While lots of the camps in the Delta are upmarket, there are some great community-based rough camping options. You just pitch up on an island with locals as polers and guides, and share this natural wonder with its elephants, hippos, eagles, tiny frogs and dark camp nights with a million stars. It's an assault on all your senses and as far from city life as you can get.
Etsha, on the west road, is a string of small, friendly villages set up by former Angolan refugees, and the community trust runs trips of as many days as you want to stunningly beautiful locations away from any car, plane or motorboat. Our Etsha guides knew everything there was to know about the place and how best to experience it. We went from Guma Lagoon camp, 11km off the metal road, but there are other places to be picked up or to get help arranging things.
Etsha Villages midway on the road between Caprivi and Maun. Easily reached too from Namibia.
guma-lagoon.com/
www.botswana-tourism.gov.bw/travel_agents/travel_agents.html
Loved the managers Jack and Eve.
Great flight over the Okavango and mokoro trip.
Thanks to Jody for arranging the flights to Chobe safari lodge afterwards.
Oddballs camp is a camp in the Okavango Delta with great mokoro trips.
It is seen as a budget option for the Okavango.
Loved Dumela Botswana that arranged the trip.
www.dumelabotswana.com/oddballscamp.htm
jody@dumelabotswana.com
Floating along in a dugout canoe, you could almost drop off but every now and then a hippo pops up out of the water nearby, snorts and wakes you up. As well as scary big hippos you'll see crocodiles, elephants, you might see a lion (you'll definitely hear them hunting at night if you camp near the river), buffalo, wildebeest, lots of antelope, honey badgers ... it's been a few years but it was properly wild when I went.
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