See Botswana Differently on Belmond’s Immersive Sketchbook Safari

Botswana offers wildlife and warmth in equal measure, but I came for something more — to draw. 

There’s a moment, somewhere between Maun and the middle of nowhere, when the pencil in your hand feels oddly incongruous. You’re in a small aircraft, flying low enough to distinguish elephant from hippo, with a view so implausibly cinematic it could make your iPhone weep. But this is a sketching safari, and taking a photograph would be, well, a kind of betrayal.

It’s not the usual rhythm of travel in Africa, where spectacle is typically measured in headcounts — how many lions before lunch, how many Instagram reels before dinner. Belmond’s ‘Sketchbook Safari’, hosted across two of its most exquisitely placed properties in Botswana — Savute Elephant Lodge in the northern Chobe and Eagle Island Lodge in the heart of the Okavango Delta — inverts the formula.

Over five days, we were encouraged to replace instant capture with slow looking, under the guidance of Vicki Thomas. A renowned figure in botanical circles, Vicki has spent four decades documenting the intricacies of the natural world, resulting in work held in international and local private collections. Her knowledge and way of seeing the world is as expansive as it is contagious.

This is not to say the experience lacks the requisite comforts. Quite the opposite. The journey begins at Savute Elephant Lodge, a polished outpost in Chobe National Park where each private suite comes with a front-row seat to the local watering hole and a mini bar better stocked than most London apartments. Included is a safari guide. Ours was Goms, a walking encyclopaedia on anything — from the differences between giraffe species to the correct spelling of Savute depending on rainfall (with an ‘e’ in the wet season and with an ‘i’ in the dry).

The second lodge, Eagle Island, is a private slip of the Okavango Delta. There are plunge pools and safari journals and local tales of the bush beside the bed. You can take your gin and tonic with a side of hippo or, for a change of perspective, book the open-door helicopter flight that traces the majestic Delta from the air.

But the real difference is the drawing. Each day begins with a sketchbook and the anticipation of discovery. It's a subtle shift of gears from guest to student, spectator to observer. The materials are supplied and beautifully arranged as one might expect: stitch-bound sketchbooks, a palette of watercolours, brushes and soft pencils.

There is something fundamentally levelling about drawing wildlife; it reveals how little attention we really pay to what’s in front of us. My first attempt at a giraffe looked more like a camel wearing pyjamas. The process forces a kind of attentiveness that’s increasingly rare: the light on a buffalo thorn tree at dawn, the way shadows pool under the bellies of a lechwe herd or the texture of a seedpod used for centuries to treat ailments that Western medicine is only now beginning to acknowledge.

The question, of course, is why? Why ask guests to forgo their urgency? Why spend a week drawing when you could be mainlining wildlife content in digital megapixels? The answer, it turns out, lies in what happens when you slow down enough to actually see. Sketching, even badly at first, is an act of attention. It’s not meditative, exactly, it requires too much decision-making for that, but it does strip away distraction. You start to notice things — not just animals, but ecosystems. Colour gradations. Perspective. The story the landscape is trying to tell when we’re not drowning it out with content.

The Sketchbook Safari doesn’t aim to turn you into an artist. It’s subtler than that. It forces you to look harder, to sit still, to relinquish the impulse to photograph every moment and instead translate it into marks on paper, however clumsy. It attunes the senses. And, in the process, you begin to see the world — and perhaps yourself — a little differently.

Sketchbook Safari

by the Belmond group, synonymous with global luxury experiences.

12–17 November 2025

For booking and enquiries, contact:

safaris@belmond.com

+27 21 483-1600

Text by Heidi Bertish