Okavango Delta & Maun

There's no engine on a mokoro. The traditional dugout canoe is poled through the reeds by a local guide, low enough to the water that you're at eye level with the lily pads, and the only sound is the pole finding the bottom. Muto Tours routes clients into the Delta from Maun for exactly this — a change of pace from vehicle-based safari, and a landscape that photographs like nowhere else in Southern Africa.

The Delta is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of the few large wetlands in the world that floods in the dry season rather than the wet one — water that falls as rain in the Angolan highlands months earlier arrives here between roughly June and August, right as the surrounding Kalahari is at its driest, drawing wildlife toward the water in large numbers. Maun, the gateway town, is where road travel usually ends and Delta access begins, whether that's a mokoro trip from a mainland lodge or a light-aircraft transfer into a camp deeper in the wetland itself.