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What a Botswana mobile camping safari is really like
Canvas rather than concrete, a camp that moves with you, and the closest most people will ever get to having the bush to themselves.
Ask most people to picture a safari and they will picture a lodge: a permanent building, a pool, a deck over a waterhole. A mobile safari is a different animal altogether. Your camp is a set of tents that a crew puts up before you arrive and takes down after you leave, moving ahead of you from one area to the next. It is the oldest way to travel in Botswana and, for a certain kind of traveller, still the best.
The point of a mobile safari is not the tents. It is that you are not tied to one patch of ground. A typical trip might start in Moremi, move north to the Khwai community area, then on to Savuti or the Linyanti, each leg a few nights. You wake up, have breakfast, go out on a game drive, and by the time you reach the next camp in the afternoon it is standing, the beds are made and someone has the kettle on. The crew will have driven ahead, often on rougher roads than you took, and done the whole thing twice over in a day.
That mobility matters because Botswana's wildlife moves. The water in the Delta rises and falls months out of step with the rain, the zebra walk between the Boteti and the pans, and the predators follow. A camp that can move is a camp that can be in the right place.
This is where expectations need setting honestly, because "camping" covers an enormous range. At the comfortable end, which is where most of our trips sit, you get a walk-in canvas tent tall enough to stand up in, proper beds with linen and duvets rather than sleeping bags, a rug on the floor, and a private bathroom at the back with a flushing loo and a bucket shower that the crew fills with hot water when you ask for it. There is no electricity in the way there is at a lodge, so lighting is solar lamps and paraffin lanterns, and charging happens in the vehicle.
At the simpler end, dome tents and shared facilities, it is genuinely camping and it costs a good deal less. Both are legitimate. What matters is knowing which one you have booked, and we will always tell you plainly rather than letting the word "tent" do the work.
The mess tent is where the trip actually happens. Long table, canvas chairs, a bar of sorts, and a cook producing three courses out of a hole in the ground with cast-iron pots. The food on a good mobile safari surprises people more than anything else does.
One thing nobody tells you: it gets genuinely cold. Between May and August the temperature can drop close to freezing overnight and the game drive leaves before dawn. Bring more warm layers than feels sensible, and a hat.
There are two versions of a mobile safari and the difference is worth understanding before you book.
Fully serviced means a full crew travels with you: a guide, a cook, camp staff. Your tent is up when you arrive, your bathroom is filled, your washing comes back folded. You do nothing but the safari. This is what most of our travellers choose, and it is what we mean unless we say otherwise.
Participatory means you muck in. You help pitch your own tent, you help with the washing up, the group shares the work. It is a good deal cheaper, it suits younger travellers and families who like the idea of it, and plenty of people say the camaraderie is the best part. It is not a lesser trip, it is a different one. Just be sure everyone in your party is up for it, because a reluctant tent-pitcher on night four is not a happy traveller.
A private mobile is exactly that: your own camp, your own guide, your own vehicle, and the dates and route built around you. A scheduled departure runs on fixed dates with other travellers sharing the camp, usually six or eight people, which brings the cost down considerably.
Our own Buffalo Mobile Safari and Lion Mobile Safari are both built this way, and the Northern Highlights covers more ground again. If you would rather have the whole thing to yourselves, we can run any of them privately.
It suits people who want the bush rather than the resort, who do not mind a bucket shower, and who like the idea that when the generator noise of a lodge is absent you can hear hyena a mile off. It suits photographers, because you are camped where the animals are rather than driving an hour to reach them. It suits second-time safari-goers who found a lodge slightly too insulated.
It suits you less if you need air conditioning, if mobility is a real concern over uneven ground, or if the thought of a long-drop at three in the morning is genuinely unappealing rather than merely amusing. There is no shame in any of that, and Botswana has superb lodges. We would simply rather you had the right trip than the trip that sounded most adventurous in the brochure.
The dry season, roughly May to October, is the classic window: the bush thins out, the animals concentrate around water and the roads are passable. July to September is the peak of it and books up a long way ahead. The green season from December to March brings dramatic skies, newborn animals and far fewer people, but heavy rain and camping are not natural companions, and some mobile operations close entirely. There is more detail on all of this in our guide to when to go.
A mobile safari asks slightly more of you than a lodge does and gives back more than most people expect. You sleep with nothing between you and the bush but canvas, which is either the appeal or the problem depending on who you are. If it sounds like your kind of trip, it probably is.
Tell us what you are after and we will put together something that fits.
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