Chobe is a national park along the Chobe River in northern Botswana, and through the dry season some fifty thousand elephants come down to that water, one of the largest gatherings of them anywhere. You meet them from a low open boat, pushed out until the river fills your eye line. From there you sit level with yawning hippos and crocodiles hauled out on the sandbars. It is an angle no safari truck can give you, and it is why photographers rate this cruise above almost any other in Africa. The herds are not only drinking. They wade and swim the whole width of the Chobe to feed on the floodplains of Namibia's Caprivi Strip on the far bank, then cross back, so the same animals eat in one country and rest in another. Calves swim behind the adults with their trunks up like snorkels. When a herd moves out toward the green islands mid-river, the guide cuts the engine and lets the current take the boat alongside, close enough to hear the calves.
The sand tracks inland are a different park. They run at first light, when lions, leopards and the rare African wild dog are still moving from the night's hunt. The green riverfront gives way to the Savuti marsh, the Linyanti swamps and the dry Nogatsaa grasslands, and the ground changes under the wheels with each. Savuti is fed by a channel that vanishes for decades and then comes back, with no rainfall to account for either. It ran from 1957 to 1982, stopped for a generation, started again in 2008 and dried once more around 2015. The cause is tiny movement on deep faults, taken up by the Kalahari sand so that nobody ever feels it. The prides here hunt elephants. When the dry season thins the usual prey, as many as thirty lions will surround an isolated animal and wear it down, and they do it after dark. An elephant sees poorly at night. The one that had the river to itself all day cannot make out what is walking up to it.