July to September for the Okavango Delta, when floodwaters are at or near peak, dry land shrinks and game is squeezed onto islands and floodplain fringes. August to October for the Chobe riverfront and Savuti — the September and October elephant aggregation on the Chobe is one of the highest-density elephant events on Earth, and it happens because the river is the only permanent water for a vast hinterland. The Central Kalahari inverts all of this and is best from December to March.

Because the water is not Botswana’s. It falls as rain in the Angolan highlands, drains through the Cubango and Cuito rivers and enters Botswana at Mohembo in the Panhandle, where peak flow arrives between mid-March and mid-May. The Delta then behaves like a sponge, spreading that water sideways through 15,000 square kilometres of near-flat sand at walking pace. Levels across most of the Delta therefore peak from May through August. Guests arriving in June to a flooded Delta under a cloudless sky are looking at Angolan rain that fell in January.

Not on a specific date, and any camp that promises one months ahead is guessing. Mokoro availability is flood-dependent rather than calendar-dependent, and flood height varies by metres from year to year because it is set by rainfall in another country several months earlier. A camp in the seasonal floodplains can be poling in July and driving in November in the same year. We check current water levels with the camps before we confirm a water-based itinerary.

It has two, and they are among the least-known great wildlife movements in Africa. The Nxai Pan migration is, by round-trip distance, the longest terrestrial mammal migration in Africa at around 1,000km — zebra hold on the Chobe floodplains from July to November, move about 250km south in December and early January, stay in Nxai Pan for roughly eighty days, and start back in late February. The Makgadikgadi and Boteti movement runs from the south-eastern Okavango to the Makgadikgadi grasslands from late November. Both are rain-triggered, so a late wet season delays them by weeks.

January to March for the classic circuit. Black-cotton tracks in the Central Kalahari become genuinely impassable, afternoon thunderstorms cut activities short, the grass is head-high and daytime heat is severe. Some seasonal Delta and Linyanti camps close in January and February. April is the Delta’s structural low point — local rain is over and the flood has not yet come through. Note that this is precisely when the Central Kalahari is at its best, so the honest answer depends on where you are going.

May is arguably the best week-for-week value of the year: the flood is arriving, the bush is drying and thinning, nights are comfortable, and rates have not yet reached June levels. November and early December are the other window — low-season rates with viewing still good, the pans greening up and the zebra arriving. Botswana’s low season is cheap because the camps are empty, not because the wildlife is bad.