Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA-3.0 / GFDL
Capital: Gaborone
Population: 2.3 million+
Language: English, Setswana
1 – Chobe National Park (also above)
Chobe National Park, in Botswana’s far north near where Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe almost meet, became a national park in 1968 and is named for the Chobe River, which joins the Zambezi at Kazungula on its way to Victoria Falls.
The star is the Chobe Riverfront near Kasane, where boat cruises drift past one of Africa’s greatest concentrations of elephants, while inland lie the Savuti Marsh, the Linyanti wetlands and more than 450 bird species.
Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton remarried on the edge of Chobe on 10 October 1975, about 16 months after their divorce, in a quiet bush ceremony conducted by the local district commissioner.
2 – Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park
Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park, straddling the Botswana–South Africa border deep in the southern Kalahari, was formally opened on 12 May 2000, joining South Africa’s Kalahari Gemsbok National Park, founded in 1931, with Botswana’s Gemsbok National Park.
Drive the red dunes and the dry Nossob and Auob riverbeds by 4×4, working from waterhole to waterhole for gemsbok, springbok, cheetahs, leopards and the Kalahari’s famous black-maned lions.
Hailed as Africa’s first transfrontier park, Kgalagadi is run jointly by the two countries, with no fence dividing the Botswana and South African sides, so its wildlife roams across an international border.
3 – Okavango Delta
The Okavango Delta, one of the world’s largest inland deltas, forms where the Okavango River flows down from the Angolan highlands and fans out across the Kalahari in north-western Botswana, never reaching the sea.
Glide the channels and lagoons by mokoro (dugout canoe) or fly over by bush plane around Moremi Game Reserve, which covers much of the central and eastern delta, in search of elephants, lions, leopards, hippos and endangered African wild dogs, amid nearly 500 bird species.
The delta floods at the height of the dry season, from June to August, because the water takes months to arrive from rains in Angola, and in 2014 the Okavango Delta became UNESCO’s 1,000th World Heritage Site.
4 – Tsodilo Hills
The Tsodilo Hills, a cluster of quartzite hills rising abruptly from the flat Kalahari in Botswana’s remote north-west, are sacred to the San and the Hambukushu peoples and became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2001.
Follow trails among the Male, Female and Child hills and a smaller fourth, past more than 4,500 rock paintings of eland, giraffes, rhinos and human figures packed into about 10 km², which have earned Tsodilo the nickname “the Louvre of the Desert”.
Local people believe the hills are home to gods and ancestral spirits who can heal or punish, and in The Lost World of the Kalahari (1958) Laurens van der Post blamed a string of misfortunes, including jammed cameras, on the offended spirits, leaving a note of apology at the rock panel named after him.
5 – Mokolodi Nature Reserve
Mokolodi Nature Reserve, a private, non-profit reserve about 12 km south of Gaborone, was created in 1994 by the Mokolodi Wildlife Foundation on 30 km² of land donated by the Kirby family, with conservation and children’s environmental education at its heart.
An easy day out from the capital, Mokolodi offers game drives, guided walks and horseback safaris among giraffe, zebra, kudu and white rhino, along with rhino tracking, a reptile park and rescued cheetahs.
Small as it is, Mokolodi is where Cheetah Conservation Botswana began, and its rhinos were among the first white rhinos returned to Moremi Game Reserve in the Okavango Delta.
6 – The Kalahari Desert
The Kalahari Desert, a vast basin of sand, grass and thornscrub that covers most of Botswana, reaching into Namibia and South Africa, has been home to the San for many thousands of years, and takes its name from a Tswana word thought to mean “the great thirst”.
At its heart lies the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, often described as the world’s second-largest game reserve, where fossil river valleys such as Deception Valley turn green after the rains, while to the north-east the Makgadikgadi salt pans, the bed of a vanished lake, draw zebra herds and flamingos around baobab-studded Kubu Island.
For all its name, the Kalahari is not a true desert, since much of it receives enough rain to grow grass and trees, yet it is often described as the world’s largest continuous stretch of sand.
7 – Serowe
Serowe, in eastern Botswana, became the capital of the Bangwato in 1902, when Khama III moved his people there from Palapye, and grew into one of Botswana’s largest traditional villages and the birthplace of Seretse Khama, the country’s first president.
The Khama III Memorial Museum tells the dynasty’s story in the Red House, a building of about 1910 named for its red roof, in the village where the novelist Bessie Head lived and died, and the royal cemetery on Thathaganyana Hill holds Khama III’s grave under a bronze duiker, the Bangwato totem.
Seretse Khama married Ruth Williams, a clerk at a Lloyd’s underwriting firm, in London in 1948, and under pressure from South Africa and Southern Rhodesia Britain kept him out of his homeland until 1956, yet he led Botswana to independence in 1966, a story told in the 2016 film A United Kingdom.