UPCOMING EXPEDITION
BOTSWANA
Delta to DesertFrom the water channels of the Okavango Delta to the silence of the Makgadikgadi Salt Pans - this is Botswana at its most extraordinary. Ten days in two of Africa's most iconic wild environments.
Snapshot of tripBOTSWANA • SOUTHERN AFRICA
BOTSWANA
Delta to DesertOKAVANGO DELTA • KALAHARI DESERT
From the water channels of the Okavango Delta to the silence of the Makgadikgadi Salt Pans - this is Botswana at its most extraordinary. Ten days in two of Africa's most iconic wild environments, led by Françoise V and Russell Bergh.
WHEN: April 2027 • dates TBC
GROUP SIZE: 6 Guests
LENGTH: 10 days • 9 nights
Experiences: Luxury Safari Lodges, visit to Elephant Sanctuary, safari game drives, mokoro through papyrus channels, baobabs, quad bikes across the salt pans, meerkat encounter, boat cruises, light scenic aircraft transfers between destinations, and evenings around the fire under African skies.
Trip leaders2027 dates will be announced soon.
Be the first to know when bookings open - places are limited to six guests and are expected to fill quickly.
THE INVITATION
Expedition ExperienceThere is a sound the wild makes at four in the morning.
You will remember it.
Water arrives in the Okavango from a thousand kilometres away and simply stops - spreading into a delta that never reaches the sea. Then, a short flight south, the ground turns to salt and the horizon goes flat and the Kalahari gives you nothing to look at but everything to feel. Two landscapes that should not belong to the same country, in the same ten days.
We move between them by light aircraft, because that is the honest way to understand the scale of this place. We stay long enough in each camp that the animals stop registering us. We eat around fires. We take it all in.
This is not a schedule to be completed. It is time in a place that ask nothing of you but your presence and curiosity.
Not an escape. But a return.
ITINERARY • CHAPTER ONE
Khwai Private Reserve
The Okavango DeltaThe Khwai Private Reserve is two hundred thousand hectares of unfenced wilderness on the north-eastern shoulder of the Okavango Delta, pressed between Moremi Game Reserve and Chobe National Park. Very few places in Botswana hold this much variety in one horizon: mopane clusters jostling for space with riverine forest, acacia woodland giving way to open floodplain, seasonal waterholes, and the winding channels that lead off the mighty Khwai River.
That diversity is why the wildlife is so rich, and why no two drives here resemble each other. Lion along the treeline at dusk, leopard in the riverine shade, elephant crossing in front of the vehicle with the confidence of animals who have never had reason to fear it, and - if the week is generous - wild dog, moving with an economy that makes everything else look wasteful.
We drive at the animals' pace rather than the clock's, and we take a mokoro out where the channels allow. This is a wilderness that operates entirely on its own terms, and Khwai is where you stop expecting it to meet you halfway.
CHAPTER TWO
Six inches above the water.Northern Okavango
Deeper in, water takes over completely. Palm islands, winding channels and broad floodplains set the scene, and wildlife moves freely through a landscape that feels wonderfully unchanged. Papyrus closes above your head; lagoons crowd with day lilies. A mokoro puts your eyes level with all of it - no engine, no conversation, just the pole finding the bottom and a reed frog the size of a thumbnail holding on beside your shoulder.
It is remote, and yet instantly grounding. Within a day the Delta's rhythm quietly becomes your own - you wake earlier, talk less, and stop checking how long anything is taking.
From the air it resolves into something else entirely: a hand of silver channels spread across the sand, the shadow of the aircraft crossing herds that don't look up. Only from up there do you understand that the whole system is a river that never finds the sea. This is one of the last genuinely wild places left on earth, and it lets you inside without ever pretending to be tame.
CHAPTER THREE
Like nowhere else on earth.The Makgadikgadi
A short scenic flight south and the water is gone. The Makgadikgadi is the bed of a lake that dried out long before anyone was here to watch it - salt to the horizon, a surface so flat that distance loses its meaning and your own footprints seem like an intrusion. Quad bikes at sunrise across it, and ancient baobabs standing where the islands used to be, holding the only shade for fifty kilometres.
