Botswana Beyond the Okavango: The Northern Corridors Most Safari Itineraries Still Miss

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Botswana received 1,183,432 international tourists in 2023, with the majority entering through border posts and airports that feed directly into the Okavango-Chobe circuit. This was disclosed by Statistics Botswana in a 2024 annual report. Industry analysis of the country’s safari economy has found that tourism remains heavily concentrated in Moremi Game Reserve, attached to the Okavango, and in Chobe National Park, Botswana’s two flagship reserves. 

The same analysis notes that this concentration is partly a policy outcome: authorities limit footprint elsewhere by keeping the bulk of high-end capacity in these two areas, at the cost of price selectivity that pushes many travellers toward repeat routes rather than new ones.

The Okavango Delta is the world’s largest inland delta, and Moremi Game Reserve, covering roughly a third of it, draws the bulk of delta bookings. Outside Moremi’s gazetted boundary, the rest of the delta splits into private concessions with tighter bed limits, off-road access and night drives that the reserve itself does not permit. North of the delta, the government has applied the same restrained model to a run of concessions that few standard itineraries touch at all: Kwando, Linyanti and Selinda.

These three reserves sit between the Okavango and Chobe National Parks, watered by the Kwando and Linyanti rivers and, in high-flood years, by the reopened Selinda Spillway. Selinda covers roughly 1,350 square kilometres and Linyanti around 1,250 square kilometres, both leased as exclusive-use concessions with strict bed caps rather than open to public campers. 

This is because they are private land rather than a national park; camps here run walking safaris, night drives and off-road tracking that Moremi’s gazetted status rules out. During the dry season, elephant density along the Linyanti waterfront rivals Chobe’s riverfront numbers, and one of the continent’s healthier populations of endangered African wild dog hunts across the floodplains. 

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Where Botswana’s Elephants Actually Are

Botswana holds around 130,000 elephants, the largest national population on Earth, and 58% of the roughly 228,000 elephants counted across the five-country Kavango Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area, or KAZA, in the 2022 aerial survey. That figure is not evenly spread across the two reserves most itineraries book. Elephants move seasonally between the Chobe riverfront, the Linyanti-Kwando waterways and the Okavango’s permanent channels as surface water elsewhere dries up between May and November. 

The same survey carried a warning that prospective travellers planning a trip should know before they book: Population growth across northern Botswana has slowed to roughly 1% a year, far below the 6 to 7.6% growth rate the government cited when it resumed elephant trophy hunting in 2019, and elephant numbers fell by 25 per cent in areas open to hunting while rising 28% in areas where hunting is banned. 

Carcass ratios inside Moremi, Chobe and the Okavango’s surrounding ecotourism zones held steady or improved over the same period, while the sharpest declines showed up in areas further from the protected safari corridor. The animals, in other words, are voting with their feet for the same protected corridor structure that photographic tourism depends on. An itinerary that only touches Moremi and Chobe sees a curated slice of a population whose real behaviour plays out across the full Linyanti-Kwando-Selinda stretch.

The RCA Argument

The Migration Most Visitors Never Plan For

South of the delta, a different kind of traffic moves each year. Researchers first identified a zebra migration between the Chobe floodplains and Nxai Pan National Park in 2012, later confirmed as the longest single land-mammal migration route on the continent, longer than East Africa’s wildebeest migration in the Serengeti and Maasai Mara. A second, separate migration runs between the Okavango Delta and the Makgadikgadi Pans further south: roughly 15,000 zebras covering a 500-kilometre round trip, leaving the delta as the rains begin in November and December and returning by April. 

Both migrations happen during Botswana’s rainy, low-visitor season, which means lower lodge rates and thinner vehicle traffic at exactly the moment the wildlife spectacle peaks. Yet the migration barely features in standard eight-day fly-in packages built around May-to-October dry-season viewing in the Okavango and Chobe. A traveller who books only the classic circuit misses a migration event that took scientists a decade to map and that Botswana’s own tourism promotion has been slow to build itineraries around.

The corridors linking these reserves are not empty of people. Roughly 22% of Botswana’s land, some 12.9 million hectares, sits inside Wildlife Management Areas leased to community trusts under the country’s Community-Based Natural Resource Management programme, first piloted by the Sankoyo Tshwaragano Management Trust near Maun in 1995 and formalised into national policy in 2007. 

