Maun

I first heard Maun Airport before I landed at it. The flight from Johannesburg descends over miles of flat scrubland and then, suddenly, there is a runway in the sand and a collection of low buildings that does not look like it should be an international airport but is. Three small charter planes were already idling beside the terminal when I landed, their propellers turning slowly, waiting to take people north into the delta. The smell when I stepped off the plane was woodsmoke, aviation fuel, and the dry Kalahari air that has a quality of its own — clean in the way that things are clean when there is nothing nearby to make them dirty.

Maun is a town that exists to send people somewhere else. Almost everything in its economy — the lodges, the charter operators, the equipment hire shops, the mechanics who specialize in Land Cruisers — is oriented around the Okavango Delta that begins roughly ten kilometers to the north and west. But the town itself is not merely functional. It has the particular energy of a frontier settlement: provisional, slightly improvised, full of people who came from somewhere else and stayed without entirely planning to.

The Thamalakane River runs along its edge — not part of the delta proper, but connected to it — and in the dry season it can be a muddy trickle, while in a good flood year it spreads wide and the crocodiles that were invisible at the edge of town suddenly become very visible indeed. The camps and lodges strung along the river range from genuinely basic — concrete blocks, hot water when the solar system cooperates, a bar with a single beer brand — to places that have heated pools and helicopter pads. The full economic spectrum of Botswana tourism exists within a two-kilometer stretch of riverbank.

I spent an extra day in Maun that I had not planned. My flight into the delta was delayed by a bush fire that closed an airstrip, and rather than sitting in the terminal I walked the town. I found a butcher selling game meat — kudu and impala and springbok — hanging in the cool of a back room behind a curtain. I found a hardware store that also sold secondhand paperbacks, apparently for no commercial reason anyone could explain. I found a mechanic who was rebuilding a 1986 Land Cruiser engine in the open air with an audience of three children and a dog, and who, when I asked about the carburetor, explained its workings with more evident pleasure than most people bring to anything.

The Old Bridge Backpackers, right on the Thamalakane, is the town’s legendary gathering point — the kind of place where overland travelers coming from all directions compare notes, share horror stories about the road from Namibia, and sit in the evening watching the river for crocodiles with a sundowner. The information density of those evening conversations, for anyone planning to go into the delta, is worth a night’s stay on its own.

When to go: Maun works as a stop-off at any time of year, but the town is most animated from May through October when the delta tourism season is running and the mix of travelers passing through is most varied. Accommodation is cheapest in the green season (November to March) when flights to camps are less frequent. The town’s Independence Day celebrations in late September are a genuine local event worth happening across.