For the traveller who wants a game reserve inside the city.

01 A reserve with a door onto the street

The Gaborone Game Reserve covers some six hundred hectares east of the centre and has been open since 1988. You do not have to leave the city to reach it: you drive on urban tarmac, a thatched gateway with a welcome sign appears, and on the other side the sand track begins.

The entrance to a reserve seen from the tarmac road: a wide gateway with a dark thatched roof and a white tarpaulin over it, resting on stone and brick walls; on either side, white boards welcoming visitors and setting out hours and rules, a red stop sign and a green arrow; beyond the gateway, a pale sand track disappearing into scrub. — The reserve gate. In front of it, city kerb and tarmac; behind it, sand and scrub.CNJerem / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 4.0·CC BY 4.0

What to expect from this trip, measured on what matters to someone after wildlife without mounting an expedition.

Wildlife close at hand 600 ha inside the city and 30 km² ten kilometres out

Cost City prices: no internal flights, no lodge

Self-sufficiency Doable with a hire car and no compulsory guide

Sense of open space Small, clearly bounded reserves, not endless wilderness

Free-roaming big predators Cheetah and wild dog live in separate enclosures

How much the month matters From 0.5 mm in July to 94.2 in January

A pale sand track through scrub in the dry season, with a male ostrich in black plumage and white wings walking down the middle of the track towards the camera; on the right, acacias with yellowing leaves and brown thorny undergrowth with termite mounds; on the left, low dry scrub; the sky an intense cloudless blue. — June in the city's reserve. With the scrub stripped bare you can see through it, which is why the dry season is the one for this.CNJerem / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 4.0·CC BY 4.0

02 The second ring

Ten kilometres to the south lies Mokolodi: thirty square kilometres of donated land, running since 1994, managed by a private not-for-profit foundation. There the scale changes. Roaming free are giraffe, zebra, southern white rhinoceros, kudu, impala, hippopotamus, Nile crocodile, leopard and brown hyena.

It is worth saying what is not free, too: the cheetah and the African wild dog live in large but separate enclosures. There is also a reptile park, with black mamba and puff adder among other species, and an aviary of rescued vultures. The white rhino herd forms part of a national breeding programme rebuilding the country's population.

The foundation's stated objective is not tourism: it is conservation education, and much of who passes through are schoolchildren from the country itself.

A panorama from a rocky height in the dry season: in the foreground, a jumble of brown and orange stone blocks with sparse-leaved shrubs and bare white branches on both sides; beyond, a vast plain of grey-green scrub dotted with clearings of reddish earth running to a chain of low hills, with a pale band of water gleaming at their foot. — Mokolodi from above. Thirty square kilometres — and twenty minutes' drive between this and the urban reserve.Cretep / Wikimedia Commons / Dominio público·Dominio público

03 The hill, on foot

The third piece costs nothing and needs no car. Kgale Hill rises to 1,287 metres on the city's south-western edge, is nicknamed "the sleeping giant", and has three trails to the top. The climb takes about an hour, and troops of baboons are a common sight along the way.

At the top the whole city is suddenly legible: a perfectly flat surface running to the horizon, with hardly any built height, and on the other side the reservoir. It is the view that organises everything else, which is why it belongs on your first day, not your last.

The reservoir adds a different layer: there is a yacht club at the northern end and a fishing club at the southern one, and yet swimming is prohibited because of crocodiles and the risk of bilharzia. Sailing yes, swimming no. It is one of those rules that describes a place better than any brochure.

04 What this is not

It has to be said plainly so nobody is disappointed: this is not the Okavango Delta or Chobe. Those lie far to the north of the country; they are a different trip, a different budget and a different logistics. Confusing them is the only way to leave here let down.

What it is: a flat capital of 246,325 people, with two reserves and a hill within reach of a hire car, fifteen kilometres from the South African border, where you can see wildlife mid-morning and be having lunch in the centre by one. If that combination is what you were after, very few places on the continent deliver it with so little effort.

One last recommendation, and it is about the calendar. Come in May, August or September. With the scrub stripped you can see through it and the animals concentrate where the water is; in January, with 94.2 millimetres of rain and the vegetation closed over, they are just as present and you will not find them. And avoid October, which in a normal rainfall year is the hottest month of all.

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Sofía Navarro

Made For You editor · Flowtravel

Sofía matches travellers with destinations, and says when they don't fit.

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01 A reserve with a door onto the street

02 The second ring

03 The hill, on foot

04 What this is not

Rate this article

Sofía Navarro

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