Botswana · pans and reserve

Makgadikgadi and Moremi

The Makgadikgadi and Moremi are the two ends of Botswana's range. One is the arid east: salt pans and pale, flat grassland, and the Boteti, the river along their edge where the pans' zebra and wildebeest drink in the dry months. The other is the wet north-west: Moremi, inside the Okavango Delta, forest and floodplain with a lagoon at the end of the drive. Nothing in between resembles either, and that is why they go together: two Botswanas with nothing in common but the flight between them.

On the pans leg you sleep by the river, not on the salt: a lodge on the Boteti's west bank, the national park on the far bank, and the game drives over there. The salt pans themselves are a day out, or on the longer route a night on them under the open sky in the June-to-October dry season. Moremi is the same Xakanaxa ground the other routes use, and you fly to it: out of the window flat pale country, then trees, then water.

The Makgadikgadi

Moremi Game Reserve

The line marks the order, not a flight path: the pans' edge, then the reserve.

The route, leg by leg

On every routeMoremi Game Reserve

S 19°10′ · E 23°10′

The delta's protected eastern side: game drives in close country and, at many camps, a mokoro or a motorboat as well.

About Moremi Game Reserve

Two guests in armchairs by a small fire at dusk, a drinks table and a man in khaki walking by a flooded riverbank

The Makgadikgadi

S 20°36′ · E 24°47′

The Makgadikgadi is salt pan and pale grassland in Botswana's east, south-east of Maun, with the Boteti River along the national park's western edge. Every route we sell there sleeps on the river bank, and the driving is in the park on the far side, reached by boat.

Why add it

What the pans add is range. After Moremi's forest and water they are open, dry and one colour to the horizon, and the cast changes with the ground: the dry months bring the pans' zebra and wildebeest to the Boteti to drink, and lion, cheetah and hyena, brown as well as spotted, hunt that frontage. Midday is for a hide let into the bank, your eyes level with the water and the animals close enough to hear them drink.

What you'll see

Zebra and wildebeest on the Boteti through the dry months, with lion and cheetah on the same stretch
The riverbank hide, elephant and giraffe drinking a few paces away
A short night drive on private ground by the lodge, once the park's day rules have closed it
On the longer route, a day at Nxai Pan or a night on the salt pans, June to October

The dry leg · game drives across the river in the park, the hide at midday, before or after the reserve

The packages