There is not a trophy-hunting dentist in sight. While there's been plenty on this morning game drive in Botswana's Okavango Delta to tempt the trigger-happy, the only shooting has been of the photographic kind. A pack of endangered African hunting dogs eyeing a fierce-looking hippo at a waterhole. Click. A female leopard spreadeagled over a thick limb of a sprawling tree, last night's kudu feast safely stored for further enjoyment in a lofty nook – seen from so close, we can almost smell her meaty breath. Click, click, click.
A newborn giraffe with her umbilical cord still dangling from her midriff. Click, boom! Seriously, how could they? Those whose smirking faces adorn the Facebook feed of all the righteous, and many more besides, who aren't so publicly foolish, but gain some sort of frisson or kudos from murdering wild animals. I don't know whether you need to have been on safari to fully realise how criminal and plain wrong it is to kill a lion, or an elephant, or anything else with a vibrant and occasionally thumping pulse. But it helps.
Our jeep ploughs along a sandy track through the grasslands near &Beyond's Sandibe Lodge. The lodge is situated in a private concession of the Okavango Delta, a 165,000-square-kilometre UNESCO World Heritage-listed floodplain that's a wonderland of channels, islands, woodlands, swamps and lagoons. I'm stupidly and unselfconsciously falling in love with everything, grinning like a stray Cheshire cat.
The smell of wild basil and sage fills my nostrils. I've lost count of the number of times I've exclaimed "Oh wow", and it feels as if the Okavango landscape is being absorbed through my eyes and into my soul by some kind of bodily osmosis. To be honest, it's damned inconvenient to have found my "happy place" in the southern reaches of the Kalahari Desert, and a tad unrealistic, given the kids and career back home. But the soft light of early morning in the Botswanan bush makes one prone to a dreamlike state in which anything is possible.
Mellifluous African voices emanate unseen from somewhere in the floodplain. The sound rises in the mysterious way that "let's go down in the river to pray" wafted through the bayou forest to George Clooney and his fellow escaped convicts in Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?
Actually it's a Sandibe guest's 70th birthday, and they've arranged this "ambush" along with her devoted husband, Andries, as a surprise. Both she and Andries are former South African politicians, very much involved with the transition from apartheid to majority rule. Sandra, who we are now toasting with champagne, was the country's opposition leader before serving as ambassador to the Czech Republic between 2009-2013.
Given their pedigree and that of the other guests accompanying me on this game drive – a madly elegant older French lady and her silver-haired Italian companion – the ambience aboard the jeep and indeed at the lodge could have been rarefied. Yet, from my first meeting with the South Africans at nearby Maun airfield, when Andries apologised to me for his infamous Afrikaner surname and promised they were nothing like "the other Bothas", the atmosphere's been easy-going and full of shared delight.
The mood is set from the moment we arrive at Sandibe Lodge the previous afternoon to a welcome of song, ululations and dancing from beaming staff. It is maintained by an unforced friendliness throughout our stay, from food and beverage manager Aaron offering to join me as I eat lunch alone, to the parting note from housekeeper Mogo wishing me "a lovely journey" alongside a "Go Well" spelt out in leaves on my bed.
Nor is it only the humans that are welcoming. Woken with a flask of hot coffee delivered to my door at 5.30am this morning, I wander into the main lodge as a 40-year-old bull elephant saunters into camp. There's no alarm – hippos, elephants and baboons are frequent visitors to this lodge beside the Santandibe River, but it's quite a sight for weary eyes.
Much as I love the early morning and afternoon game drives, the newly refurbished Sandibe Lodge is equally compelling. It's relatively dry when I visit but come the seasonal rains I can imagine it as an ark anchored in the floodplain, its expansive open deck and those of the massive rooms floating above the bristling wetlands. For now, it appears as it's meant to, like a giant pangolin or anteater, its roof mimicking the hard scaly back of the creature, its wooden supports like curved ribs.
Given its remote location, it's a huge achievement, a super luxurious but very African refuge. It has facilities like plunge pools on the deck of each capacious cottage, a spa, a captivating library and excellent all-inclusive food and drink, but it's totally in tune with its environment and has most of its power provided by a 100-kilowatt solar power system.
