Best Safari Camps in Botswana's Okavango Delta: Mombo, Duba Plains & Xigera (2026)
Mombo Camp on Chief's Island — arguably Africa's most wildlife-rich camp, Duba Plains in the Jouberts' private lion-and-buffalo concession, and Xigera Safari Lodge's art-filled suites — where to stay in the Okavango Delta, the UNESCO wetland that vanishes into the Kalahari.
The Okavango Delta: A River That Never Reaches the Sea
The Okavango is one of the planet’s great geographical anomalies: a river that rises in the highlands of Angola, flows some 1,600 kilometres south, and then — instead of finding an ocean — fans out across the sands of the Kalahari and simply disappears, spent on evaporation and the thirst of the desert. The result is a vast inland delta of papyrus channels, lily-covered lagoons, palm islands, and seasonal floodplains, inscribed in 2014 as UNESCO’s 1,000th World Heritage Site. Its rhythm is beautifully out of step with the calendar: rain that falls in Angola between January and March takes months to travel downstream, so the flood peaks in the middle of Botswana’s bone-dry winter, drawing animals from across the Kalahari to the only water for hundreds of kilometres. Botswana holds the world’s largest elephant population — commonly estimated at around 130,000 — and the delta is a stronghold of the endangered African wild dog, whose cooperative hunts succeed far more often than a lion’s. The classic way to experience it all is by mokoro, the traditional dugout canoe (today usually a fibreglass replica, to spare the old jackalberry trees) poled silently through the reeds at water level, eye to eye with reed frogs and, occasionally, elephants. Access is by light aircraft from the frontier town of Maun; Botswana’s deliberate low-volume, high-value tourism policy keeps camps tiny, prices high, and the delta gloriously empty.
The Okavango Delta Lodges
Mombo Camp Moremi Game Reserve — UNESCO Okavango Chief’s Island Luxury Tented Camp
Price: €2,000–8,000/night | Location: Chief’s Island, Moremi Game Reserve, Okavango Delta, Botswana
Mombo sits at the northern tip of Chief’s Island, the largest landmass in the delta, inside the Moremi Game Reserve — a reserve with its own claim to history, created in 1963 at the initiative of the local BaTawana people. Guides call this area the “place of plenty,” and the game density around camp justifies decades of hype: big lion prides, exceptional leopard viewing, large elephant and buffalo herds, and all the plains game that follows the floodwaters. It is a dry-land camp, so the focus is on game drives rather than boating. Rebuilt in 2018, the camp pairs a handful of enormous raised tented suites — each with private plunge pool and views over a floodplain that functions as a 24-hour wildlife theatre — with the polished guiding Wilderness is known for. Mombo also played a central role in the project that reintroduced rhino to the delta. Perennially cited among the best safari camps in Africa, and priced like it.
Duba Plains Camp — Predator-Prey Exclusive Concession Remotest Okavango Tented Camp
Price: €1,500–6,000/night | Location: Duba Plains Concession, Okavango Delta, Botswana
Duba Plains is the flagship of Great Plains Conservation, the company founded by Dereck and Beverly Joubert, the National Geographic Explorers-in-Residence whose films — most famously the lion-versus-buffalo epic shot on these very floodplains — made Duba a legend before most travellers could find it on a map. The camp holds an exclusive private concession of tens of thousands of hectares in the remote heart of the delta, shared with no other operator, where lions have learned to hunt buffalo in water and in daylight — a spectacle almost nowhere else offers so reliably. Rebuilt in 2017 in a 1920s-explorer register of brass, leather, and dark timber, the camp has only a handful of tented suites, and activities shift with the flood: game drives across the plains, boat and mokoro excursions when the water is up. For serious wildlife photographers, this is one of Africa’s essential addresses.
Xigera Safari Lodge — Contemporary African Art and Design in the Moremi Wetlands
Price: €2,500–9,000/night | Location: NG25 Concession, adjacent to Moremi Game Reserve, Okavango Delta, Botswana
Xigera (pronounced “kee-jera,” after the pied kingfisher) reopened in 2021 after a ground-up rebuild by the Tollman family’s Red Carnation Hotels, and it changed the conversation about what a safari lodge can look like: a dozen suites raised over permanent water, filled with specially commissioned furniture, textiles, and artworks from dozens of contemporary African artists and makers — effectively a gallery of southern African design that happens to have elephants wading past. Sitting in one of the wettest, most permanent parts of the delta beside Moremi, it is the strongest water camp of the three: mokoro trips, boat safaris through the channels, and game drives on the islands, plus a starlit sleep-out in a sculptural baobab-inspired treehouse a short drive from camp. Largely solar-powered, and the natural choice if design and comfort matter as much as the game.
Beyond the Lodges
Mokoro Trails and Scenic Flights
Two experiences define an Okavango itinerary regardless of camp. The first is the mokoro: an hour or two of being poled through the shallows in near-total silence, a water-level counterpoint to the game drive that turns the delta’s small things — painted reed frogs, malachite kingfishers, sieves of lilies — into the main event. The second is seeing the delta from above. The light-aircraft hops between camps double as scenic flights, and a dedicated helicopter flight with the doors off, over channels braided like silver rope and elephant herds trailing shadows across the floodplains, is worth every pula. Most itineraries combine two or three camps — one dry-land, one water — over five to seven nights.
FAQ
When is the best time to visit the Okavango Delta? June–October is the classic window: Botswana’s dry winter, when the flood is high (the Angolan rains arrive months after falling), vegetation is thin, and wildlife concentrates around the water. June–August offers the best mokoro and boating conditions; September–October brings the most intense game viewing as the delta slowly recedes, with hot days. The November–March green season is lush, dramatic-skied, and full of birds and newborn animals, with rates often 30–40 percent lower — the trade-off is heat, afternoon storms, and dispersed game.
Why is Botswana considered Africa’s premier safari destination? Deliberate scarcity. Since the 1980s Botswana has pursued a low-volume, high-value tourism policy: vast private concessions leased to single operators, camps of six to twelve tents rather than hundred-room lodges, and prices that fund conservation and community programmes instead of mass infrastructure. The result is that you can spend a week in the delta and rarely see another vehicle — a near-impossibility in the famous parks of East Africa — while diamond revenue and community-based natural resource management have kept wilderness genuinely wild.
How do you get to the Okavango Delta? Fly to Maun, the delta’s gateway town, usually via Johannesburg or Cape Town (there are also regional links via Gaborone and seasonal routes). From Maun, camps are reached by light aircraft — typically 15–45 minutes in a Cessna or Caravan over the floodplains, with strict soft-bag luggage limits around 20kg. Transfers are booked by the camps and woven into the itinerary; many travellers pair the delta with Chobe’s elephants or Victoria Falls, each a short flight away.
Why are Okavango camps so expensive, and what is included? Rates of €1,500–9,000 per night look extreme until you see what they carry: all meals and drinks, twice-daily activities (game drives, boats, mokoro, walks), private-concession fees, conservation levies, laundry, and often the inter-camp flights. Everything must be flown or trucked into a roadless wetland, staff-to-guest ratios frequently exceed three to one, and the tiny camp sizes are the point — you are paying for a few thousand hectares of Africa functioning as it did a thousand years ago, shared with a dozen other people.