#okavango river

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Okavango River - Namibia - Afternoon Boat Trip

Video - please tap!

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(via GIPHY)

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Okavango River, Shakawe, Botswana

Taken by Wynand Uys

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Indescribable beauty 🌊🌳🐘

Okavango Delta

The Okavango Delta is a vast inland river delta in northern Botswana. It's known for its sprawling grassy plains, which flood seasonally, becoming a lush animal habitat. The Moremi Game Reserve occupies the east and central areas of the region. Here, dugout canoes are used to navigate past hippos, elephants and crocodiles. On dry land, wildlife includes lions, leopards, giraffes and rhinos.

Photo 📷 @Solly Levi Photography

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Okavango Delta u. Moremi Reservat

Die Tsodilo HIlls in Botswana mit ihren jahrhundertealten Felsmalereien, die Xaro Lodge auf einer Insel im Okavango und das Moremi Wildreservat sind unsere letzten Stationen auf unser Reise durch Botswana.

Auf dem Okavango im Okavango Delta fahren, zu den Tsodilo Hills und zum Schluss der Reise ins Moremi Wildreservat, so füllen wir die letzten fünf Tage unserer Rundreise, die an den Victoria Fällen begann, Namibia berührte und in Botswana endet. Die Tsodilo Hills Botswana ist durch seine Lage rund um das Okavango Delta ein sehr flaches Land. Daher werden die Tsodilo Hills im Norden der Kalahari…

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Okavango Delta

vast inland river delta in northern Botswana

[salantami]

Okavango Delta, Botswana

The Okavango Delta is a vast inland river delta in northern Botswana. It's known for its sprawling grassy plains, which flood seasonally, becoming a lush animal habitat. The Moremi Game Reserve occupies the east and central areas of the region. Here, dugout canoes are used to navigate past hippos, elephants and crocodiles. On dry land, wildlife includes lions, leopards, giraffes and rhinos.  

[script-a-world]

Submitted via Google Form:

How big can a desert oasis be? I know the Nile river delta is massive but how much bigger can it get? I'd like to have one half the area of Egypt. What also needs to be done about the rivers that flow into them?

Tex: An oasis has a geological underpinning that is man-made in its longevity (Wikipedia), so I suppose they’re only as large as they need to be. Some factors in that include amount of irrigation, size of the underlying water table, how long you can travel from one oasis to another before running out of water, and mode of transportation that typically dictates rate of travel. By definition, an oasis resides in a desert. If something is large enough to cover, as you say, half of Egypt, then the resulting changes in the local environment might create a temperate climate rather than an arid one. Rivers are part and parcel with sedimentary or metamorphic rocks because of its more porous nature than igneous rock, and are the surface-visible part of water movement that also works underground through things like water tables/aquifers.

Licorice: Apparently the largest oasis in our world is 33 square miles. It has four cities and 22 villages. It's in Saudi Arabia and it's called Al-Ahsa. Al-Ahsa_Oasis (Wiki)

I think it might all be a question of scale. An oasis half the size of Egypt wouldn’t be an oasis in the Sahara desert, but if your desert took up half your planet, then that huge oasis might be considered an oasis.

Utuabzu: The exact definition of oasis gets a little fuzzy, since it’s not super clear at what point your lake becomes an inland sea. But an oasis is typically a body of water formed by upwelling groundwater - generally from an artesian basin of some kind - in an otherwise arid environment. They can range in size from a glorified puddle to the one Licorice mentioned, and they’re not necessarily permanent features on the landscape. Plenty of oases are seasonal, only present when the groundwater has risen due to rains elsewhere and vanishing again once the water table drops.

You mentioned the Nile Delta, which is not an oasis. I suspect you may have meant the Fayum, which is a body of water formed by a branch of the Nile entering an endorheic basin - a watershed that cannot empty to the sea because it is too high on all sides - and has been and remains a very agriculturally productive region of Egypt. Endorheic basins can also produce what are called inland deltas, where a river fans out into a large wetland at the bottom of the basin, as it is unable to reach the sea and does not have high enough water flow to flood the basin and create a lake or inland sea. Examples of this include the Okavango Delta in Botswana and the Sistan Delta in Iran and Afghanistan. More commonly endorheic basins have lakes (often salt lakes) or saltpans at their lowest points, and small or intermittent to non-existent waterways.

