As you look out of the aircraft window on the flight from Victoria Falls to Maun, you are spectator to the Kalahari Desert. This is home to over 120 different species of mammal, including the largest elephant population in Africa. All inhabit their own specialised niche in the teak, mopane and acacia woodlands on these ancient wind-blown sands. It is hard to believe that such a flat, seemingly waterless area can sustain one of the highest animal diversities on earth.

Another phenomenon of this vegetated desert is the hand-shaped Okavango Delta, the second largest inland delta on our planet and an ever-growing and receding waterway. The abundance of animals and birds living in this area of spectacular scenery is what has made the Okavango a most sought-after wildlife destination.

I had decided to explore this region with the Uncharted Africa Safari Company, who operate luxury mobile safaris throughout Botswana. Camp is moved from site to site, giving a change in habitat and animal life. A week later you could visit that same place and never know that a whole safari camp had been based there.

Day One
We were to meet our guide outside the Maun International Airport at midday. Maun is the hub for thousands of travellers each year and aircraft are constantly on the move, taking wildlife enthusiasts into the delta or to Savuti and Chobe national parks. There are now daily flights from Johannesburg to Maun and four flights a week from Victoria Falls.

Our group consisted of two Capetonians, two Melbournites and one Zimbabwean. We met our guide, Graham Hemson, with his comfortable new Land Cruiser, secured our baggage on the roofrack and did a few last minute stops to buy film and a toothbrush before setting off for South Gate in the Moremi National Park.

The two hour drive sped us by villages and cattle outposts while we all got to know who came from where, did what etc. We were to be together for the next eight days, exploring and learning as much as this diverse area could offer us in that time.

After entering the park with two hours of daylight left, we were treated to large herds of impala, elephant, red lechwe, wildebeest, zebra and giraffe in some of the most majestic mopane woodlands I had ever seen in Africa. As the deep red glow of the winter sky coloured the western horizon, the night was heralded in by Venus, the "evening star" (and the brightest object in June's night sky after the moon). As nightfall set in we encountered a number of hyaena on their way to work and hippo as they ambled out of their lagoons to graze on the surrounding grasses.

We spotted the flickering flames of our campfire at an opportune time, as the winter nights in the Kalahari are as cold as the days are hot. We shed the blankets that had kept us so warm for the latter part of the drive and were welcomed by the camp staff. They outnumbered us two to one!

While we were warming ourselves with the penetrating heat of the hardwood fire, the showers in each tent were filled with hot water and hoisted into an elevated position so that we could wash off the "bush talcum powder" - dust - which had coated us on our drive in from Maun. As I stood beneath the spray and looked up into a clean open sky I could see Scorpio stretched out across the western horizon. It was good to be back in the bush again.

Our tents were elaborate affairs of the East African design. Spacious and insect-proof with large gauze windows on either side, they housed an old hospital bed with crisp white linen covered by a large goose-down duvet. The tent was also furnished with a hanging canvas cupboard and a teak hardwood kist with brass corners, hinges and clasp. Next to this was a table with a standing three-paned mirror, a stately old thermos flask containing drinking water and a well-turned wooden bowl offering an assortment of fruit. The front of the tent (all gauze) zipped out into a verandah on which were directors' chairs, a canvas wash basin, a large brass water jug and a hanging canvas toiletry cupboard with a centrally-placed mirror.

After the refreshing shower and a change of clothes, we all met around the warm campfire for drinks before moving into a well-furnished mess tent. The dinner table was softly lit by two large lanterns, whose flames waved us a warm welcome. The table was covered with damask linen, bone-handled silver cutlery and tastefully shaped wine and water glasses.

Our proud and smiling waiters presented us with a dinner of minted pea soup, followed by lemon chicken curry, mint chutney and coriander relish, plum chutney, papadams, mustard seed and cumin potatoes. We still had room for "mango fool" with wafery biscuits served in ramekins as our desert! The long drive, fresh air, excitement and anticipation had earned us an appetite that was more than satisfied with such a delicious dinner, amazingly all cooked on an open fire!

After dinner we sipped hot percolated coffee around the happy flames of the log fire, whose shadows danced across a circle of contented faces. Above was a clear, moonless sky studded with twinkling stars.

As we lay entombed in our cocoons of pure cotton sheets, beneath a goose-down duvet, we were serenaded to sleep by the tinkling of the painted reed frogs.

Day Two
Dawn was heralded by the raucous call of a Natal francolin in a dense clump of tangled undergrowth. There followed the soft greetings of the camp staff who brought hot water to our tents for an early morning wash. As I stood shaving at the steaming canvas basin at the edge of my verandah, a formation of cattle egrets flew over, their white feathers coloured soft pink in the dawn light. Our tents looked across a green bed of papyrus. Massive ebony and rain trees shaded us.

