Travel to Nxai

a range of subtle and specialist safari experiences

At around 2650 square kilometres, Nxai Pan National Park is a substantial conservation area, situated on the north side of the main Maun to Nata road in the north of Botswana.

Across the road to the south lies the much larger Makgadikgadi National Park, the two reserves lying at the heart of an enormous conservation area.

Nxai is a vast, arid and relentlessly flat landscape of Kalahari bushveld. At first sight the area may appear to be of little interest, but it is actually a very subtle and surprisingly interesting place.

The area features three very important networks of salt pans and a number of very remote and impressive baobab groves.

These serve as major landmarks for the hardy dry season residents and the larger herds that migrate through the area at either end of the green season.

If you are planning a longer safari in Botswana, including three or more camps, then you choose to include Nxai to provide variation and contrast.

However, we far more commonly include the nearby Makgadikgadi area, due to the wider range of activities and more predictable wildlife movements.

Seasonality

The Nxai area has converse seasons to the main safari areas of the Okavango Delta and Linyanti Waterfront.

Wildlife highlights during the May-Oct dry season include desert specialists, whilst during the converse green season large migration herds pass through.

The Jun-Oct dry season offers a very subtle desert experience, when the pans are dry and the migratory animals have departed, leaving behind a relatively sparse population of desert specialists to struggle through the dry winter months, including ostriches, springboks, aardvarks, brown hyenas and black-maned lions.

The Nov-May green season brings rich wildlife viewing, as these critical pans fill with rainwater and attract in the migrating herds of zebras, wildebeest and giraffes, along with an unusual range of predators including cheetahs, leopards, spotted hyenas and aardwolves. However, the timing of these wildlife movements is famously unpredictable in Nxai, far more so than in the larger Makgadikgadi area to the south, where the herds tend to linger whilst calving.

During the May-Jun transition season, temperatures can drop towards freezing during the night.

During the Oct-Nov transition, temperatures and humidities can become uncomfortably high in advance of the rains.

Getting there

The camp in this area is usually accessed by light aircraft into the small bush airstrip.

There are daily flights to and from the main airport at Maun, for connections to camps throughout the Okavango Delta and Linyanti Waterfront areas, as well as long haul flights to Johannesburg.

It is also possible to access the camp by private road transfer from Maun, a journey of around 4-5 hours.

converse seasons to Okavango and Linyanti