experience
I’ve spent 16 years in the safari industry, and the bush still finds ways to remind me how much I have left to learn. I began as a guide at lodges across South Africa, where early starts and long silences gave me a sense of belonging I hadn’t found anywhere else. That led to private guiding and, in 2018, to co-founding my own safari company . Nowhere has drawn me back like Botswana. I’ve returned close to 50 times in the last decade, and I still remember my first flight over the Okavango Delta in 2016: channels glinting between islands all the way to the horizon, the scent of wild sage as we stepped off the plane, the warmth of the people who met us. To me, the Delta is a place of reverence. There are no power lines, no concrete or hum of anything human. When you’re there, your mind is only there. So when Singita invited me to join Kokoano in July, a small journey across its NG26 concession, at a moment between what the place has been and what it’s becoming, I knew how rare an invitation it was. Kokoano means ‘gathering’. We were a handful: Jo Bailes, four fellow safari specialists, and me.
We flew in from Maun, spent the afternoon on a game drive, then boarded a boat for the last half hour. We reached camp in the last light. The water was still and golden, a fire was already burning, and its smoke drifted across the channel to meet us. The team waved from the bank as we glided in. The camp sat under shaded canopies along an ancient channel, which was filling with water that had travelled for months from the Angolan highlands. Everything was gathering around it: wildlife, birds, fresh green growth. In our own way, so were we. What I remember most is the time. There was no routine of morning drive, rest, afternoon drive, dinner, repeat. We walked, poled through the reeds in mekoro, crossed the channels by boat, and saw the concession from the air. One night two male lions roared behind camp until dawn. At first light we followed their tracks through the mist, found them, read their mood, and guessed they would cross the channel. We waited, and they crossed. Lions cross water in other places too. What felt rare was the freedom to give that moment as much time as it needed.
Previous spread Ever-shifting waters shape life in the Delta. Wildlife has adapted to them in both behaviour and form. Right Some were born here; others have lived here for decades. Our people know this place intimately. They are part of its flow.
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