Fleewinter

The camp has nine spacious, beautiful tents, each individually handcrafted. These twin-bedded canvas and thatched rooms are situated beneath a canopy of shady trees and have en-suite facilities, as well as an outdoor shower. The rooms are built on raised decks, each with a private sala for afternoon siestas and offering wonderful views of the surrounding floodplains.

In addition to the lounge and dining area, there is a plunge pool and an outdoor boma for dining under the stars, complemented by wines from the excellent wine cellar. Jao Camp also features a salon where a wide range of massage therapies are offered.

Mokoros (wooden dug out traditional canoe), boating, fishing, walks, day and night game drives and bird watching are usually on offer all year round.

In the central region of the concession, vast open floodplains provide some of the most stunning scenery Botswana has to offer. Jao Camp lies in the southern side of the plains, an area with lovely islands fringed with riverine forests.

Access is possible via a light aircraft flight either from Maun or Kasane (easy to combine with Victoria Falls). There are daily flights from Johannesburg to Maun. Please ask us about the best way to include Jao Camp in your African safari.

The Okavango Delta is one of the world's largest inland water systems. Its headwaters start in Angola's western highlands, with numerous tributaries joining to form the Cubango river, which then flows through Namibia (called the Kavango) and finally enters Botswana, where it is then called the Okavango.

Millions of years ago the Okavango river use to flow into a large inland lake called Lake Makgadikgadi (now Makgadikgadi Pans). Tectonic activity and faulting interrupted the flow of the river causing it to backup and form what is now the Okavango delta. This has created a unique system of water ways that now supports a vast array of animal and plant life that would have otherwise been a dry Kalahari savanna.

The delta's floods are fed from the Angolan rains, which start in October and finish sometime in April. The floods only cross the border between Botswana and Namibia in December and will only reach the bottom end of the delta (Maun) sometime in July.

Taking almost nine months from the source to the bottom. This slow meandering pace of the flood is due to the lack of drop in elevation, which drops a little more than 60 metres over a distance of 450 kilometres. The delta's water deadends in the Kalahari - via the Botetle river, with over 95 per cent of the water eventually evaporating.

During the peak of the flooding the delta's area can expand to over 16,000 square kilometres, shrinking to less than 9,000 square kilometres in the low period. As the water travels through the delta, the wildlife starts to move back into the region. The areas surrounding the delta are beginning to try out (the rains in Botswana occur approximately the same time as in Angola) and the wildlife starts to congregate on the edge of the newly flooded areas, May through October.

The delta environment has large numbers of animal populations that are otherwise rare, such as crocodile, red lechwe, sitatunga, elephant, wild dogs, buffalo, wattled crane as well as the other more common mammals and bird life.

Photographic credits to Wilderness Safaris and their photographers.