Botswana is bordered by South Africa in the south, Zambia to the north, Nambia to the west and Zimbabwe to the east. Within its borders are some of the last of Africa's great wildernesses including the Okavango Swamps and the Kalahari desert. Botswana is uncrowded, safe and mostly unspoilt, and there are large numbers and varieties of animals and birds.

The Okavango Delta is created by a river originating in Angola flowing inland into the Kalahari where it is halted by the deep sands of the desert. It forms a delta covering some 10,000 square miles, consisting of lakes, channels and lagoons that shift and change from year to year.

Above is a stitched picture of a view of the Okavango swamps in the early evening from Maun. At the bottom of the picture, partially cropped is a mokoro or dugout canoe; to the right are more modern canoes - used nowadays to prevent the destruction of trees from which mokoros are made. The best and most typical way of viewing the swamps is from a canoe. The channels are not very deep, and the quietness of this mode of transport allows an optimum experience of the bird life and wildlife of the area.

Views from the canoe of various scenes of the swamps.

The bird life in the swamps is prolific, with about 600 species including many rare or unique species. It is thus a birdlovers' paradise, where good photos can be obtained with much patience and good lenses. The left picture is of a flying jacana, the second of a possible egret in flight. The third picture is of a giant kingfisher, and the last of a pair of little bee-eaters.

Sunset over the swamps from the campsite at Maun. Next a mokoro oarsmen and his two sons smoking fish caught from the swamps. Pictures of the village at Maun. Next a picture of the traditional dress of the Herero who are also found in Namibia. The style of dress is an adaption of dresses worn by German missionary women in the 19th century.

On the way to the Victoria falls, there are other wildlife areas of note: the Savuti Channel, the Moremi Game Reserve and Chobe. These pictures were taken in and around Chobe, where there are large numbers of elephants. The antelope is a lechwe.

Travelling northward to Zimbabwe, one crosses the border of Botswana at Kasane, an area where four countries meet: South Africa, Namibia, Botswana and Zimbabwe. After entering Zimbabwe, one does not have to travel too far to reach the Victoria Falls on the Zambezi river.

Okavango
Excerpted from "African Wildlife", Volume 31, No. 5, written by A.C. Campbell.

"The Okavango, third mightiest river in Southern Africa rises in the western highlands of Angola within a few hundred kilometers of the Atlantic. Rapidly plunging eastwards, it snakes out across the northern fringes of the Kalahari for more than a thousand kilometers finally to enter Botswana at Mohembo. During the summer months it flows smoothly between defined banks more than a hundred metres apart, but with the autumn the Okavango's waters rise, swollen by earlier rains in Angola and it reaches above its banks and spreads rapidly over floodplains. Termitaria sprouting palms, figs and leadwood suddenly become little islands in a vast open sheet of water, a moving lake that carries along its own islands of matted living papyrus, broken by the flood from the banks upstream and now drifting with the current, slowly turning the sails of fronds three metres high."

"The river rises relentlessly lifting the living walls of papyrus with it, pushing through huge stands of phragmites until it finally breaks free of its ancient course near the haMbukushu village of Seronga and spills out over the Okavango Delta, a vast complex of twisting waterways, islands, floodplains and lagoons - nearly 15,000 square kilometers in extent. The Delta is shaped like a huge cone, its apex at the exit to the Okavango River. This cone is believed to have been steadily built over a vast period in time by the two million tons of sand and debris that the river brings down from Angola and deposits annually on the floor of the Delta."

"Long ago, where the Delta lies today, was a deep graben, a vast crack in the earth's surface running approximately from the north-east to the south-west. It comes out of Zambia, cuts off the northwest corner of Botswana and enters Namibia reaching nearly to the coast. This is almost certainly an extension of the Great Rift Valley, that vast crack that reaches from the Dead Sea to Central Africa. The shifting sands of the Kalahari and sediment carried down the Okavango have combined not only to fill the crack, perhaps in places more than 300 metres deep, but also to mold that strangle conical surface which fans out from Seronga. To the southeast are two massive faults lying athwart the river's course which show clearly on aerial photographs. The one lies along the eastern bank of the Thamalakane, Mogogelo and Nxhabe Rivers and the other parallel to it and about 25 kilometres to the northwest. The floods, seeping through the reed-beds and across the floodplains are momentarily halted by the first fault, channeled through narrow exits, and allowed to spill onwards to the second. Here they are contained and flow southwest until either they disgorge into the Boteti River or down the Nxhabe into Lake Ngami. Yet less than 3% of the water that spills into the Delta from the Okavango River emerges at the other end to flood either Ngami, or meander through a further 500 kilometres of Kalahari finally to spill into Lake Xau and the Makgadikagi Pans."

