Ignore most of the towns - the vast savannahs and deserts are the African paradise you're probably already dreaming of.

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