The day began where we had left off, around the hot campfire on this chilly winter morning. During an early breakfast of freshly-prepared fruit salad, home-made muesli, yoghurt, toasted brown bread, strawberry jam and apricot marmalade, we were briefed by our guide on the various kinds of game-viewing activities we would be doing over the next seven days. These included morning and afternoon game drives, all-day drives with a picnic lunch and exploring far into the delta by motor boat.

Our guide Graham Hemson had been working for Uncharted Africa for the past four years. He held a B.Sc. in biology from Oxford University and was presently dividing his time between interpretive guiding and pursuing a Ph.D. on the lions of the Makgadikgadi. We were soon to find out that Graham had a sound knowledge of the area, its birds, grasses, trees, insects, aquatic plants, astronomy, mammals and their varied behaviour.

Within two days we had seen thousands of lechwe and impala, numerous wildebeest, tsessebe, baboons, vervet monkeys, bat eared foxes, black backed jackal, giraffe, zebra, kudu, large herds of elephant, a female leopard and a lion kill! One of our group from Australia had only been in Africa four days and had already been graced with two good lion sightings.

The second of these occurred just before crossing "Third Bridge". This is made of mopane poles attached to wooden posts embedded in the channel and lined on either side by large tasseled heads of papyrus. We thought we would like to photograph our vehicle crossing the bridge which is so typical of the delta. No sooner had we mentioned this than a pride of lionesses and their cubs padded their way across the bridge. We slowly followed them, watching the rear guard of the pride. Little did we know that the advance party had killed a fully-grown female zebra some 500 m away, without so much as a sound!

We came upon the lions' breakfast some five minutes after it had been brought down. We spent the next two hours in the rich morning light, firing off rolls of camera film while the lions opened up the black and white fingerprint patterns of the striped African horse. The assorted pride of nine snarled greedily at each other as they fed from all parts of the carcass.

A young male specialised in burying his head deep inside the carcass to feed. His whole head and neck were dark red and his bloodied mane hung in burgundy dreadlocks. Some of our group found this savage behaviour difficult to witness, but realised that it was all part of the intricate chain of life in a wild and natural environment.

Graham gave lengthy explanations of the behaviour of various members in the pride - an informative commentary against a background of snarls, grunts and deep-throated growls!

Day Three
This morning we said farewell to our home at the end of the peninsula and drove for some three hours through the most scenic and game-rich area we had seen so far. We boarded a 27 foot-long boat moored in the Xaxanaka channel and prepared to cruise deep into the delta. Our bed rolls and camping equipment were tied onto the roof and we were seated towards the front of the vessel. Our back-up crew chatted happily with the coxswain, Lucky, who had spent the last eight years plying the maze of channels in this part of the delta.

For three hours we slowly cruised on the gin-clear water, home to a variety of colourful water lilies. The channels and lagoons were lined with stocky water figs, which offered perfect roosting sites and perches for darters and cormorants to dry their wings after an underwater spearfishing expedition. Malachite kingfishers sped across our bow like purple darts. African jacanas strode with purpose from pad to pad as they fed on the insects that had taken up temporary dwellings on the lilies. In every lagoon we encountered a resident pair of fish eagles proudly overseeing their territory and throwing back their heads in cries of exhaltation - who wouldn't, owning such a pretty patch of paradise?

We also encountered hippos in a number of the lagoons; they politely moved out of the narrow channels on our approach. Crocodiles basked on mats of floating vegetation and allowed us a close approach before sliding into the still water without causing a ripple.

In the late afternoon Lucky pointed the nose of our long craft into a gap in the reeds and we found ourselves staring into a cathedral of massive strangler figs, ebonies and sausage trees whose large spreading limbs intertwined with each other to form a cave of vegetation. The beauty and isolation of our new camping site gave rise to excitement and anticipation of the night ahead.

On our return from a sunset cruise we found our bedrolls laid out and mosquito nets set up. A bucket shower bulging with heated water was lazily swinging from side to side below a strong ebony limb from which it hung. On a modest open fire, beside the lime green buttress root of a sycamore fig, our talented chefs, Foster Dube and Victor Hamandwana, prepared a dinner which started with tuna mousse accompanied by home-made poppyseed, sesame seed and cheese wafers. This was followed by roast fillet of beef with rosemary and brandy cream sauce, broccoli and roasted butternut. Our dessert comprised of none other than Marie Claire fruit brulée - fruit salad topped with crème fraiche, yoghurt and toffee. Our meal was enhanced by some of South Africa's finest wines along with an accompaniment from the calls of three different frog species and a toad who serenaded our dinner from the surrounding reeds.

