I Spent Three Safaris Staring at Leaves Before I Learned to Go in Winter

For a long time I was convinced a safari had to happen in summer. That was the whole picture in my head, green grass, warm nights, everything lush and glowing the way it looks on the brochures. So for three trips in a row I went in the warmer months, and for three trips in a row I came home with a memory card full of foliage and very little else. I would catch a shape shifting somewhere in the thick green, lift the camera, and by the time I found it in the frame the animal had already melted back into the leaves. I told myself that was simply how it went. Wildlife is shy, I am unlucky, maybe next time. It honestly never occurred to me that I had the season completely upside down.

What changed my mind was a quiet argument with a guide and, not long after that, a corner of Botswana I had never even heard of.

The guide was the one who first said it out loud. If you actually want to see things, he told me, come in winter. I remember pushing back, because winter sounded like the last time anybody sensible would fly somewhere to sit outside all day. He explained it in a way that finally landed. In the dry months the grass dies back and the leaves fall, so the whole landscape thins out and the sightlines stretch. More than that, the water disappears from all the little scattered places it collects in summer, so the animals have to come to the few places that still hold it. You are not chasing them through a green wall any more. They gather, and you wait near the water, and they come to you. It was the exact opposite of everything I had been doing.

So the following June I found myself in the far eastern corner of Botswana, in a place called the Northern Tuli, where the Limpopo and the Shashe rivers meet and three countries touch at the same point. I had booked a stretch at a private reserve there that people in the region apparently call the Land of the Giants, a name I assumed was marketing until I saw the elephant herds and quietly took it back. The reserve runs across something like forty two thousand hectares of privately held wilderness, and the land is far more varied than I expected, open plains in one direction, rocky hills and sandstone ridges in another, riverine forest down along the water and marshland off to the side. Planning a winter Botswana safari here felt different from the delta trips friends had raved about, quieter and less obvious, and I liked it more for that.

The dryness was real. Someone mentioned the reserve is rain-free the overwhelming majority of the year, a figure they had measured across more than two decades, and I believed it, because I did not see a single cloud worth worrying about. The days were cool and comfortable, which I had not anticipated. I had braced for either sweat or shivering and got neither, just long, clear, mild days that were easy to spend in an open vehicle. And the animals were exactly where the guide had promised. On my second morning we sat near a waterhole and I watched more elephants in one place than I had seen across all three of my previous trips combined. Apparently this reserve holds some of the largest elephant herds on any private reserve on the continent, and it has a serious reputation for leopard too, which is why the photographers keep coming back. I am not much of a birder, but even I noticed the variety, and I was told later that more than three hundred and fifty species have been recorded across the rivers and ridges.

The guiding was the part that quietly humbled me. My old assumption that I was just unlucky did not survive contact with people who genuinely knew the ground. The guides here have been at it for years, the average tenure is around fourteen years and a few of them have been reading this same stretch of bush for something closer to four decades. You feel that. Our guide would slow the vehicle for no reason I could see, and a minute later there would be the thing he had somehow known was there. I also learned the area carries a deep human history, with traces of occupation stretching back over a million years, which put my little frustration about photographs into a slightly humbler frame.

What surprised me almost as much was how much choice there was in where and how to stay. I had lazily assumed a reserve was one lodge and that was that. Instead there are six separate properties spread across the same wilderness, each with its own character. There is a five-star villa option called Euphorbia, a larger lodge with luxury suites that clearly suits families, a tented lodge set on the bank of the Limpopo, a smaller tent camp for people who want something more stripped back, and a couple of exclusive-use homes for groups who want a whole property to themselves. Looking through the range of Botswana lodges afterwards, I realised a honeymooning couple, a big family and a group of friends could all book the same reserve and have completely different trips inside the same forty two thousand hectares, with the same wildlife wandering through.

Getting there was easier than the remoteness suggested. There is an airfield inside the reserve itself, and a connecting flight runs out of Lanseria near Johannesburg, though I came by road, which took most of a day and ended with a border crossing at a point called Pont Drift. None of it felt like the expedition I had imagined.

What stays with me is not really the photographs, although this time I finally have some worth keeping. It is the small, slightly embarrassing lesson that I had been fighting the season for years. I kept turning up when the bush was at its most crowded and green and hardest to see into, then blaming my luck. The cold, dry, unglamorous middle of the year turned out to be the whole trick. I went looking for animals in the season that hides them, and it took a stubborn guide and a quiet corner of the Tuli to turn that around.