Things to Do in Botswana in June

The Gaborone City Tour covers the capital's key landmarks in a single morning, the Three Dikgosi Monument, where three bronze chiefs gaze out over a city they helped bring into existence. The National Museum and Art Gallery, its dim, cool rooms hung with contemporary Setswana painting and colonial-era photography. And the Main Mall, where the smell of coal-fired cookstoves drifts from side streets and vendors sell roasted groundnuts from paper cones. Your guide weaves the stops into a narrative of post-independence Botswana, from the diamond revenues that built the modern state to the HIV/AIDS crisis that nearly broke it. You leave knowing why this small, quiet capital punches so far above its weight in African governance.

The Around Gaborone Adventure pushes outward from the capital into the surrounding bushveld and rock formations, taking in Mokolodi Nature Reserve's acacia-studded hillsides, where white rhinos browse within metres of open vehicles, their grey flanks dusted pink by the laterite soil, and the Manyelanong vulture colony, where Cape vultures nest on a cliff face of rust-streaked dolomite high above the valley floor. Between stops, the route threads through small Tswana villages where the sharp tang of drying biltong hangs in the cold winter air and roosters crow from the tops of kraal walls. The silence between settlements is enormous, broken only by the metallic trill of lilac-breasted rollers launching from fence posts.

The overnight Madikwe Game Reserve trip crosses the border into South Africa's malaria-free Big Five concession, 75,000 hectares of Kalahari bushveld where the sand underfoot is the colour of burnt sienna and sunsets flare copper and violet behind flat-topped acacias. An afternoon game drive, a night in a safari lodge, and a dawn drive the next morning offer encounters with elephant herds, leopards slinking through tamboti thickets, and the reserve's reintroduced African wild dog packs, one of southern Africa's most consequential conservation recoveries. Lodge dinner is typically a braai of kudu steak and boerewors cooked over hardwood coals, the smoke curling into a sky so clear the Milky Way looks three-dimensional, its central band visible as a physical structure rather than a smear of light.

The single-day Madikwe trip packs the same malaria-free Big Five reserve into one long, relentless push, a predawn departure from Gaborone, a border crossing, and back-to-back morning and afternoon game drives through thornveld that in June is stripped to its bones. Bare branches, blonde grass, dry riverbeds etched like veins into red earth. Animals stand out against the muted winter palette with startling clarity: lion prides sprawled on sun-warmed rocks, cheetahs scanning the plains from termite mounds, giraffes backlit against the low afternoon sun like paper silhouettes. The return drive to Gaborone arrives after dark, the headlights catching the eyes of spring hares along the roadside.

This ten-day overland journey from Johannesburg or Gaborone to Victoria Falls threads through Botswana's three defining ecosystems in sequence, the Kalahari's rust-red dunes and ancient dry riverbeds, the Okavango Delta's flooded channels and mokoro-navigable lagoons, and Chobe National Park's elephant-dense riverfront, before ending at the Zambezi's edge, where the spray from Victoria Falls hangs in the air like cold rain and the roar of the cataract is audible from a kilometre downstream. In June, the Delta is at or near peak flood: water arrived from Angola weeks earlier and has transformed dry grassland into a silent, glassy maze navigated by dugout canoe, the pole pushing through water hyacinths while jacanas tiptoe across lily pads alongside you. Chobe in the same month hosts what may be the largest elephant concentrations on Earth, herds of hundreds gathering along the river in the amber light of late afternoon while hippos grunt and blow in the shallows.

The Art and Craft Tour circuits through Gaborone's creative quarter, working studios, open-air craft markets, and the National Museum's permanent collection, where Setswana basket-weaving techniques are displayed in tight coils of mokola palm dyed in earth tones of brown, rust, and cream alongside contemporary sculpture and bold, graphic printmaking. The craft markets smell of tanned leather and freshly cut hardwood, and the rhythmic tap of chisels striking soapstone carries across the stalls like a percussive undercurrent. You handle the work as you go: running your fingers along the ridged texture of a hand-coiled basket, weighing a carved ebony figure in your palm, feeling the waxy grain of a hand-stitched leather journal still warm from the artisan's bench.