Things to Do in Botswana in March

The Gaborone City Tour covers the capital's essential ground in a half day, moving from the quiet limestone corridors of the National Museum, where San rock art reproductions glow ochre and rust under gallery lights, through the Three Chiefs Monument at the civic centre, past the angular modern architecture of the parliament buildings, and into the densely stacked stalls of the Main Mall market, where the smell of roasting corn and dried mopane worms hangs in the warm air. The tour threads narrative through each stop: how three Tswana chiefs travelled to London in 1895 to argue against Cecil Rhodes, how Gaborone grew from a railway siding into a capital in the space of a decade, and what the country's diamond wealth built. It is an efficient, walking-friendly introduction that gives context to everything you see for the rest of your trip.

The Around Gaborone Adventure pushes beyond the capital's paved centre into the surrounding thornveld and rocky kopjes that most visitors drive past without stopping. The route takes in the Mokolodi Nature Reserve, where white rhino graze on open grassland that smells of crushed sage after a rain, and winds through small villages where goats amble across dirt roads and women sell fat cakes, golden, crispy dough balls, from roadside stands. You get close to the Gaborone Dam, its water level high in March from the seasonal rains, where African fish eagles call from dead trees standing in the shallows, their sharp descending whistle one of the most recognisable sounds on the continent. The day covers ground that reveals how quickly Botswana's landscape shifts from semi-urban to wild.

A single night at Madikwe Game Reserve compresses one of southern Africa's most underrated Big Five reserves into a concentrated experience. You'll do an afternoon game drive, dinner in the bush under a sky so thick with stars the Milky Way casts a faint shadow, sleep in a lodge where you hear hyena whooping across the floodplain, and a dawn drive when the air is cool enough to see your breath. Madikwe sits on the Botswana-South Africa border in a malaria-free zone, which matters for families and travellers who prefer not to take prophylaxis. The reserve's 75,000 hectares hold lion, leopard, elephant, rhino, and wild dog, one of Africa's densest wild dog populations, across a landscape of open grassland, rocky inselbergs, and thick riverine bush that smells of wild sage and tamboti wood.

The Madikwe Game Reserve Day Tour takes the same reserve, the same Big Five territory, the same wild dog packs, the same granite kopjes that radiate stored heat into the evening, and fits it into a single long day departing from Gaborone. The drive crosses the border into South Africa's North West Province, where the flat bushveld gives way to Madikwe's more broken terrain, and you spend the core hours on open-sided vehicles with trackers scanning for fresh spoor in the red sand. The five-person minimum keeps the group small enough that you hear the bush rather than chatter: the crack of an elephant stripping bark, the alarm call of a francolin, the rustle of a tortoise through dry leaf litter. Lunch is typically taken at a lodge overlooking a waterhole, watching warthogs kneel to drink.

The ten-day Across Botswana small group tour is a proper transect of the country, running from either Johannesburg or Gaborone all the way to Victoria Falls, threading through the Makgadikgadi Salt Pans, the Okavango Delta, and Chobe National Park. In the Makgadikgadi, you stand on a blindingly white salt flat that stretches to every horizon and feel the crunch of crystallised salt underfoot while the heat shimmers blur the line between earth and sky. The Okavango leg puts you in a mokoro, a shallow dugout canoe, gliding through papyrus-lined channels where the water is so clear you watch barbel fish drift beneath you and the only sound is the pole dipping and lifting. Chobe brings the elephants. Herds of fifty or more wade belly-deep into the river at dusk, silhouetted against a sky turning from amber to indigo. The tour ends at Victoria Falls, where the spray from the cascading Zambezi rises high enough to soak you from a kilometre away and the roar is a physical sensation in your chest.

The Art and Craft Tour in Gaborone pulls back a layer of the city that most visitors walk straight past. You visit working studios where painters stretch canvas over wooden frames knocked together from recycled pallet wood, galleries hung with contemporary Tswana art that ranges from bold acrylic abstractions in ochre and cobalt to photographic series documenting rural cattle posts, and craft workshops where women weave baskets from the dried fronds of the mokolwane palm, each tight coil producing a pattern that encodes the weaver's village of origin. The smell of natural dyes and wood shavings fills the smaller studios, and in several you can sit and work alongside the artists, feeling the resistance of the palm fibre as you pull it taut. Botswana's contemporary art scene is small enough that a half-day tour introduces you to a meaningful fraction of its active practitioners, and the guides contextualise each studio visit with the economics and cultural politics of art-making in a country whose international reputation rests almost entirely on wildlife.