Travel to the Okavango Khwai River

waterhole hides and sleepouts allow the wildlife to come to you

At around 1960 square kilometres, Okavango Khwai is a large private safari area in the extreme northeast corner of the Okavango Delta.

The concession is restricted to just 68 guests in four small camps, around 28 square kilometres per person, which is a very low guest density.

Since 2014, the camps here have worked hard to reverse the damage caused by hunting and poaching, with tracker teams successfully habituating the animals to safari vehicles.

The area has a diverse range of habitats and hosts a similarly wide range of wildlife, including lions, leopards, spotted hyenas, wild-dogs and many elephants.

The southern part of the concession is an absolutely beautiful landscape of seasonal floodplains dotted with islands of hardwood and palm trees, inhabited by abundant wildlife.

Along the rivers there are good numbers of hippos and the occasional crocodile. Grazers include giraffes, zebras, kudus and impalas. It is also a reasonably good area for unusual sightings such as honey-badgers, civets, servals and pangolins. Predators include lions, leopards, spotted hyenas, wild-dogs and lots of elephants.

The savanna wildlife viewing here in Khwai River is perhaps not quite so reliable as some prime concession areas, but there are compensations.

The vast majority of the area is covered by dry mopane forest with occasional waterholes. Historically these forests have been considered no good for safari, but the concession holders here have worked hard to demonstrate that this is not the case. There is a great deal of wildlife in the forest, especially the prodigious numbers of elephants, which will come to you if you sit and wait by water.

A couple of camps to the north, Hyena Pan and Khwai Skybeds, have developed a network of hides around waterholes, where you can wait for the animals to turn up and observe them at close quarters. It’s a very different type of safari, but very rewarding.

The area should not be confused with the Khwai Village Concession, which is a busy public access area to the east, a totally different proposition for safari.

When it comes to trip shapes and durations in Botswana, most visitors combine 2, 3 or 4 lodges by light aircraft over 6-12 nights. When using a camp in the Khwai Concession, we like to combine with another camp further west or south in the Okavango, to provide a more rounded delta experience. This means safaris are already starting to get quite long before you consider including the Linyanti Waterfront and/or Makgadikgadi areas.

These trips are often done in combination with further nights at the Victoria Falls and/or down in the Cape.

The usual stay duration in the Khwai River area is 3-6 nights.

Seasonality

The Khwai River Concession can be visited year round, but wildlife viewing is most reliable during the May-Oct dry season months.

The May-Jun flood season is a period of transition from the hot wet summer to the cool dry winter and is generally considered to be a great time to visit. Temperatures can drop towards freezing during the night, but this has little adverse effect on safari, there are virtually no insects and plenty of baby animals around. The flood in this eastern part of the delta is usually late, unreliable and relatively light, meaning that the camps remain primarily focused on land-based safari during this period. For this reason the area is commonly combined with another wetter concession for boating activities.

The Jul-Sep dry season is the classic time to visit and is generally considered to be the best time for wildlife viewing, as many animals are drawn to the floods which have reached their peak.

The more southerly camps on the Khwai River Concession are able to offer some limited mokoro canoe safari and motorboat safari at this time, although less so in September.

The Oct-Dec hot season is the transition period between the peak of the dry season, when temperatures and humidities can become uncomfortably high in advance of the rains. When the rains do arrive, the animals can disperse suddenly into the vast mopane forests in the north and become much more difficult to access.

Jan-Apr is the main green season in the Okavango Delta, when the area experiences the majority of its rainfall. There are lots of baby animals around and the landscapes are green and beautiful. Conditions prove dramatically through these months, making late March and the whole of April particularly attractive, especially given the often dramatically discounted prices.

Getting there

The camps in the Khwai River Concession are usually by light aircraft into the local bush airstrip, which has daily flight connections with all other camps in Okavango, Linyanti, the main airport at Maun (for connections to Central Kalahari, Nxai, Makgadikgadi and Johannesburg) and north to Kasane (for connections to Livingstone and Victoria Falls).

From the airstrip it is a considerable drive, largely through dense mopane forest, to reach the camp.

Unusually, this area can also be reached by vehicle from Maun in 3-4 hours, which can save a great deal of money, especially for larger groups.

more reliable wildlife during the May-Oct dry season