Chobe

Rivers & StreamsNorth-West,Botswana

Fifty thousand elephants crowding one Botswana river through the dry season, one of the largest populations on Earth — and lions that hunt them after dark.

September·Peaking now

Jul–Oct

With the interior pans dry, thousands of elephants funnel to the Chobe alongside buffalo and antelope, and predators follow them. Dawn cruises pass the herds at the waterline. Animal numbers peak through September and October, as the heat climbs toward 40°C before the rains.

Year-round Chobe's elephants, hippos and predators are here year-round; in the dry season, May to October, thousands of elephants funnel to the river, the easiest time to see them from a boat.

Chobe National Park protects one of the largest elephant populations on Earth, roughly fifty thousand animals, and in the dry season they crowd a single river in herds hundreds strong. Botswana declared it the country's first national park in 1968, folding four very different landscapes into one reserve: the green Chobe riverfront, the predator-rich Savuti Marsh, the remote Linyanti swamps and the dry Nogatsaa grasslands inland. The Chobe River draws the park's northern edge and runs east to join the Zambezi. As the interior bakes and its waterholes vanish, elephants, buffalo and antelope funnel toward its permanent water, and where the grazers gather the hunters follow: lions, leopards, cheetahs and the rare African wild dog. The Savuti prides in particular have worked out a way of hunting that has been filmed here and almost nowhere else. Chobe is one of the few African parks you explore as much by water as by road. Slide out in an open boat at dawn and you pass within a few metres of yawning hippos and basking crocodiles, while herds wade the shallows toward the green islands. In the late afternoon the sky turns copper and long lines of elephants file down to drink, their silhouettes doubled in the still water. A 4x4 through the dusty interior trades that calm for the tension of the hunt, and after dark the roar carrying past the campfire is a reminder that the park still sets its own rules.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Aim for the late dry season if sheer numbers are the point — the riverfront herds swell month by month and peak in September and October, just before the first rains scatter them inland again.
For the elephant-hunting lions, head to Savuti, not the riverfront — the famous prides work the marsh in the late dry season, a full day's drive inland from the river.
The Kasane stretch is Chobe's most visited — the late-afternoon cruise is what everyone books, so a dawn boat meets the same herds with far fewer engines on the water.
This is a malaria zone — start prophylaxis before you travel and cover up at dusk, when both the mosquitoes and the best game viewing come out.

Things to do

1
Meet the river at eye level, dawn and dusk
Board a low open boat and slide out until the river fills your eye line, sitting level with yawning hippos and crocodiles hauled up on the sandbars. That water-line angle, impossible from a high safari truck, is why photographers rate the Chobe cruise above almost any other in Africa. When a herd wades out toward the green mid-river islands, the guide cuts the engine and lets the current carry the boat alongside, close enough to hear the calves.
2
Drive the sandy interior at first light
Set out at first light on the sand tracks inland, when lions, leopards and the rare African wild dog are still moving from the night's hunt. The drive leaves the green riverfront for the park's drier faces — the Savuti marsh, the Linyanti swamps and the Nogatsaa grasslands — and the ground changes under the wheels with each of them. Every rise brings either a new animal or nothing at all but heat and space.

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Nearby

174 km