The Next Small Thing

The biggest new trend for adventure travel? Microcamps.

- Mark Ellwood

NORTH ISLAND, OR Xuxuga, sits in one of Botswana’s prime safari locations, right at the top of the panhandle. The waters of the Okavango Delta slosh through year-round, making the soil rich and damp; riverine forests edge the island, while plush grassland covers the interior of its 122,215 hectares. These natural assets keep it teeming with game, especially predators such as leopards, cheetahs and lions. Each year, 18,000 or so elephants trample through, following a corridor that stretches up to Angola, and the area’s waters are consistent enough that mokoro trips—silent glides along the Delta in the local canoe-style boat, spying more than 450 different bird species—are also a staple.

No wonder that luxe-safari operator Natural Selection, a Botswana specialist, eyed this as the site for the latest of 13 camps it operates in the country. But this newest addition is radically different from the traditional expedition template. North Island Okavango, which recently opened with just three rooms (a fourth and final villa arrives early next year) is a microcamp.

“We could have built a 12-room camp,” co-founder Dave van Smeerdijk tells