The Call of the Wild

With a new crop of spectacular camps, Botswana offers a lush environment for African safaris

- Nicholas DeRenzo

BOTSWANA’S UNESCO-PROTECTED Okavango Delta is emerging as one of the go-to spots for first-time safari-goers, offering an alternative to the usual destinations in South Africa, Kenya and Tanzania. For more than 30 years, Natural Selection has operated camps in some of the delta’s most dazzling and remote corners, including this quartet of new and in-the-works lodges that provide an ecologically diverse adventure through the region’s wildlife-rich swamps, lagoons, channels and mopane forests.

Thamo Telele 

Most travelers enter the Okavango through the bustling gateway town of Maun, touching down at the international airport just long enough to catch another prop plane out to their safari camp. In an effort to entice visitors to stick around awhile, Natural Selection recently acquired and reinvented a lodge on the outskirts of town, only a 20-minute drive from the airport. Think of it as a suburban safari of sorts, set on a 618-acre private game reserve that’s home to a herd of giraffes. The animals feature heavily in the 11-room hotel’s colorful, folk-art-inspired decor, and an unusually tall calf born here during the refurbishment process lent Thamo Telele its name: It means “long neck” in the local Tswana language. Because the reserve is free of predators, you can explore the landscape on foot, by fat-tire bike or on horseback, allowing you to commune with its zebras and more than 300 species of birds.