The Kalahari draws its name from the Tswana word, Kgala, meaning “The great thirst”. One of the world’s most fabled deserts, the Kalahari conjures up images of shifting red sand dunes, vast emptiness and withered animals eking out a living in a harsh thirstland under the relentless African sun. Like everything in nature, the real story of the Kalahari is much more complicated than this. To be sure, the Kalahari can be a stark and inhospitable environment, but it also holds surprises – the verdant Eden of the Okavango Delta system, for example, and the seasonal transformation that occurs when the summer rains come. This is The Green Season, a time when dormant seeds germinate with the rain, and the desert floor becomes a carpet of nutritious grassland.

Conventional wisdom has it that the only good time to go on safari in Botswana is during the dry winter months, when visibility is good, and scare water supplies forces animals to converge at waterholes. Our adventure across the Green Kalahari will reveal just how dynamic the game viewing can be in the “off season” of the summer months. We’ll enjoy vivid blue skies, lush green hues, and a brilliant wildlife experience as we make our way from the Central Kalahari Game Reserve – along the famous Deception Valley and its satellite pans, into the Okavango Delta itself, and then on to the Savute Marsh of Chobe National Park. If you connect the dots correctly, Botswana in summer can be a wonderland, prolific birdlife, the apex predators, ungulates galore, and rarities such as the sitatunga, brown hyena and aardvark are all possible.

Much more than a wildlife safari, our journey will also take us to remote settlements of Kalahari Bushmen where we’ll be able to learn much from them about their lives and relation with the natural world. We’ll also visit the fabled Tsodilo Hills, mystical and still mysterious; these remote hills are home to one of the world’s richest collections of pre-historic art, and remain a place of profound spiritual import to many communities in Botswana.

I was very lucky to spend a wonderful year doing field research in Botswana, when I was a graduate student. While the country has changed dramatically since then – much for the better – the wilderness remains, as before, vibrant, vital, and infinitely alluring. I look forward to sharing this truly incredible experience with you.

Bill Buskirk