Most rivers end at the sea. The Okavango is different. After travelling more than 1,000 kilometres, it fans out into a giant fan shape — a delta — covering an area the size of Switzerland. Millions of litres of water soak slowly into the desert and evaporate in the sun, so the river never reaches the ocean at all.
The flood arrives every year between June and August, which is winter in Botswana. This sounds backwards — floods in winter? It happens because the rain that falls in Angola in summer takes months to travel all the way down the river. When the water arrives, the parched Kalahari suddenly blooms with islands of grass, and animals travel from far away to drink and swim.
People called the Bayei and the Hambukushu have lived in and around the delta for hundreds of years. They use slender wooden boats called mokoro (say: mo-KO-ro) to glide silently through the channels, poled along with a long stick. Mokoro trips are still one of the best ways to explore the delta today.
The Okavango Delta is home to an extraordinary mix of wildlife — elephants wade through the shallows, hippos grunt in the deep channels, lions hunt on the islands, and enormous flocks of birds turn the sky pink. It was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site because there is nowhere else quite like it on Earth.