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.
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.
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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