Things to Do in Botswana in January

The Gaborone City Tour covers half a day and moves through the capital's key landmarks at a pace that rewards attention. The route typically threads through the National Museum, where glass cases hold San rock-art fragments and independence-era photographs with the crackle of aging paper still visible on their mounts, past the Parliament buildings with their clean modernist lines, and into the Main Mall precinct where tailor shops and fabric merchants fill doorways with bolts of shweshwe cloth in indigo, maroon, and burnt orange. The tour often pauses at the Gaborone Dam, where in January the water level is visibly higher than during the dry months, and waterbirds, herons, stand motionless in the shallows while the hum of the city carries faintly from the south.

The Around Gaborone Adventure pushes beyond the capital's edges into the surrounding bushveld and rocky kopjes, where the January rains have turned the landscape an almost violent green. The experience typically includes stops at the Mokolodi Nature Reserve, where white rhino graze on rain-fattened grass within earshot of Gaborone's southern suburbs, and at cultural sites where traditional Setswana crafts, carved wood, woven baskets, and beadwork, are demonstrated rather than merely displayed. The air in the outlying areas smells of damp clay and the faintly citrus scent of wild camphor bush after rain, and the birdlife along seasonal streams is loud and competitive, with lilac-breasted rollers diving from fence posts and fork-tailed drongos chasing insects flushed by passing vehicles.

A single night at Madikwe Game Reserve, just across the border in South Africa's North West Province and accessed easily from Gaborone, compresses a full Big Five safari into roughly twenty-four hours. Madikwe is malaria-free, fenced, and stocked with lion, elephant, leopard, buffalo, and both black and white rhinoceros. January's green season means the reserve's thornveld is thick with new growth, the soil is dark and fragrant after storms, and the predators are active around impala lambing grounds. Night drives in the open vehicles bring the scratch and rustle of nocturnal hunters into sharp focus: the reflective eyes of thick-tailed bushbabies caught in the spotlight, the distant sawing cough of a leopard, and the warm smell of sun-baked earth releasing its stored heat into the cooler night air.

The Madikwe Game Reserve Day Tour covers the same terrain as the overnight option but compresses it into a single long day, departing Gaborone before dawn and returning after dark. The format works for groups of five or more and delivers two full game drives separated by a midday rest at a reserve lodge, where the sound of weaver birds constructing nests in fever trees fills the still, hot air. The morning drive in January typically catches elephant herds at waterholes, their skin still dark and wet from overnight rain, trunks swinging as they drink, while the afternoon drive targets predators that begin moving as the day cools and thunderheads build on the western horizon, casting the bush in a greenish, electric light.

The ten-day Across Botswana small-group tour runs from either Johannesburg or Gaborone to Victoria Falls, crossing the full breadth of the country through landscapes that shift from Kalahari sandveld to the waterways of the Okavango Delta to the dry, teak forests flanking the Chobe River. In January, the route is at its most dramatic: the Makgadikgadi salt pans hold shallow, shimmering water that attracts tens of thousands of flamingos, their pink massed ranks visible from kilometres away against the white pan surface. The Okavango's mokoro channels are navigable but intimate, the water warm and tea-coloured from tannins, with papyrus fronds brushing the sides of the dugout and the low, liquid calls of African jacanas echoing off the water. Nights in mobile camps bring the patter of rain on canvas and the mineral-wet smell of the bush after a storm, followed by mornings so clear the air seems to ring.

The Art and Craft Tour grounds visitors in Botswana's material culture through workshops and studio visits in and around Gaborone. Stops typically include basket-weaving cooperatives where women work with mokola palm fibre, their fingers pulling tight spirals of naturally dyed coils in amber, rust, and charcoal black, and pottery studios where the earthy, mineral smell of wet clay fills low-ceilinged workrooms. The tour also passes through open-air markets where woodcarvers shape mopane and teak into animal figures, the rasp of hand tools and the sweet sawdust scent cutting through the humid January air. This is not a shopping excursion dressed up as culture. The emphasis is on process, watching skilled hands at work and understanding the regional traditions, San, Tswana, Kalanga, that each craft carries forward.