Travel Guides

Botswana safari camps are built on decks, stilts and sand, which makes access a question about each camp rather than about the country.

The pula is named after rain, which tells you most of what you need to know about how Botswana values the thing it has least of.

Botswana packs like a desert that floods, which means layers for cold mornings, dust protection, and far fewer clothes than you expect.

Botswana is one of the safer countries in the region and its own advisory is specific about where that stops, including one named stretch of river.

Botswana wants three blank passport pages, not two, and if you are traveling with a child it wants their birth certificate at both ends of the trip.

Botswana has good tarmac and genuinely dangerous roads, and the reason is not the surface but what walks onto it after dark.

Zambia has very little formal accessible infrastructure, so the useful research is per camp and per operator rather than per country.

Distances in Zambia are longer than the map suggests, the roads are the real hazard, and driving after dark outside the towns is the line to hold.

The kwacha, a country where mobile money reaches further than cards do, and the reason no exchange rate appears anywhere on this page.

Zambia has three seasons rather than two, and the one you travel in decides almost everything you put in the bag before you leave.

Zambia carries no blanket travel warning, and its real risks are the road, the water and a set of laws that visitors do not expect.

Zambia asks for six months of passport validity and two blank pages, and the visa answer depends entirely on which passport you are carrying.