Botswana: Primal Pleasures

A month spent hopping across some of the most exclusive lodges in the country yields sights to last a lifetime

- Devanshi Mody

Don’t dangle your arm from your jeep,”—this is standard advice on safaris anywhere. In Botswana, it may as well be divine decree. Here, wildlife can get as close as arm’s length. There’s a shoot-to-kill poaching policy. Wildlife is sacred, and abounds on the vast plains, tinkling with rills and rivers, of the lush Okavango Delta, that beauty spot on the Kalahari’s parched visage in the country’s northwest. If perchance you don’t see animals it’s because they aren’t hemmed in fenced reserves but roam freely across the almost 22,870 square kilometres of the delta’s marshlands and seasonal floodplains. Animals that are being tracked can suddenly vanish into the wilderness, or leap over channels severing you off. When you see them, the intensity of action is unprecedented. In Botswana’s camps, safarigoers can live out those wildlife documentaries as they consecrate days to the wild.

TOP OF THE FOOD CHAIN

Chef Herman was refining a six-course, winepaired supper. It was unusual refinement in the wilderness, even if this was Botswana’s poshest camp, Great Plains Conservations’ Duba Plains, and even someone as finical as I could not complain. But animals are more pernickety than myself, I noted. During a signally interesting sighting earlier that day, we spotted a bataleur eagle lunching blithely, until a hefty tawny eagle swooped down and hijacked its meal, which was cursorily inspected and dismissed with disdain. Bat-eared foxes weren’t to its taste.