Maun, Botswana

MAUN, BOTSWANA | "Gateway to the Okavango"

Maun is the gateway to the Okavango Delta — the largest inland delta in the world and one of the most extraordinary ecosystems on earth, where the waters of the Kavango River fan across the Kalahari Desert to create a vast floodplain of papyrus channels, hippo pools, and palm islands supporting the greatest concentration of wildlife in southern Africa. The town sits at the southern edge of the delta on the banks of the Thamalakane River, and the defining sound of Maun is the snort of a hippo surfacing at dusk in the channels that run through the town itself. The Okavango Delta was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2014, and its seasonal flooding creates a wildlife spectacle of extraordinary beauty — hippos yawning in the shallow channels, elephants crossing between palm islands, fish eagles calling over the reed beds, and the flat-bottomed mokoro canoes of the Bayei polers threading silently through the papyrus.

The colors are golden and specific: the pale blue of the delta channel water against the amber of the reed beds in the afternoon light, the deep grey of a hippo surfacing among white water lilies, the terracotta of the Kalahari sand road leading north from Maun, and the extraordinary violet of the night sky above the delta where light pollution is genuinely absent. It is a palette that belongs entirely to the Okavango and to nowhere else on earth.