If we take what you want to be a region approximately the size of Egypt with a river that ends in a delta but does not flow into the sea, surrounded by desert, then that is possible. The Syr Darya and Amu Darya rivers flow through the Central Asian deserts and steppe to empty into the Aral Sea, which is an endorheic basin that once housed an enormous freshwater lake.* The region between these two rivers - called Transoxiana in classical sources - has been home to a chain of vibrant, prosperous civilisations and a vast diversity of peoples and cultures. So if you want to have a big river run through a desert and empty either into a lake or an inland delta, so long as you know where the water is coming from - the Syr Darya and Amu Darya are fed by snowmelt from the Hindu Kush and Tian Shan mountains, while the White Nile, which is the source of the Nile floods, rises in the Ethiopian Highlands and is fed by the wet season rains there - then there’s really no reason why you shouldn’t. Far stranger things exist in real life.

*Soviet hydroengineering has resulted in the Aral Sea all but drying up, causing immense ecological damage to Central Asia.

[beni75]

Photos and texts: @beverlyjoubert

1-. little cub

2-. Off to patrol his territory in the early morning light

3-. A young Okavango male catching the last rays of light

4-. An Okavango lioness off to hunt

5-. Lazing as only a cat knows how to do

6-. A mother's patience. Luckily for curious cub it stretches

7-. A pride on the move. An unforgettable sight

8-. It's always a privilege spending time with a pride of lions and seeing ther interaction and bonds

9-. Heading out in the Okavango dawn to patrol his territory

10-. Calm and chaos. As the great wildebeest migration enters in frenetic, rushed phase in the Serengeti and Massai Mara, rivers block the free flow of hundreds of thousands of wildebeest

11-. Every now and again it's best to sit back, relax and enjoy the beauty around you. Botswana

[simplicius-simplicissimus]

Okavango River - Namibia - Divava Okavango Resort & Spa

[trans-africa-2024]

Today was definitely one of the highlights of our trip so far. We started from the Divava Lodge from the Okavango River towards the border between Namibia and Botswana. We had to drive some 445 km and if everything would have gone smoothly we would have been there by noon. Unfortunately we were trapped behind a wide load transport of some mining equipment which took the whole road so that even the oncoming traffic was forced to pull over onto the shoulders to let it pass. So we crawled almost for one hour at a speed of 60 km behind these trucks which did not stop to let us pass.

Nevertheless eventually they pulled over and we arrived at the border around 11:30. Both border proceedings were quite efficient and after 30 minutes we were cleared to drive and our car in the Carnet de Passage was stamped out of Namibia and into Botswana. We then proceeded onwards to Kisane airport were all cars were stored in a secured parking facility. Equipped with small overnight bags we were driven into the Chobe National Park to the Chobe Game Lodge. On our way in we saw already more elephants and other animals than on the whole game drive in the Etosha Park. Hundreds of elephants in the marshlands of the Chobe river, giraffes, kudus and many more.

The Chobe Lodge is a beautiful hotel right at the river. Elisabeth Taylor and Richard Burton spent their honeymoon after they got married the second time in this lodge. We were greeted like kings and after a late lunch and a little rest we went onto a game boat ride onto the river Chobe. We were just in time when the elephants came from the bush to the river bank. There were about 20-30 of them and we got really close. It was a real treat. Elephants, baboons, kudus, springboks they all meet at the river at the same time. There were crocodiles waiting for their prey, hippos and fish eagles and many other animals. While watching all of this drinks and snacks were served.

In the evening there was a big buffet dinner outside right at the river.

Tomorrow they shall wake us at 5:00 for a game drive and then we shall drive into Zimbabwe.

Best

L&C

[merrillsafricabikeadventure]

Thursday March 30 Rest Day in Maun.

Okovangoin Delta in Botswana is a vast inland delta formed where the Okavango River reaches a basin of the Kalahari. It is an UNESCO World Heritage Site as one of the few interior delta systems that do not flow into a sea or ocean. All the water reaching the delta is ultimately evaporated, transpired, or absorbed. It has lots of animals.

My ride for the day. A three passenger, no doors, thrill ride over the delta. Lots of animals.

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📷 The Nature Conservancy in Africa

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Meandering Okavango River, Botswana. Photo by Frans Lanting

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The Okavango Delta (or Okavango Grassland; formerly spelled "Okovango" or "Okovanggo") in Botswana is a vast inland delta formed where the Okavango River reaches a tectonic trough at an altitude of 930–1,000 m in the central part of the endorheic basin of the Kalahari.

Photo Credit:Solly Levi

Botswana