Sit still on the sand and a habituated meerkat colony will treat you as furniture, then as a lookout post. And after dark, the reason people come: no light for hundreds of kilometres in any direction, the Milky Way bright enough to throw a shadow, and a silence so complete you can hear your own pulse. After ten days of water and wildlife, the Kalahari takes it all away - and somehow gives you more.
CAMPS & LODGES
Being finalised, and chosen carefully.
Every property on this route is selected for character, for conservation ethos, and for a real relationship with the land it sits on - not for a star rating. Names, dates and pricing will go to the interest list first.
Who you travel with.
TRIP LEADERS
Both of them, the whole way.HOST & PHOTOGRAPHER
Françoise VFrançoise was born in Botswana. She grew up a natural explorer — pulled toward wild creatures, wild country and the edges of the map long before she had a word for why. Africa was never a backdrop to her childhood. It was the ground she was formed on, and she has never really left it.
She is now one of the world's most recognised fine art photographers, with a body of work built on an unusual closeness to wildlife, to the people who live alongside it, and to the natural world as a whole. The intimacy in her images cannot be manufactured. It comes from time, patience, and not photographing Africa from the outside.
What she believes is simple, and she will say it around the fire if you ask her: being out in the African bush returns a person to a state of childlike wonder — and what that does to a soul is not a small thing. It is also why she leads these journeys herself, rather than sending anyone in her place. Her hope is uncomplicated. Share the natural world with people, because the people who feel it are the people who go home wanting to protect it.
In the field she is calm, generous with what she knows, and entirely unhurried. She notices the light before anyone else has lifted their eyes..
Russell BerghPROFESSIONAL GUIDE
Twenty-five years in the field, and still most at home sitting in silence at the edge of a waterhole, waiting for something that may not come.
Russell began his career as a specialist safari guide with &Beyond and Singita, in some of the most demanding wilderness areas in Southern Africa, before moving behind the camera. As a wildlife cinematographer he has won both an Emmy and a BAFTA. His credits include Penguin Town for Netflix, Secrets of the Penguins, Whale Wars, Into the Pride, Escape to Chimp Eden with the Jane Goodall Institute, and Saving Rhino Phila.
None of that is the reason he is on this expedition. He is here because of an instinct for the wild that cannot be taught and is very rarely found - the ability to read a track, a wind direction, a change in the way a herd is standing, and know what is about to happen several minutes before it does.
He is quiet about it. He will not narrate, and he will not perform. He will simply put you in the right place, at the right hour, facing the right way - and then let the moment be yours.
A Different Kind of JourneyAre you looking for a life-changing journey into ancient wild spaces that bring you back to yourself? Have you ever dreamed of standing somewhere so wild it changes how you see everything after?
I grew up in Botswana, raised by the bush before I was raised by anything else. That's the lens I photograph through, and it's the world I want to take you into - not as a tourist passing through, but as someone willing to be undone a little by it.
This isn't a safari. It's a slower, more ethical way of travelling through Africa - one that follows the hidden threads between wildlife, landscape, culture, and the conservation work quietly holding it all together. We stay with places longer. We sit with stillness until it becomes presence. The camps, lodges and private retreats we travel through are chosen the same way I choose everything - for character, for conservation ethos, for their real connection to the land they sit on.
Come solo, with a friend, or with a partner. Bring a camera or don't. This isn't about experience - it's about the willingness to be somewhere that asks something of you.
Every group is small and chosen with intention. I look for people who carry the same quiet hunger for wild places, even before they've met.
They arrive as strangers. They leave as friends.
REGISTER YOUR INTEREST
There are six places.
That is the whole expedition.2027 dates will be announced soon. Because the group is capped at six, these journeys tend to fill from the interest list before they are announced anywhere else — not by design, simply because there are so few seats.
Registering commits you to nothing. It means that when the April dates are set, Françoise writes to you first — personally, not from a mailing list. If Botswana has been sitting somewhere at the back of your mind for a while, this is simply the next thing to do about it.