Seronga

The ferry across the Okavango River at Shakawe brought us to Seronga in a twelve-metre aluminium boat that fit the minibus, three motorcycles, a load of timber, and about thirty people with no particular arrangement and no particular concern about stability. The crossing took twenty minutes. A fish eagle screamed from a date palm on the far bank. Everyone disembarked onto a dirt track that dead-ended into the northern Panhandle’s papyrus world, and most people scattered into paths I couldn’t see from the track. I followed the directions I had written from a forum post and walked through the village — corrugated iron roofs, a small school with a painted fence, dogs that regarded me with mild professional interest — to the community campsite beside the water.

Seronga is as far from the luxury delta experience as it is possible to get while remaining in the delta. The village sits at the very top of the Panhandle, that narrow strip of Botswana reaching up toward the Namibian border, where the Okavango River is still recognisably a river before it disperses into the broader wetland. The community-based tourism here is run by the Okavango Polers Trust — a cooperative that provides guides, mokoros, and camping for travellers who find their way here by public transport and fortitude rather than charter flight and credit limit.

My guide was a man named Godfrey who had grown up two minutes’ walk from the campsite and who had been poling mokoros since he was fourteen. He knew the channels not as a map but as a series of known decisions — left at the dead fig tree, straight through the gap in the papyrus that looked like a dead end but wasn’t, right where the water turned the colour of coffee to the colour of tea. He knew where the sitatungas fed in the early morning and where the lechwe gathered in the afternoon. He knew where not to cross without checking first. He navigated without compass or GPS and arrived where he intended to arrive every time, which in retrospect was remarkable in an environment where one papyrus channel looks exactly like every other papyrus channel.

The experience in the northern Panhandle is different from the inner delta in ways that are not just about price. The floodplain is still being used by the people who live beside it — for fishing, for fetching water, for cutting papyrus to build roof thatch. There is a quality of daily life running alongside the tourist activity that the inner delta’s exclusive concessions have no equivalent of. A woman in a boat loaded with fish passed us in the channel. Two boys were swimming in a pool off the main channel, shrieking and splashing, completely delighted by themselves. An old man in rubber boots was cutting papyrus with a panga and loading it into a dugout canoe. These things were happening regardless of our presence, which made our presence feel more real and less curated.

The food at the campsite was simple and honestly cooked — a meat stew with pap that appeared at a set time in the evening from a kitchen I never entered, served by a woman named Bonang who had no interest in my opinions about anything. I thought the stew was excellent. I kept this to myself. The mornings were cold in June and the papyrus held the frost in a way that made the channels steam slightly until nine o’clock. You eat a plate of fried eggs from the communal kitchen, wrap yourself in a fleece, and get into the mokoro and let Godfrey decide where you go.

When to go: May through August for the peak flood, when water levels are highest, the papyrus channels are fully navigable, and wildlife concentrations peak in the surrounding floodplains. The cold dry-season mornings (June–July) are uncomfortable but spectacularly clear. Seronga is accessible year-round by ferry from Shakawe, but the rainy season (November–March) can complicate road connections and reduce water clarity in the channels.