"Fingers of sand, long ridges covered by mophane, croton, palm, and many other species of trees reach out from the southeast deep into the Delta. Even when the floods are high it is possible to follow these ridges sometimes crossing flooded melapo to the heart of the swamp. Long ago Bushmen followed them, pushing deeper into permanent water areas and they left behind names filled with clicks, Gcaengca, Qhu, Cidzira, Qo, Xamgxame, Ququa… During recent prehistoric times these were the only people to live in the Delta, although stone tools tell of habitation probably more than 100,000 years before the Bushmen evolved in Africa. The Bushmen lived by hunting, fishing and collecting plant food; some, a very few, still do to this day. About 1750 AD the first of the siNtu-speaking peoples began to filter south towards the Delta poling their dugout canoes down the Magqegana or trekking their cattle through the Mababe plain. These were the baYei, a people whose culture was inextricably inter-woven with the river from whence they had come, the Chobe-Zambezi confluence. Although they kept cattle, tilled the soil and hunted, their main means of livelihood was fishing and collecting river plants. They introduced the dugout canoe to the Delta and to the Bushmen. As at home in a canoe as they were on land, they soon penetrated deep into the Delta fishing with traps, baskets, nets, spears and lines, hunting hippo with harpoons, spearing lechwe in the water and collecting a wide variety of waterplants, particularly lilies with which they supplemented their diet. They cleared lands of the floodplains in autumn and planted in the spring as the floods receded long before the first rains, thus gaining an extended growing season. Fifty years later they were to be attacked and subdued by the baTwana, a Tswana people coming from the southeast, who settled around Kwebe and brought with them herds of cattle which they grazed outside the tsetse limits around the Delta and Lake Ngami. Two more major groups of people were to settle in the Delta area: the first was the haMbukushu, another river people coming from Katimamolilo. They moved across the northern peripherary of the Delta settling in the Kwando and then moving to the Okavango River in about 1850. Coming from the upper Zambezi they were accustomed to deep water. Although fisherman and hunters, their main interest was in agriculture which they practised in the riparian areas. As a result of the colonial wars in Namibia between 1904 and 1906, numbers of ovaHerero fled to Botswana to settle around the western end of Ngami and on the plains to the west of the Thaoge River. Semi-nomadic people, they lived almost entirely off the milk from their large herds of cattle supplemented by a little hunting and wild food collecting; they did not plough at all. They had lost all their cattle when they arrived in Botswana and at first became servants of the baTwana, but by the 1930's they had regained their independence and today are some of the wealthiest cattle-owners in the Delta area."

"It is only during the last 200 years that the Delta has seen agricultural man and his first effect on it must have been minimal. Oral tradition and the writings of the early White travelers give us some idea of the quite incredible wildlife populations that existed around the Delta in the middle of the 19th century. Oswell, Andersson, Galton, Baines, Green, Livingstone and Selous write of vast numbers of animals they saw (and sometimes slaughtered); herds came down to the Boteti River not just in their hundreds, or even thousands, but in tens of thousands. Lake Ngami was a wide stretch of water fringed with huge reed-beds and containing numbers of hippo and crocodile; elephant came down to drink and feed in the reed-beds and buffalo were there in their thousands. This was the edge of the Delta where people were living in quite large numbers. What then must it have been like in the center on Chief's island where there were only a few Bushmen and perhaps a scattering of temporary Yei hunting and fishing camps? Today we can only guess at the numbers of wildlife that must have inhabited the whole Delta area in the past. Another fact that amazed the White travellers was the great variety of wildlife with which they had never before met. It was, and still is, possible to see within sight at one time elephant, buffalo, tsessebe, giraffe, lechwe, reedbuck, hippo, crocodile, baboons, warthog and impala. By stretching credibility slightly, although not out of the realms of possibility, one could add otter, sable, roan, eland, duiker, steenbok, ostrich, wildebeest, zebra and waterbuck. This does not include predators such as lion, leopard, cheetah, wild-dog, hyaena, serval, ratel and so on. Although it is not often that one sees a great variety at once, I have stood on a truck roof on the Khwai River and counted 11 species of animal and four species of large bird apart from numerous small ones. The reason for this wide spectrum of wildlife lies in the habitat itself, and relies much on the fact that dry-land vegetation inter-digitates with wetland providing a unique range of species."