Chobe River Cruise: Riverine Ecology and Reading Wildlife from the Water

Most safaris are seen from a vehicle, looking out across the bush. A Chobe River cruise turns that around. From a small boat drifting along the river near Kasane in northern Botswana, you sit at the level of the water, a few metres from hippos and crocodiles, and watch elephants come down to the bank, drink and sometimes swim across to the floodplain islands. The change of viewpoint changes what you notice. From the water, the river stops being a backdrop and becomes the thing that explains everything else: why the animals are here, why the floodplain is green when the bush is dry, and why the same stretch of river can look so different from one year to the next. On Days 15 and 16 of our Southern Africa Tour, the group takes two cruises on the Chobe River, one at sunset and one in the morning.

A river with three names

The Chobe is the last stretch of a much longer river. It rises on the central plateau of Angola as the Cuando, or Kwando, flows south-east into the Linyanti Swamp, where it becomes the Linyanti, and then turns north-east past Lake Liambezi as the Chobe. In all, the system runs for about 730 kilometres before joining the Zambezi just above Kazungula, a short distance downstream from Kasane, near where Botswana, Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe come close together.

For much of its course near Kasane, the Chobe forms the border between Botswana, on the south bank, and Namibia’s Zambezi Region, on the north. The Botswana side is the riverfront of Chobe National Park, with woodland running down to the water. Opposite and between the channels lie low, flat floodplains and islands.

The river that flows backwards

The Chobe has one of the strangest habits of any river in Africa. In years when the upper Zambezi floods strongly, its water rises high enough at the confluence to overwhelm the Chobe, and the Chobe reverses: instead of flowing down into the Zambezi, it flows back upstream, westwards, carrying Zambezi floodwater towards Lake Liambezi. As the flood recedes, the flow turns round again. In the great flood of 2010, satellite images showed Zambezi water spreading across the eastern Zambezi Region and pouring into Lake Liambezi.

The timing matters for anyone on a cruise. The Zambezi flood normally covers the eastern Zambezi Region around March and April. By late August and September, the time of the tour, the floods have long receded and the river is low and slow, with the floodplains exposed and green. The size of the flood varies greatly from year to year: research on the wider basin has found that between about 12 and 62 per cent of it floods in a given year, and that the average area flooded has declined over recent decades. Lake Liambezi itself fills and dries out over periods of years: when full it holds about 100 square kilometres of open water, but the final stretch of the Linyanti feeding it ran dry from the 1980s.

The swings in the river are measurable. At Katima Mulilo, upstream on the Zambezi, the river peaked at 8.15 metres in the flood of 2009, and fell to a low of 2.39 metres in the drought of 2019. Those changes ripple through the whole Chobe system, deciding how much floodplain is flooded, how far the water spreads and how much grazing there will be when the dry season comes.

Why the floodplain draws the animals

In the dry season, the contrast between the land and the river is stark. Away from the water, the bush is grey and leafless and the seasonal pans are dry. Along the Chobe, there is permanent water and green grazing on the floodplains, and the animals converge on it. Researchers working on the Chobe floodplain describe grazers gathering there in the dry season and competing for food and space, with predation by lions usually higher at the same time.

The riverbank woodland on the Botswana side has been heavily changed by elephants. The tall hardwoods that once lined the river, including pod mahogany and Zambezi teak, have been much reduced, and smaller browsers have declined with them: in one long-term study, bushbuck numbers in the riverfront area fell to about a third of their 1969–70 level as the vegetation changed. From the boat, the open, broken woodland on the bank is part of the story you are watching. Our article on Chobe National Park elephants looks at how and why that happened.

Reading the animals from the water

A boat puts you where the river’s most characteristic animals live. Hippos spend the day in the water and come out at night to graze, often several kilometres from the river, eating around 40 kilograms of grass in a night. In rivers, dominant bulls hold stretches of water some 50 to 100 metres long, which is why you see the same groups in the same places, and why the boat keeps a respectful distance; the species is listed as Vulnerable. Nile crocodiles bask on the banks and sandbars, and on the floodplains you may see buffalo, red lechwe and puku, a golden antelope of wet grasslands classed as Near Threatened.

Elephants are the great attraction. From a boat you can watch them drink, bathe, wallow in the shallows and, sometimes, swim across a channel to graze on the islands, often with only their trunks and the tops of their heads above the water. From the water you are close to that moment in a way no vehicle can match.

