A Guide to Chobe National Park

With a friend of mine from Salzburg, we took on a massive roadtrip across Africa, crossing six countries and nearly 6000km in two weeks. We started with a week in Cape Town on the southern tip of beautiful South Africa before flying up to Windhoek in Namibia where we picked up our rental 4x4 to begin our epic adventure.

With six days of challenging, intense and wild adventures through Namibia, we headed eastward to cross the border in Botswana, the next country on our itinerary to explore. We spent our first few days in Botswana exploring the revered Okavango Delta, a fertile hub for plants, birds and animals, best seen from the water in a traditional mokoro.

From there, we headed northward into Chobe National Park, which borders the Okavango Delta and shares many of the same animals.

How to Visit Chobe National Park

Chobe, like all of the other national parks we visited in southern Africa, can be self-driven with your own vehicle at your own pace or, given how terrible the roads are, you can also opt to hire a driver and go on safari with someone who knows the roads expertly.

The drive from where we camped at Mbudi in the Okavango to the Savuti camp in the heart of Chobe was quite terrible and took us a good three hours to conquer even though it's less than 100km. We also felt the animal spotting was nowhere near as good as in Etosha National Park (or any of the later parks we would visit) and Chobe is three times the price of Etosha!

However, it was still an experience I wouldn't have wanted to miss out on - there's nothing like driving along a maddeningly potholed and sandy road bumping around in a 4x4 and spotting a pack of elephants lumbering out of the bush ahead of you. Sure, it was insane at times, but I think in both a good way and a not-so-good way and it was the sum total of the experience that made it memorable and rewarding.

We entered Chobe at the south gate from Mbudi where we signed in and paid our park permit fees and showed we had proof of campsite booked for the night. We left at the north gate heading to Zimbabwe where we signed out. For our one-night stay in Chobe, we camped at the Savuti Campsite which is a centrally located and well-maintained camp. There's no fences at this camp so you might wake up to springbok strolling through your site! Be warned, the roads to get here really, really suck. 4x4s only.

And, admittedly, because the roads aren't great, I didn't get to take a lot of photos. We were really just focused on getting where we were going in one piece.