Indeed, with &Beyond's strong conservation principles and commitment to local communities through its Africa foundation, its lodges are places you can visit and leave with conscience intact. In 2013, the company launched Rhinos Without Borders. The project's aim was to relocate 100 rhinos from South Africa, where poaching is rife, to comparatively safe Botswana, where a quarter of the land is designated for protected parks and reserves.
In the first four months of 2015, 393 rhinos were killed in South Africa – a rate of one every seven hours – so the scheme, which has already translocated its first batch of animals, cannot be realised quickly enough. Indeed, Botswana has not only led the way with anti-poaching initiatives, implemented by a special army unit, but in 2014, it banned hunting, an activity that ironically fuelled the emergence of its tourism industry in the 1960s.
The government's low impact, high-value tourism strategy could be considered elitist, delivering intimate encounters to only the privileged few who can afford to come, but it keeps the deadly dentists at bay. Nor does time spent at Sandibe or at Xarana lodge, where we go next, feel remotely redolent of colonial times with its images of the "upper clawses" being proffered G&Ts on a silver tray by white-jacketed black Africans. You can still get a G&T, of course – some traditions are worth keeping – but it will likely come with a quip and some banter.
Nothing is perfect. The management in both lodges is South African, white, and perfectly charming, particularly at Xarana. But all the dedicated and superbly knowledgeable guides are Botswanan, rejoicing in names like Trust, at Sandibe, and Action and Gift at Xarana, and invariably justifying their monikers.
On game drives at Sandibe, after a slow start, Trust leads us to that rare pack of African wild dogs, hanging out like boys from the hood, intent on no good, and to that sated leopard up a tree. His eyes pick out tiny bee-eaters, woodland kingfishers and lilac-breasted rollers, the Botswanan national bird emblazoned in the colours of its flag. He finds aggregations of gummy ungulates too in hippo pools, a "business" of striped mongeese scurrying around a termite mound and a "tower" of hip-swivelling giraffes, destined to remain forever teenage in their gangliness.
The sightings don't stop after we've had sunset drinks and canapes beside the river, Trust spotting a lioness and her cubs in the dark and prompting our valiant driver, JC, to pursue them through near impenetrable scrub. Later, spotlighting reveals the raccoon-like tail of a genet cat and the ghostly figure of a Pel's fishing owl.
At Xarana, after a small plane flight across the Okavango Delta that recalls the opening scenes of Out of Africa, we are greeted once more by singing staff. Then, as we settle into the lounge with a cold, welcome drink, a tall, devilishly handsome male kudu strides into view, within touching distance, watching us ponderously as it chews on vegetation. Behind it, a wallowing hippo surfaces in the pool out front, extending its jaws in an enormous bored yawn as if to ask, "What's new pussycat?".
By 7.30am the next morning, our game drive with Gift and Action has already yielded the sight of 40 breeding elephants, 200 Cape buffalo and several types of African eagle. Nonetheless, Action is constantly leaping from the vehicle to check tracks and scat for signs of creatures, calling it "the morning news", in this blessedly media-less environment.
"A big hyena was here last night," he announces. "That's one of the ugly five," adds driver Gift with a grin, "marabou stork, hippo, vulture, warthog and hyena."
After four days in the Okavango Delta I've gained some perspective of its magnificence and, above all, more of an eye for detail in the wildlife that inhabits it. The way, for instance, that a zebra's stripes swirl around its torso and part like ripples on a lake halfway along its body or that, viewed from close up, a leopard's spots seem more like smudgy paw prints.
All this is down to the patience and expertise of our guides, and to being in the right place at the right time. It's the confluence of these three elements, that, like the meeting of several tentacles of the Okavango River, results in a memorable send-off as we come across hundreds of large birds hovering on the thermals above the floodplain.
After Action has spotted them, Gift edges us carefully, and at some risk of not getting out again, into the muddy morass, until we find ourselves in the midst of a Battle of Britain-like aerial display of vultures, marabou storks and pelicans circling high above in the deep blue African sky, intermittently breaking formation to dive-bomb and pick off floundering fish in the drying waterways.
www.botswanatourism.co.bw
Qantas flies six times a week from Sydney to Johannesburg, with flights on sale until November 11, 2015 at $1399 return in economy and $4499 in business. See qantas.com.au. From Johannesburg Air Link has flights to Maun, the nearest airport to these lodges, flight time 1hr 40min. See flyairlink.com. Transfers to and between lodges by light aircraft are included in &Beyond tariff.