Birds of the river

The Chobe is rich in birds, and BirdLife International lists both Chobe National Park and the Linyanti Swamp and Chobe River as Important Bird Areas. The African fish eagle, with its white head and ringing call, is a familiar sight perched above the water. Southern carmine bee-eaters, crimson and turquoise, breed in colonies from around August to November, digging nesting burrows into vertical riverbanks. The slaty egret, a rare heron of seasonal wetlands classed as Vulnerable, with perhaps only a few thousand birds worldwide, is seen in small numbers along the river. Downstream of Kasane, rock pratincoles use the rocks of the rapids when the river is low, from around September. The African skimmer, which feeds by flying low with its lower bill slicing the water, is also recorded on the Chobe.

Managing a busy river

The Chobe riverfront is busy, and the river can be crowded. In 2025, Botswana’s Department of Wildlife and National Parks logged between about 1,100 and 1,300 boat trips a month on the river in April to June. Its rules require boats to follow a one-way, clockwise route around Sedudu Island, and allow no more than four boats near elephants cooling off in the river, for five minutes each. Officials have warned that boats that linger too long crowd the river and stop elephants from crossing.

The land side of the riverfront has had similar rules for longer. Since 2012, game-drive vehicles on the riverfront have followed set one-way routes, with a cap of 75 vehicles per session, and further limits on operators were added in 2016. The idea in both cases is the same: spread the visitors out so that the animals, and the people watching them, are not crowded.

Sedudu, known in Namibia as Kasikili, was itself the subject of a dispute between the two countries; in December 1999, the International Court of Justice ruled that the island, about 3.5 square kilometres, belongs to Botswana, and that boats from both countries have equal rights to navigate both channels around it. A study of attitudes among tourism operators and other stakeholders found that boat congestion is widely seen as an impact on the river, though its effects on the animals themselves have not been measured in detail.

Threats beneath the surface

Not every pressure is visible from the boat. Salvinia, a floating water fern from South America, was first collected in southern Africa in 1948 at Kazungula and later spread into the Kwando–Linyanti–Chobe system, where it can smother waterways. After herbicides and earlier attempts at biological control failed, Namibia imported weevils from Australia in 1983 that feed only on the plant; they spread through the river system, and Botswana now reports the weed under control there. Fishing is another pressure: a study on the Namibian side found that gill-net catches declined between 2010–13 and 2015–18, along with the maximum size of the fish caught. The river holds more than 90 species of fish, among them the tigerfish, prized by anglers for its fight and its sharp teeth.

What is the difference between the sunset and morning cruises?

Mostly the light and the activity. On the sunset cruise, on Day 15, the low sun lights up the floodplain and the river turns gold, and elephants often come down to drink in the late afternoon. On the morning cruise, on Day 16, the air is cooler and the river quieter, and birds are often most active. Neither is a guarantee of particular animals, but together they show the river at two very different times of day.

How comfortable are the cruises, and what should I bring?

Cruises are seated and gentle, on calm water, so they are among the least physically demanding activities on the tour, though stepping on and off a boat at a jetty takes some care. In late August and September, Kasane is dry, with average highs of around 29 to 33°C and cool early mornings, with lows of around 11 to 15°C. Bring a hat, sunscreen, sunglasses and water for the sunset cruise, and a warm layer for the morning. Binoculars make a great difference on the water. The tour as a whole is rated Level 2 (Moderate), which means managing three to five hours of activity a day and walking up to eight kilometres on uneven ground.

The Chobe River on the Southern Africa route

The group reaches Chobe from Victoria Falls, where the same great river system has cut its gorges through basalt; our article on Victoria Falls geology explains how. Alongside the cruises, game drives in Chobe National Park show the same landscape from the land. On Day 17 the group flies from Kasane back to Johannesburg. Our overview of the Southern Africa cultural journey shows how the Chobe fits into the whole route from Cape Town to Soweto.

A river cruise is often treated as the relaxing part of a safari, and it is that. But it is also the clearest way to see how a dry-season landscape works. Everything you watch from the boat, from the hippos holding their stretch of water to the elephants crossing to the islands and the bee-eaters nesting in the banks, depends on the river and its seasons. Spend a sunset and a morning on the Chobe, and you come away understanding not just what lives here, but why.