The Okavango River never reaches the sea. It runs south out of the Angolan highlands, spills onto the flat sands of the Kalahari and fans out into a maze of channels, papyrus islands and clear lagoons until the desert drinks it dry. About 96 percent of the water evaporates or is taken up by plants; the rest sinks into the sand. The delta swells from around 6,000 to as much as 15,000 square kilometres of open water, and the strange part is when it does so — in the middle of Botswana's bone-dry winter. This is the largest inland delta on the planet and one of the few left largely intact. In 2014 it became the 1,000th site inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List. Almost none of it is fenced, so the animals move in and out with the water.
Because the flood arrives when everything around it has dried out, the delta pulls in one of Africa's densest gatherings of animals. Elephant herds wade the shallows in long files with calves walled inside, hippos cut trails through the reeds, and lions, leopards and African wild dogs hunt across the islands. Most visitors meet all of this from a mokoro, a dugout canoe that a standing poler pushes through water barely deeper than your hand. At that level the delta closes in — lily pads, reed walls, frogs dropping into the water — and with no engine you drift up on animals before they notice you. Much of the core lies inside the Moremi Game Reserve, and most people arrive by bush plane — though mokoro trips also run out of Maun and from the village poler trusts along the delta's edge. Mist lifts off the channels at dawn and the lagoons turn copper at dusk.