Travel reviews by Happy Campers from Perth

"The wildlife sightings are great (June 2022) - wide variety, plentiful animals and birds, variety of habitat.

Our tracker "TT" and guide "Grass" worked very well together, did an excellent job of tracking and finding the animals, and explained their habits in detail. The staff as a whole are cheerful and very welcoming. The comfortable accommodation has an amazing outlook over a shallow bend in the Gomoti River - we saw lots of elephants and hippos from our balcony and also from the lounge/dining area.

The hippo grunts provided an early morning wakeup ahead of the delivery of freshly brewed coffee to our safari tent/cabin (much appreciated on cold, early morning starts!).

The highlight was seeing 3 leopards (a female and 2 potential male suitors, we were told) chased up trees by a prowling lioness, with chacma baboons sounding alarm calls."

"Lebala was more of a dry plains camp, with waterholes and marshlands. We were told that the cheetahs and wild dogs had been mostly displaced by large prides of lions (June 2022).

There were plenty of plains animals - lions, giraffe, zebra, impala, wildebeest, jackals, ostriches. The night game drive gave sightings of an aardwolf, genet, serval, spotted hyena and spring hares (which reminded us of small wallabies). Hippos, and a lion prowling the camp area, roaring loudly, woke everyone during the night - authentic African safari experience!

The tracker "Akeem" and guide "Mike" worked very well together, enthusiastically tracking and finding game off-road, and explaining the habits of the animals. We were delighted to see small lion cubs practicing their hunting skills on each other, and chasing our vehicle while their mother was absent!

A baby hippo provided a lot of entertainment by riding its mother's back then introducing itself to basking crocodiles on the bank of the waterhole (oops), before mother came to the rescue!"

"This camp was the largest of our three camps, and had very modern facilities. The chef was excellent and the camp was very well organised.

The variety of habitat made it possible to do boat safari trips in addition to the game drives. We saw lots of animals and birds. The tracker "KB" and guide "Mr T" worked well together and did a superb (truely unbelievable) job of tracking and finding animals off-road. In fact, the tracking and guiding was excellent in all three camps we visited (Mma Dinare, Lebala and Splash).

Our highlight was the cheetah "Mr Special" who posed beautifully for us in a range of settings, and demonstrated that he could climb a (fallen) tree almost as well as a leopard. Surprisingly, we saw a leopard hunting along the river in the marshes while on a boat excursion. There was a sitatunga and lots of red lechwe in the marshes.

The wild dogs and especially their new pups (June 2022) were very entertaining."

"We enjoyed seeing all the different animals coming down to the Chobe River, and the antics of the hippos and elephants in the river. The river boat provided a different perspective to game viewing in the camps, and the river safari boat with camera mounts was much appreciated.

There was a wide variety of birdlife, from tiny malachite kingfishers to large storks and herons (especially all the storks competing for nesting spaces in the bushes in the middle of the rapids). Large crocodiles were also plentiful.

We saw a leopard lurking in a tree on the banks, then stalking in the bushes behind some small baby elephants, before being spotted and fleeing, with adult elephants in hot pursuit.

Another highlight was watching several troops of baboons, and not least a group of lionesses conducting an extended (unsuccessful) hunt for baboons along the river bank with much alarm barking and acrobatic displays by these baboons in the trees."