Third Bridge

The bridge is three planks wide and crosses a channel of black-tea water about eight metres across. On my first crossing, in a hired Land Cruiser with more faith than clearance, I felt the planks flex under the tyres. They hold — they have held thousands of vehicles over decades — but the engineering gives nothing away. On the other side, under a canopy of ancient leadwood trees, the campsite opens up: a handful of sites marked by rough fireplaces, no fences, no shop, no electricity, no Wi-Fi. The closest thing to a facility is a drop toilet in a brick structure that advertises its presence before you see it. I set up my tent and immediately felt, for the first time in months, genuinely off-grid.

Third Bridge is the most celebrated overland campsite in Botswana and possibly in southern Africa, and the reasons are elemental rather than amenable. The site sits deep inside Moremi Game Reserve, surrounded by mopane woodland and delta channels, far enough from the park gates that day visitors rarely make it this far. You must self-cater, self-navigate, and self-rescue if your vehicle decides the channel crossing was a poor decision. The people who come here have generally planned to come here, which creates a community of the like-minded around the evening campfires.

The wildlife at Third Bridge is not incidental to the campsite — it is continuous with it. The boundary between human space and animal space does not exist. I watched a large troop of baboons systematically dismantle a neighbouring camper’s braai setup at six in the morning while the camper, still half-asleep, tried to shoo them with a spatula. The baboons were unmoved. The camper had a Rolex watch and a well-appointed vehicle and the baboons had absolutely no respect for either of these things, which I found philosophically satisfying.

The hippos own the night here. They come out of the channels at dusk to graze the short grass between the camp sites, and they return before dawn. Their grazing sounds are unglamorous — a heavy, wet tearing of grass — but the footprints they leave in the morning, enormous padded impressions pressed into the soft ground inches from tent pegs, communicate something important about the relationship between sleepers and megafauna. A lion walked through the camp one night at about two in the morning. I know this because I heard it — the low saw-cut sound of a contact call — and in the morning the guide at the next site pointed to tracks that led between the tents and directly across the fireplace of a group who had inexplicably left food on the ground.

The cooking at Third Bridge is whatever you brought from Maun, augmented by whatever you didn’t eat at lunch, cooked on a grate over mopane wood coals that smell like nothing else on earth — slightly sweet, very dense, burning slow enough that you can add a steak at nine and still have coals at midnight. I cooked a lot of simple things at that fireplace: tinned tomatoes with eggs and bread, steaks with salt, a pot of lentils that I ate for two days. The food tasted better than it had any right to. The darkness helped. So did the sound of hippos.

When to go: June through September for dry-season access — the black-cotton soil tracks leading to Third Bridge can become impassable in the wet season even with a 4x4. Early morning game drives from the campsite are superb in July and August when the cold, dry air is sharp and the animals are active until mid-morning. Book the DWNP campsite online well in advance; peak-season sites fill three to four months ahead.