On Day 4 we will check out of the hotel and head to Kasane Airport to meet our charter flight into The Okavango Delta. Our charter airline of choice is Mack Air, and we have built in an additional 5kg of luggage allowance into your ticket, so you don’t need to worry about heavy camera gear exceeding the 20kg limit. Your new limit is 25kg in soft-sided bags only, please.
The flight to The Delta takes around an hour and is a beautiful scenic flight, landing at the airstrip in the Shinde Concession. This 30,000-ha piece of paradise is managed by our partners at Ker and Downey, Botswana, and is home to our base for the next few nights – Shinde Footsteps.
Footsteps is a fantastic private camp in the north of the concession and has only five tents for the eight guests and one photo host! It is built on the edge of a lagoon in a tree line. It features luxurious tents, a lounge, a dining tent, and a small editing tent for those afternoon image review sessions.
The concession is an excellent environment for big cats such as lions and leopards, and if we are lucky, a pack of wild dogs will spend time in the area, too. There are lots of plains game like wildebeest, red lechwe and giraffes, as well as several hundred bird species that call The Okavango Delta home – either seasonally or permanently.
As Shinde is a private concession, we are allowed to off-road at special sightings for better positioning and conduct night drives. We have hosted the Shinde footsteps guides at the Pangolin Chobe Hotel, where they attend our Photo Boot Camp once a year to brush up on their photo and positioning skills. The photo hosts and Shinde guides work together to get you the best shots available.
At Footsteps, we have access to two game viewers with a maximum of four guests each, and the Pangolin Photo Host will alternate between vehicles on each activity. More often than not, the two vehicles will be the only two at a particular sighting. The vehicles are in radio contact with the other guides on the concession to call in sightings.
On one of the mornings, we arranged for a four-seater helicopter to be available for aerial photography. Two guests will accompany the Photo Host on each 30-minute flight over the concession, looking for photo opportunities with the doors off! It’s an incredible experience; you can see more about what it’s like in William’s video here.
Footsteps was fully rebuilt at the start of 2023 and is a very comfortable traditional safari camp. No frivolous luxuries will be found here. Just a good, honest, tastefully decorated camp in a stunning part of the world! This is why we love it here!
As the safari draws to a close on day 8 you will most likely fly out to Maun for a connecting flight home. (For more information about the different airports in Botswana you can read about them here). This need not be the end of your African Photo Safari adventure, however, as connecting to other destinations in Botswana is easily arranged.
Perhaps you might like to visit The Kalahari or places such as Madikwe in South Africa – where you have an excellent chance of seeing rhinos which we rarely see in Botswana. For something a little less rustic, you might consider adding a few days in Cape Town at the end for some spectacular scenery and equally impressive gastronomic experiences!
Please use the form below to tell us if you are interested in this photo safari, and then one of our expert safari planners can send you some date options and also discuss any additions you might like to add to this safari.