The Australia-based Africa Safari Co. has three nights, all inclusive, at &Beyond Sandibe Lodge, including return charter flights ex Maun, from $4790 pp twin share. It also offers a seven-night Fly Me Around Botswana Safari from $6750 a person twin share, at any combination of &Beyond lodges (there is $235 supplement per night for Sandibe Lodge). Accommodation, food and transfers included, international airfares extra. See www.africasafarico.com.au
The Okavango Delta was the 1000th site to be inscribed on UNESCO's World Heritage list, in 2014. UNESCO's criteria for listing the Delta included it being "a landscape of exceptional and rare beauty", "an ecosystem of remarkable habitat and species diversity" and its role as a home to "some of the world's most endangered large mammals, such as cheetahs, white and black rhinoceroses, wild dogs and lions, all adapted to living in this wetland system".
It can take up to six months for the rains over the headwaters of the Okavango River in the Angolan mountains, to the north, to reach the extremities of the delta in the Kalahari Desert. Each year the Okavango River discharges 11 cubic kilometres of water into the alluvial fan, arriving between March and August, peaking in July. The majority of it disappears through plant transpiration and evaporation, with only 2 per cent filtering into the aquifer beneath the delta.
The yearly flood-tide pulses through the wetland system revitalising ecosystems during Botswana's dry season (June and July). The Okavango Delta's juxtaposition of bristling wetland in a semi-desert landscape and the metamorphosis caused by the floods prompts the arrival of large herds of African elephants, zebras, buffalos and other large animals that have survived the dry autumn or their torrid migration across the Kalahari Desert. One of the unforgettable sights in the delta is the large numbers of these creatures drinking and frolicking in the water-inundated floodplains.
The Okavango River runs south-eastwards for 1600 kilometres and has no outlet to the sea. The delta is one of a very few on the planet that are completely cut off from the ocean. Known as an endorheic delta, it seeps instead into the sands of the Kalahari Basin. It is Africa's largest endorheic delta and third-largest alluvial fan.
In total, the delta's habitats are home to 130 species of mammal, 482 varieties of bird, 64 reptiles and 89 types of fish, as well as 1061 plants. The habitats of the nominated include permanent swamps, islands, rivers and lagoons, grasslands, forest and deciduous woodlands. The delta's birds include 24 species that are globally threatened, including six types of vulture. It is also central to Botswana's population of around 130,000 elephants, the largest in the world.
Experience luxury camping at &Beyond Chobe Under Canvas tented lodge. Situated in the wildlife-rich Chobe National Park right in the midst of the African bush at the conjunction of four countries – Namibia, Botswana, Zambia and Zimbabwe – the accommodation includes en suite bathrooms and hot bucket showers, the chance to dine out under the stars and both game drives and boat cruises on the Chobe River. See www.andbeyond.com
Make like Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor at the riverside Chobe Game Lodge, in the town of Kasane, where the couple married for the second time in 1975. The lodge was the first built within the Chobe National Park, famous for its huge herds of elephants, and abundance of other species such as hippos and lions, and game drives and cruises are included in the tariff. See www.andbeyond.com
The &Beyond Fly Me Over Botswana safari includes stays at any three of its Okavango properties and scenic flight transfers between each. Flying in small, light aircraft allows you to take in the scale and theatre of the landscape, as well as pick out herds of elephants, giraffes, buffalos and giraffes. The colours and contours of the wetlands can appear like a masterful painting or a moving tableau from up high; it is utterly thrilling. See www.andbeyond.com
Explore the Kalahari Salt Pans, a dazzling lunar landscape brought to life by the annual rains to the south-east of the Okavango. The pans are the remnants of the great central Botswana Lake. They encompass Makgadikgadi Pan, the Nxai Pan and the Sua Pan, the latter attracting large numbers of flamingo in years of good rainfall. Among the discoveries here are the fossils of giant ancient hippos and zebras and Stone Age tools. There are several lodges in the area including the luxurious Jack's camp. See www.luxurysafaricamps.com/jackscamp
Consider combining the Okavango with a visit to Victoria Falls, on the border of nearby Zimbabwe and Zambia, on the Zambesi River. One of the most spectacular waterfalls on the planet, it's a rapturous sight combined with a thunderous sound and a misty spray covering everything within close range. For the most memorable experience of the falls take a microlight flight above them. See www.zambiatourism.com
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