Where Moremi sits

Inside the Okavango, not beside it.

Yes, Moremi is in the Okavango Delta — it is the delta's heart, not its neighbour. The reserve covers close to five thousand square kilometres of the delta's eastern side, roughly a third of the whole, and it is the one part of the Okavango under formal protection; everything around it is private concession or community land, the same water traversed differently. So the question is never "Moremi or the Okavango" but which part of the Okavango: the reserve, with its public areas and its camps inside the boundary, or a concession beyond it, where a single operator holds the ground and sets the rules. Both are the delta.

Botswana's other names sit at clear distances. Chobe and the Savuti are a short flight north-east, across the Mababe country that lies between; the Makgadikgadi pans are south-east, on the far side of Maun. Maun itself, the reserve's gateway and the delta's light-aircraft hub, is a short flight south-west — and for nearly everyone it is where the journey changes from an airliner to a light aircraft.

Different kinds of place, not better and worse.

Chobe is a river; Moremi is forest, floodplain and lagoon — and that difference decides more than any ranking could. At Chobe the river is the safari: elephant in their hundreds at the water in the late dry season, days that run by boat as much as by vehicle, lodges strung along the riverfront and reached by road from Kasane's airport, with Victoria Falls a morning's drive away. In Moremi the country is closer and more varied — mopane woodland, open floodplain, the edge of a lagoon inside one morning's drive — the camps are small and scattered and reached by light aircraft, and at many of them a mokoro or a boat is part of the day as well as a vehicle. Neither is the better safari. They ask different things of a trip.

So which fits? If your dates are fixed to the winter months and the water is the point — mokoro mornings, a lagoon camp, the delta at full stretch — Moremi answers the trip, and a concession beyond it may answer it too. If a short safari has to be folded into a Victoria Falls trip, if you would rather not fly in light aircraft, or if the elephant spectacle at the water is the picture you carry, Chobe answers it better, plainly, and its riverfront is a simpler trip to reach.

Both, in the right order.

For a great many first trips to Botswana the honest answer is both, sequenced. Chobe's riverfront first, Moremi as the second act, with the two one light-aircraft flight apart — or, on a guided mobile safari, the Mababe and the Savuti in between as part of the trip rather than a gap in it. A week to ten days takes in both without hurry; a week alone is better spent on one.

Water at the centre, dry land at the rim.

Where you base yourself decides which Moremi you get. The eastern edges are solid ground — Khwai's river country in the north-east, the Mopane Tongue's woodland — where drives run in every month and the camps are at every level; push further in and the ground gives out at Xakanaxa's lagoons, until Chief's Island stands surrounded by water at the heart. Water camp or land camp, reachable or remote, is the choice that shapes the whole trip, and each of the four areas has its own read.