These trusts, not international operators, first carried the model that now underwrites the northern corridor: communities holding hunting and, later, photographic concessions and reinvesting the proceeds into local jobs and services. That mattered because it gave residents of the wildlife corridor a direct financial stake in keeping elephant and zebra populations moving through their land rather than treating them as a threat to crops and cattle.

Building Botswana Safari Itineraries That Go Further

None of this argues against the Okavango or Chobe; both remain the country’s strongest game-viewing ground and the reason Botswana can charge what it does. It argues for treating them as one leg of a longer route rather than the whole trip. Operators already combine the Okavango, Chobe, Linyanti and the Makgadikgadi pans into single multi-stop itineraries linked by light aircraft, a model that raises the value of a trip without adding pressure to any single reserve. That structure exists because Botswana’s fly-in network, built to serve a delta with minimal road access, already connects Maun and Kasane to airstrips across the northern concessions. 

Booking three or four nights in Linyanti or Selinda alongside a standard Okavango stay adds elephant and wild dog viewing without duplicating the game drives most visitors already associate with Moremi. Timing a trip to the November-to-March window, even briefly, opens the possibility of the Makgadikgadi migration at lower rates than peak dry season demands. Neither choice requires abandoning the reserves that made Botswana famous. Both require asking a travel agent for a map that extends past the one most brochures show.

The practical mechanics support this. Maun functions as the gateway to the delta and the wider northern circuit, with scheduled and charter flights reaching camps and airstrips that road transport cannot practically serve; Kasane covers the Chobe side of the same network. 

A traveller who adds two nights in the Linyanti-Kwando corridor to a delta-based itinerary typically adds one light-aircraft hop, not a second visa, a second entry point or a materially longer trip. The cost difference between a seven-night Okavango-only itinerary and an eight-night itinerary spanning the delta, Linyanti and a brief migration-season stop is often smaller than travellers assume, because per-night camp rates across the private concessions sit in a similar band; the added cost is largely the extra night itself. What changes is not the budget category but the range of behaviour a visitor actually sees: water-based delta wildlife, dry-corridor elephant density, and, in season, a migration event most competing safari countries cannot offer at all.

Botswana’s northern wilderness does not end at Moremi’s fence line, and neither should your reading. Rex Clarke Adventures covers the corridors, policies and communities that most safari brochures leave out. Explore more stories on African travel, conservation and tourism policy across the continent, and start planning a Botswana route built on the full picture, not the postcard.

 

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) and Answers 

Is it worth adding Linyanti or Selinda to a standard Okavango Delta safari?

Yes, for travellers who have already done a classic Okavango-Chobe trip or want denser elephant and predator sightings without national-park vehicle limits. The concessions sit between the two better-known reserves and connect to them by light aircraft, so the addition is logistical, not a separate trip.

When is the best time to see Botswana’s zebra migration?

The Chobe-to-Nxai Pan movement and the Okavango-to-Makgadikgadi movement both run roughly from November to April, tracking the rains south and back north. This overlaps with Botswana’s rainy, lower-cost season rather than the classic May-to-October dry season that most itineraries are built around.

How many elephants does Botswana actually have, and where are they?

Around 130,000, the largest national population in the world, and 58% of the elephants counted across the five-country KAZA conservation area in the 2022 survey. They move seasonally between the Chobe riverfront, the Linyanti-Kwando waterways and the Okavango’s permanent channels as water elsewhere dries up.

What does a community levy on a Botswana safari actually fund?

In principle, it funds the local trust holding the Wildlife Management Area concession, covering jobs, schools and services. In practice, researchers have questioned how much control trusts retain since Botswana’s 2021 tourism policy shift, so it is reasonable to ask an operator directly which trust holds the land and what it currently decides.

Do the northern corridors cost more than a standard Okavango-Chobe trip?

Generally yes, since bed limits and exclusivity in Linyanti, Selinda and Kwando follow the same high-value, low-volume pricing model as the Okavango’s private concessions. Travelling in the November-to-April migration window can offset some of that cost through lower seasonal rates.