The best sport spots and adventures in Botswana – travel tips, packing lists and first-hand experience from DOMISPORTS.
Ngamiland · Mokoro canoe trips, Safari · Best time: May–Oct
Safari at water level: in a mokoro you glide silently through reed channels while elephants and hippos appear at eye height. Add walking safaris on the islands — here you're a guest in their territory, not a spectator in a jeep. Dry season May–Oct has highest water levels — best time!
Norden · Safari, Boat tour · Best time: May–Oct
Wildlife from the water: in the dry season elephant herds crowd the Chobe riverfront, and a boat gets you surprisingly close. Pair a morning game drive with an evening river safari — two completely different perspectives in one day. Africa's highest elephant density — river safari at sunset.
Zentral · Quad biking, Hiking · Best time: May–Oct
Nothing as far as you can see — and that's exactly the appeal: you ride quads across the salt crust toward the horizon and sleep under a sky with zero light pollution. Guided trips add habituated meerkats and ancient baobabs. Endless white expanse — quad tours & stars like nowhere else.
Nordwesten · Hiking, Climbing · Best time: May–Oct
Four hills rise out of the Kalahari, their walls covered in rock paintings thousands of years old — you explore them on short guided trails. Not climbing in the sport sense, more scrambling through deep history: easy going, and one of the continent's truly special places. 'Louvre of the Desert' — 4500+ rock paintings, UNESCO site.
Tuli Block · MTB, Horse Riding, Safari · Best time: May–Oct
Mountain biking among elephants: Cycle Mashatu takes you, guide up front, across sand tracks, dry riverbeds and rocky ridges through 42,000 hectares of private concession in Botswana's far east. Technically it's no alpine epic, but deep sand, heat and a quiet "bull, on your left" turn it into its own discipline. Prefer a saddle with legs? Limpopo Valley Horse Safaris rides the same terrain, and walking safaris run too. Every early May the reserve hosts its own "Land of the Giants" ride — roughly 180 km of reserve tracks over three days.
Norden · Kayaking, Hiking, Safari · Best time: May–Oct
Four days paddling down the Selinda Spillway, the waterway linking the Okavango Delta with the Linyanti-Kwando system. It's flatwater, so no whitewater skills needed — just stamina, an eye for hippos and the willingness to sleep in a mobile camp on the bank. Paddling alternates with guided bush walks, and there are never more than eight of you. Eight guests per departure, four days, three nights — and whether the trail runs at all depends on the spillway's water level.
Zentral · Hiking · Best time: Apr–Sep
Botswana isn't all flat: in the Tswapong Hills you scramble up a gorge over wet boulders, past waterfalls that keep running through the dry season — the porous rock slowly releases stored rainwater. At roughly 4 km round trip it's short, but steep and slick; sure-footedness beats fitness here. The site is run by a community trust, about 70 km east of Palapye. The cliffs above hold one of only two Cape vulture breeding colonies in Botswana — bring binoculars.
Südosten · Hiking, Trail Running, Running · Best time: Apr–Sep
Gaborone's home hill, locally called the "Sleeping Giant": three routes lead up, about an hour to the 1,287 m summit, with the whole city laid out below. Doable without experience, though the upper section is rocky and steep enough that trail runners take it seriously. And somewhere halfway up there's almost certainly a baboon troop sitting in your path. Kgale hosts the 15 km "King of the Hill" race with the Gaborone Runners Club — this hill is running infrastructure, not just a viewpoint.
Nordwesten · Cave tours, Hiking · Best time: May–Oct
Botswana's most serious caving trip: tight passages and chambers in Kalahari limestone, fig roots hanging from the ceiling like curtains, and colonies of Commerson's leaf-nosed bats with wingspans up to 60 cm overhead. The main chamber is still called Drotsky's Cavern, after the farmer the San showed it to in 1932. Remote, dusty, tight — not for anyone who likes a handrail. Since late 2014 the entrance has a gatehouse, ablutions, borehole water and a campsite — and nothing else; the Namibian border is 10 km away.