Welcome to Maun

As the main gateway to the Okavango Delta, Maun (pronounced ‘mau-UUnn’) is Botswana’s primary tourism hub. With good accommodation and a reliably mad mix of bush pilots, tourists, campers, volunteers and luxury safari-philes, it’s a decent enough base for a day or two, though it's earned something of a reputation for petty crime. The town itself has little going for it – it’s strung out over kilometres with not much... Read More

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Recent articles

Botswana: the rewards of self-drive safaris

Botswana may have a reputation as the most exclusive safari destination in Africa, but it does offer an incredibly tempting alternative to the fly-in, upmarket-tented-camp experience: the more budget-friendly self-drive safari. Botswana is made for road (and road-less) trips – it is big-sky country, a land of flood plains, deserts and eternal horizons. Drive yourself and you'll undoubtedly have one of the continent's most intimate safari experiences.

Self-drivers camping beneath the southern sky in northern Botswana. Image by Edwin Remsberg / Getty Images
Anthony Ham
Lonely Planet Writer

The Okavango: why you need a safari in Botswana's delta

Sitting at the geographical heart of southern Africa, Botswana's Okavango Delta is the closest thing to Eden left on the planet. Amid the sandy thorn-scrub of the Kalahari Desert, its 15,000 square kilometres of champagne-coloured rivers, papyrus-choked reed beds and lily-covered lagoons represent one of the largest wetland wildernesses in the world − a place where classic African wildlife thrives unmolested and the safari experience is second to none.

Lion on the hunt of buffalo in the Okavango Delta, Botswana. Image by Brendon Cremer / NIS / Getty Images
Paula Hardy
Lonely Planet Writer

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