The Okavango is the second river

The water in the Okavango Delta in July did not fall in Botswana. It fell in the Angolan highlands the previous January, on a plateau six months of slow geography away. By the time it reaches the Delta the rains are over, the rest of southern Africa is brown and cracked, and the Okavango is at flood. It is the only place on the continent where the dry season is also the wet one.

This single fact decides everything about a safari there.

What the flood actually looks like

We took a mokoro out at first light in late August. A mokoro is a dugout canoe, originally cut from a single sausage tree trunk, now usually fibreglass for the trees' sake. The poler stands at the back. You sit at the front, low enough that the water is at eye level.

The lily pads opened as the sun came up. There is a smell to the Delta water in the morning that we have never been able to describe properly. Slightly sweet. Slightly green. Cold even in summer. The papyrus walls on either side of the channel are taller than the boat. Hippos somewhere in the reeds, maybe close, maybe two channels over. The poler reads the depth with a long stick and does not speak.

The thing that surprises every guest the first time is how slow the Delta is. There are no rapids, no current you can feel. The water seeps. From the Angolan source the river drops only about sixty metres of altitude across more than a thousand kilometres before it spreads across the Kalahari and stops. There is no outlet. The Delta is a place where a river arrives, opens out across the sand, and ends.

Why the wildlife concentrates

The water is also the reason you go.

In the months before the flood arrives, Botswana's vegetation is at its driest. The pans have dried up. The bush is open. By June the Delta begins to fill, and the animals that have been spread across the wider landscape concentrate on the edge of the new water. Elephants come for the grass. Zebra and impala come for the drink. The predators follow.

The result, in July, August, and September, is the highest density of large mammals you can see in southern Africa. We have watched four lionesses take down a buffalo in a wet channel from twenty metres away. Wild dog packs run the floodplain edges chasing impala. Leopards come down from the islands at dusk. Elephants swim the channels in pods, the youngest babies held by trunk.

Mokoro, drive, walk, fly

The four ways of moving through the Delta each see a different version of it.

A mokoro shows you the water at the smallest scale. Frog calls, the sound of a sitatunga moving through reeds, the way the lily roots come up from the bottom. You will not see big game from a mokoro often. That is not the point. The point is the silence and the water level and the heron at the next bend.

A vehicle shows you the islands. Most of the Delta is a mosaic of permanent and seasonal water, broken up by tree-covered islands of varying size. The lodges sit on the larger ones. The drives cross between them on hardened tracks and through shallow flooded crossings, water sometimes high enough that the vehicle's exhaust gargles through it. This is where most of the predator viewing happens.

A walking safari shows you the small things. We walked with a guide in the Selinda Reserve last September and spent forty minutes on the tracks of a single hyena, learning to read whether it had been hunting, drinking, or moving with intent. We saw nothing larger than a steenbok all morning and finished the walk understanding the bush better than two days of vehicle drives could teach us.

A scenic flight shows you the Delta as a whole. From a small Cessna at three thousand feet the water is a fan of channels and islands shaped exactly like a hand pressed into wet clay. Most internal transfers between lodges are by light aircraft, and the flights themselves are part of the safari. Ask for a window seat on every leg.

When to go

The flood arrives in May and peaks somewhere between July and September depending on rainfall in Angola. This is the high season for a reason: the water is high, the bush is open, the wildlife is concentrated, and the days are mild and dry. Mornings can be cold enough for a fleece in July. Afternoons are warm.

October and November are the shoulder. The water has begun to recede and the heat builds. By mid-October temperatures hit the high thirties Celsius. The wildlife is still good but the comfort window is shorter.

December to March is the green season. The Angolan rains are happening but they have not arrived yet, the local rains are happening locally, and the Delta is at its lowest while paradoxically the surrounding bush is at its lushest. Many lodges close or run reduced operations. Prices drop. Birding is at its peak.

We send most first-timers in July or August. We send returning guests in October for the heat and the leopard activity, or in March for the green and the price.

What it actually feels like

The thing nobody tells you about the Okavango is how quiet it is.

There are no towns. There are no other vehicles outside your own concession. At night the camp generators go off after dinner and the dark is total. We have stood outside the tent at midnight with no sound at all except a hippo grunting somewhere down the channel and a scops owl two trees over, and remembered that this is what most of the world sounded like, most of the time, until very recently.

The Delta is the second river. It begins in another country, six months earlier, and it ends in the sand. The thing it leaves behind, every dry season, is one of the last places where you can hear what we used to hear.

The bush has been expecting you.