Tuli Block

We almost skipped Tuli Block entirely. Every map of Botswana points north, toward the Okavango, and I’d spent months telling people that’s where we were headed. Then a friend in Gaborone laughed at me and said I was ignoring the country’s best-kept secret. So Lia and I rerouted, and drove east instead of north, into a strip of private land squeezed between Zimbabwe and South Africa along the Limpopo and Shashe rivers. Almost nobody we knew had been. That alone made it worth it.

The landscape is nothing like the wetlands I’d pictured. No mokoro, no flooded plains. Instead: sandstone koppies rising out of dry riverbeds, baobabs so old and swollen they look like they’re melting, and a stillness that made our first game drive feel almost eerie. Our guide at Mashatu, the largest reserve in the Block, told us it grew out of old cattle ranches consolidated back in the 1960s and 70s — which explains why it feels less manicured, less performed, than some of the more famous circuits. Locals call this the Land of Giants, and by our second evening we understood why.

We must have seen close to a hundred elephants in three days — the reserve holds roughly 1,200 of them on private land alone, and you feel that density everywhere, in trampled thorn scrub and fresh dung on every track. One evening a breeding herd crossed maybe twenty meters from our vehicle, unbothered, matriarch first, and Lia grabbed my arm without saying a word. We didn’t need to say anything. There’s also a strange historical layer under all of it: this concession traces back to a 19th-century land grant from King Khama III to prospectors, decades before anyone was thinking about tourism. Standing among the koppies at dusk, it’s easy to imagine that older, harder version of this place.

We stayed in a tented camp with no fence between us and the bush, and I’ll admit I didn’t sleep much the first night — every rustle sounded like something enormous. By the third night I’d stopped flinching and started listening on purpose, which I think is the whole point of a place like Tuli. It asks you to slow down in a way the busier parks don’t.

When to go: We visited in the dry winter months, May through September, when the animals crowd close to the rivers and the bush thins out enough to actually see them — if you want elephants at point-blank range, this is the window that delivers.