Santawani Camp, near the Okavango Delta, Botswana
23-26 December 2025
We read Going on a Lion Hunt countless times to our kids when they were small. Now we’re living it. We have our binoculars, and we truly have been going over rivers and through grass.
This camp is in a conservancy rather than a national park, which means very few vehicles and far more freedom. Our driver is technically supposed to leave the roads only when following a “high-value animal,” but we always seem to be following one, so about ninety percent of our driving has been off-road. Gully, our driver, reads the bush constantly, watching for signs of lions and leopards: multiple vultures perched in a single tree, vultures circling overhead, impalas standing rigid and staring in the same direction, footprints pressed into the sand.
Tuesday, after it was already quite dark, we found five lionesses and a cub. Wednesday (24 December) we have been less successful so far, but the search itself has hardly felt like a disappointment. Along the way we’ve seen all the usual animals—kudu, elephants, giraffes, wildebeest, impalas, and a jackal—plus some new birds and four bat-eared foxes. Even when we’re not finding big cats, it never feels like we’re missing anything on these cross-country treks.
We flew here in a Cessna Grand Caravan (206B) from Kasane, landing on a small airstrip near the camp. Although we’ve been worrying about rain all week, we had a wonderful direct flight and touched down on a bone-dry runway. It poured overnight, but both last night’s and this morning’s game drives were dry.
Santawani is a tented camp, so we’re glamping in the same spirit as Big Makalolo in Hwange National Park. At the entrance to our tent were one-day-old lion footprints left from the night before. Walking from our tent to the main camp requires crossing an “elephant highway,” a well-worn path used by elephants and other grazing animals on their way to a nearby waterhole. We definitely have to be more alert here than in other places we’ve stayed. Perhaps this is how Sarah and I finally break the tie in our Survivor game from Chobe—but the stakes are higher than finding geckos.
Sarah is considering making a coffee-table book called Termite Mounds of Southern Africa. I think she’s joking, but they do come in an astonishing variety of sculptural shapes. Someone once said that if you give an infinite number of monkeys an infinite number of typewriters, one of them will eventually type the complete works of William Shakespeare. Sarah’s termite-mound corollary is that if you give a lot of termite colonies enough space, one of them will eventually produce a replica of a Henry Moore sculpture. We’ve seen some very strong contenders.
The Okavango Delta is a “backwards” delta. There isn’t a major river spreading into a delta and then flowing to the ocean. Instead, a river fans out as it flows into the Kalahari Desert. There is no significant river leaving the delta, so almost all the inflow evaporates across its huge area. This fresh water supports abundant vegetation and wildlife, but there is concern about climate change and human encroachment.
Merry Christmas! Thursday we went on a mokoro (dugout canoe) ride in the delta, with a guide poling us through a swampy inlet about three feet (one meter) deep. We learned about the medicinal uses of various plants and spotted an Angolan reed frog. I kind of wish we’d gone out into the main channel by motorboat to see what wildlife we might have encountered there, but I understand those tours are being discouraged due to the environmental damage.
On the way back from the makoro, we saw another leopard. The leopard was resting in a tree, having just killed and partly eaten an impala before dragging it up into the branches. Victoria then spotted another half-eaten impala in a nearby tree, likely within the same leopard’s territory. Shortly afterward, we passed a large herd of impala. I’m starting to think leopards are really just farmers, raising impala within their own territory for their own consumption. It’s a good gig.
Just before our afternoon game drive, we helped the camp staff plant a new baobab tree. There are no baobabs in the area… and in 20 years we hope this will be the first of many to reach maturity. There is even a plaque near the tree that each of us signed.
Unfortunately, unlike in the book, we didn’t find a lion. Still, we had a wonderful time here. The staff concluded our stay by singing traditional songs and serving a traditional meal — a perfect way to end our final safari in Africa.
Tomorrow we fly to Victoria Falls for two nights, then head to Cape Town for a week to finish our trip.
Late breaking news -we did find the 5 lionesses and cub on the way to the airstrip!