It didn't take much more to put us to sleep beneath our hanging mosquito nets under a ceiling of a million twinkling stars.

While we were spending this night on an island in the Delta, our last camp was dismantled, loaded onto a five-ton back-up vehicle and driven ahead to prepare our next camp in the Moremi National Park.

Day Four
In the morning we went for a walk to see whom we had been sharing our well-treed island with and found evidence of elephant, hippo and baboons. A herd of lechwe bounded through shallow water, the splashes from each well-splayed hoof back-lit by the bright morning sun and reflected at us like a thousand coloured diamonds.

On our return to the boat, everything was packed and loaded. We departed, leaving little evidence that a band of humans had enjoyed the cover of such an enchanting grove of island trees.

Around midday we reached our game viewing vehicle and climbed onto the roof, which had a most ingeniously-designed form of seating, which allowed a birds-eye view of all that we drove through. We must have been 12 feet above the ground.

The two-hour game drive to our new site seemed to be a never-ending array of kudu and giraffe. Our new camp was in quite a different habitat. Tents were discreetly sited in a croton grove looking out onto a vast open plain scattered with impala, lechwe, warthog and zebra. We were in the middle of a busy corridor that animals used to move from their feeding grounds in the mopane woodland across to a large lagoon some two kilometres away.

Day Five
In the morning we were eager to explore our new area. After yet another healthy breakfast we set off with blankets up to our necks to keep out the early morning chill. We had not gone 400 metres when we encountered a pride of nine lion cubs from three litters and a single mother acting as nanny. We spent most of the morning with them, expending screeds of film as they moved onto a termite mound to soak up the warmth of a winter morning's sun.

The mound looked as if it had a melted caramel covering, as these tawny cats draped themselves over it, looking idly out in every direction. Wary impala stood staring from a safe distance, their sharp alarm snorts informing all of the lions' presence.

That afternoon, on visiting the pride again, we noticed that two more females and two big maned males had joined them. One can only watch resting lions for so long, so we moved on to the very scenic lagoon close to camp. The short grassland surrounding it was being grazed by over 100 lechwe. There was a large pod of hippo in the water and a pair of wattled crane with a downy brown chick at the water's edge.

During the next 43 minutes, a never-ending flow of red-billed quelea flew in to drink right in front of us. They came in like black, waving ribbons, undulating from as far as we could see, possibly four or five million in number, wings beating furiously and each bird chirping incessantly before landing in the reed beds. With hundreds of birds on each reed, it wasn't long before the whole bed was bowing to their combined weight, reeds bending horizontally to touch the water as they quenched their thirst after an energetic day of feeding in the veldt.

We marvelled at the fact that the multitudes of these fast-flying birds never collided and all seemed to turn and dip at the same time without command, or leader. It was air traffic control at its best! However, the spectacle would not have been appreciated as much by wheat farmers, as these little sparrow-like birds eat twice their weight in seed each day!

As the sky turned from crimson to black and the quelea settled down to roost, we decided to come back to this site before dawn the following day to enjoy another one of nature's most impressive shows.

On our return to camp we found our dinner table set out in the open next to a leaping fire of mopane and leadwood logs. We finished the day with another gourmet dinner of carrot and orange soup followed by ostrich Masala, cooked in a sliced mushroom and sherry sauce, served with roasted cauliflower, coriander, turnips, broccoli and potato stacks. We put our taste buds to rest with black cherry clafoutis and cream.

As we sat under yet another cloudless night sky, the milky way with its millions of bright, twinkling stars stretched from horizon to horizon. It reminded us of the never-ending flocks of quelea we had been privileged to see.

Day Six and Seven
The last few days of our safari were filled with quelea flyby's, lagoons teaming with noisy, lethargic hippo and open plains covered in lechwe, zebra, tsessebe and wildebeest. Our fortune continued with lion sightings on each outing.

On our last morning we said farewell to the staff who had been responsible for making us feel totally spoilt. Graham had become a good friend; we had all shared many laughs and life-bonding wildlife experiences. Our aircraft lifted us away from Xaxanaxa airstrip and we looked down on one of the world's greatest wildlife sanctuaries, wedged into the heart of the Okavango Delta.

Harare-based Garth Thompson is a professional safari guide who has travelled extensively throughout Africa.

Published in Travel Africa Edition Ten: Winter 1999/2000 Text is subject to Worldwide Copyright (c)