Nkasa Linyanti

an extraordinary conservation success, eight years in the making

Nkasa Linyanti is located on Nkasa Island within the 30,000 hectare Nkasa Rupara National Park in the Zambezi Region of northeast Namibia, the country’s far northeastern corner that pushes deep into Botswana, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

Nkasa Linyanti is a Natural Selection property, one of a portfolio of camps that we have been working with closely for many years, across both Namibia and Botswana. It opened in May 2026 and sits on a 5,000 hectare exclusive concession that takes up the whole of Nkasa Island, with no other camps in the park.

What makes this one genuinely interesting, even by Natural Selection’s standards, is the conservation story behind it. The wider area sits at the heart of the KAZA (Kavango-Zambezi) Transfrontier Conservation Area, the five-country block (Botswana, Namibia, Angola, Zambia, Zimbabwe) created to reopen the ancient elephant migration corridors that decades of civil war and instability had effectively closed.

Eight years ago aerial counts in the park recorded around 80 elephant carcasses and almost no live wildlife. Through a long-running partnership with three local conservancies the park has been transformed. Today the resident wildlife includes a strong lion population, healthy leopard and wild dog numbers, exceptional red lechwe and impala, more reliable sitatunga sightings than the Okavango itself, and the full Okavango bird spectrum.

The camp is centred on a main area combining lounge, bar, dining terrace and swimming pool, with a fire pit for evenings and an outdoor dining setting along the riverbank. The style is traditional safari camp but well finished.

Rooms

The camp itself has 6 tents (two doubles, four singles), each raised on stilts above the floodplain with views across to the water.

Activities

Nkasa Linyanti provides the following guided activities …

• Vehicle safari
• Night vehicle safari
• Walking safari
• Boat safari (water levels permitting)
• Mokoro (water levels permitting)
• Community and cultural visits (the Sangwali villages, partners in the conservation project)

The camp sits between the two rivers, with Botswana visible across the Linyanti to the south. The island itself combines two quite different habitats: wetlands and floodplains on one side and open savanna on the other. This is a useful contrast to the Botswana Linyanti, which is more uniformly wooded.

Private guide and private vehicle bookings are available.

The Mudumu and Mamili areas feature relatively rarely in trips, since epic self-drive trips are inherently not for everyone.

The usual stay duration is 3 nights.

Seasonality

The wildlife viewing in Mudumu and Mamili is usually strongest during the Jul-Oct dry season, but there are very good reasons during other months.

Getting there

Access is usually by self-drive vehicle on the long traverse between Namibia and the Victoria Falls, or vice versa.

accessed by road along the Caprivi Strip