Chobe National Park

The most remarkable feature of the Chobe National Park is its huge concentration of elephants. But it's not just the elephants that make this special park worth visiting. The Chobe National Park is internationally famous for its predators - lions and spotted hyenas in particular as well as astonishingly high numbers of other big game species.

The 11 000 square kilometre national park has an astonishing variety of habitats, which range from floodplains, through woodlands of teak, mopane and acacia, to verdant grasslands studded with huge baobabs and riverine forest bordering the Chobe River. Flowing along the park's northern boundaries are the wildlife-rich Linyanti and Chobe Rivers, while in the south the misnamed Savuti Marsh is a huge open savanna.

Chobe is a national park, like so many in Africa, that is subject to the seasons - the rains above all. With the advent of the wet season in October/November, the waterholes and pans in the back country fill up and the game tends to drift off into the remote central areas while the Savuti region becomes a vital summer grazing area for huge herds of zebra and wildebeest. But the rains are over by April and the dry season changes the mood.

The life-supporting clay pans in the mopane woodlands disappear as the dry season wears on, and the scattered elephant and buffalo populations congregate into larger herds. These herds migrate to the permanent water sources of the Chobe and Linyanti rivers, gathering there in their thousands. The game viewing along the Chobe River from June to October in particular is awesome. As soon as the rain arrives again, most animals disperse back to the labyrinth of woodlands but game viewing remains good nonetheless.

The rains bring a further bonus in the excellent birding that is to be had as intra-African and Palaearctic migrants arrive to join the resident bird species.

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