Moremi Game Reserve

Has everything! Seclusion, bush experience, interesting routes and roads/bridges coupled with diverse wildlife and birds. Water, water, water - in Souther Africa it is like magic bringing everything to life and abundance! A must see/stop over for at least 3-4 days on a tight budget, even longer if you can!

Moremi was the highlight of the trip. Due to its game reserve status, the number of people allowed into the area provided a much more secluded experience. We honestly did not see another tour group for about a week. The isolation and massive amounts of wildlife made it my premier destination in Botswana. Highly, highly recommend it.

A very wide area where you can find almost all the animals living in Botswana. The park is so wide that often you won't see other people, and you'll live a true bush experience.

This was my favorite park...I have never seen colors like this in the grass, trees and land before...something very spiritual about Moremi.

Boating and birding at Xigera on a different level to everything else ever seen.

Beautiful and quiet, and one of the best places in Africa to view wild dogs.

Was very dry!

We saw some nice heards of Red Lechwe and quite a few tsessebe, hippos, wildebeest, giraffe, zebra, warthogs, elephants, lots of bird life. We did not find the area teaming with game and we didn’t see any cats. It was a new area to us so we were excited about everything we saw, but it wasn’t as prolific as Chobe National Park.
The roads were really terrible and the grass really was as high as an elephants eye.

Same reason as above.

Arriving at the gate we were warned that it was very wet in the reserve and that certain tracks were impassable, one of which was the track into the Khwai reserve that we were due to take a few days later. Undaunted we set off and although we did encounter some very large and deep puddles our initial impression was that the situation wasn't too bad.

The drive was fairly uneventful as far as animals were concerned, apart from a first ever sighting of a Lesser Spotted Eagle and the first Red Lechwe of the trip.

We were entertained for quite a while by a couple of Yellow-billed Storks expertly fishing and also by a Monitor Lizard basking in the late afternoon sun on a termite mound.

Our first full day in Moremi dawned dry and overcast after another night of rain and thunder. Little did we realize how quickly a significant sighting would be made and within 5 minutes of leaving camp we were parked and watching a male Leopard in a tree. We spent almost two hours watching him before he finally came down the tree and moved away.

We headed off to see what else was on offer, but very soon it became apparent that there was even more standing water after the overnight rain. This fact was later born out when we spotted a crocodile actually swimming in the flooded wheel tracks. OK, it was a young one, but even so, it’s not a very common sight. The day was mainly one of spotting and photographing birds, including a couple more to add to our all time list.

Our second full day in Moremi was much the same as our first, although the weather was drier and there was no early surprise Leopard sighting. A couple more new bird species, but perhaps the highlight was our first encounter with a Rock Monitor Lizard. We witnessed a rather serious disagreement in a Baboon troop as an alpha-male chased an interloper round and around a lake at speed until he had been seen off and found another tree.

The remainder of the day was again mainly bird photography, punctuated by Wildebeest, Impala, Giraffe, Red Lechwe, Kudu and Leopard sightings.

Probably the highlight was the Southern Carmine Bee-eaters. We had spotted them the day before, but this time it appeared we were disturbing potential food sources for them as we drove along. We were being accompanied by up to four birds flying alongside us, it really was a beautiful sight.

We finished the day with another visit to the Yellow-billed Storks fishing and then back to camp for dinner. What greeted us when we got there was one of the best sunsets we were to witness during the whole trip.

All that remained in Moremi was the following day’s game drive to the gate and then the transfer into Khwai. Three memorable sightings were in store for us between the camp and the gate, which strangely happened at the same location. We were watching a large group of Red Lechwe, the most we had seen all trip, as overhead was flying a majestic African Marsh Harrier. As we were concentrating on these, there was a commotion behind and to our right hand side and what was probably the largest pod of Hippos we have ever seen were running down a track to a new flooded area. Magical to watch.