September marks one of the finest stretches of the walking calendar in Botswana’s Northern Tuli Game Reserve, and Kaelo Destinations is using the month to spotlight the on-foot experiences within its collection. The company runs safari lodges, tented camps and private homes across eastern Botswana, along with an exclusive-use beach house on the Mozambican coast. The timing is deliberate: September falls inside the WalkMashatu walking window that opens each year from March to October, and it also sits within the reserve’s peak season, which spans 1 July to 31 October. Travellers who have already logged a season or two behind the wheel of a game vehicle often say it is the guided trails, the sunken photographic hides and the fly-camp sleep-outs that reshape how they experience the bush.
Walking the reserve instead of driving it
At Mashatu, guests can trade one of their two daily game drives for a guided safari walk. It is a simple swap, not an extra booking. On foot, the whole scale of the reserve shifts. Rather than covering distance, guests move at a measured pace through mopane woodland and along riverbeds beside an experienced ranger, learning to read spoor, insect tracks and the scent of wild herbs. These are the small things a vehicle simply rolls past. For anyone comparing a Botswana safari with a busier, more famous reserve elsewhere in the region, the walking option is frequently what tips the balance.
WalkMashatu takes the idea a step further. Each trail carries no more than six guests, is guided by an experienced leader, and is planned around the fitness and interests of the group. Running alongside it is Night Under the Stars, an add-on activity offered year-round to guests booked at the Mashatu lodges and at Kolokolo Safari Home. The evening begins with an afternoon game drive out of the lodge, overnight bag in hand, arriving at the WalkMashatu Fly Camp for a night around the fire with dinner, night photography, storytelling or a short guided walk. Guests bed down in custom designed tents beneath the open Botswana sky, then head out on a sunrise game drive that returns them to the lodge for brunch the next morning.
Hides that put the camera at eye level
Both of the reserve’s photographic hides are set underground, and that is exactly their appeal. Inside the Matebole Photographic Hide, guests are positioned at eye level as elephants, antelope and an extensive list of bird species arrive to drink just metres away. Sessions are offered morning or afternoon, hold a maximum of nine people, and are led by the PhotoMashatu team, whose members bring more than a decade of hide experience and can lend equipment support such as gimbals. First-timers and veteran photographers get the same treatment, with coaching matched to whoever is behind the lens.
The Lala Limpopo Sleepout Hide, named by Conde Nast Traveller as the world’s most intrepid sleepover, operates from dusk right through to dawn. It is a comfortable safari suite sunk into the ground, with an active waterhole about two metres from the photographing window and lighting tuned for night photography. Guests dine, sip coffee and remain in place, tracking nocturnal wildlife through the hours of darkness before waking to elephants at eye level. For photographers who have spent years shooting from a raised vehicle, working at ground level is a genuinely different craft. The PhotoMashatu vehicle brings that same principle out into the field, offering room for gear, fitted gimbal arms and a floor lowered specially for eye-level shots.
Where guests actually stay
Kaelo Destinations sorts its properties into three collections, which makes the choice simpler to navigate. The Luxury Collection includes Euphorbia Mashatu, a five-star property completed in 2021 with eight private villas and the first of its kind in the region, together with Kolokolo Safari Home, an exclusive-use house sleeping eight that dates back to the 1960s and was renovated in 2023, plus Pambele Beach House, La Grande Mare and the group’s aviation services. The Safari Collection brings together Mashatu Lodge, first constructed in the mid to late 1970s and hosting between fourteen and twenty-eight guests, Tuli Safari Lodge Mashatu, Botswana’s oldest safari lodge, built in 1964 and later reworked into a luxury tented lodge with eight tented suites, and Mashatu Tent Camp, built across 1987 and 1988 with eight private tents. The Explorer Collection features Fika Futi Safari Camp with four bedrooms for eight guests, Shalimpo Safari Home, a self-catering house for eight renovated in 2023, and the WalkMashatu and Night Under the Stars experiences.
With that kind of range, a family, a photographic group and a couple can each land on a Botswana safari lodge that fits their travel style, all within a single reserve. A number of the properties are exclusive-use, which is a real advantage for multi-generational parties and for photographers who prefer to keep their own schedule instead of fitting into a shared one.
The reserve behind the lodges
Spanning roughly 72,000 hectares, the Northern Tuli Game Reserve ranks among the largest privately owned game reserves in Africa. It lies in the remote east of Botswana at the confluence of the Shashe and Limpopo rivers, where the borders of Botswana, Zimbabwe and South Africa converge. Sandstone ridges, mopane woodland, riverine forest and ancient baobabs define the terrain, which sustains 48 mammal species and more than 350 bird species. Of that total, Mashatu Game Reserve makes up about 42,000 hectares, close to sixty per cent of the wider reserve.
Wildlife roams the reserve unfenced, drawn by its eight rivers, and nothing is hunted or culled. Game drives are limited to three vehicles per sighting, so encounters stay unhurried. A good many of the rangers and trackers have worked at Mashatu for decades, some beyond forty years, and that long familiarity shows in the way they read the ground.
Conservation built into the operation
Of Mashatu’s six camps, five draw their power from solar and carry green-camp status, aided by the roughly 95 per cent of days Botswana enjoys with sunshine. Laundry dries in the sun, gardens are stocked with indigenous species, and single-use plastic gives way to refillable flasks handed to every guest. The reserve buys 95 per cent of its supplies from inside Botswana, spanning food and beverages through to building and vehicle materials, and pours around P91 million a year into the local economy. At Merryhill, the reserve headquarters, a central recycling plant deals with glass, tins and waste reuse.
The practical work is paid for by conservation levies built into every stay. Those funds cover erosion rehabilitation, alien plant control, elephant-safe fencing that guards the more than 86 Iconic Trees of Mashatu, and a monthly water saving of about a million litres. Hydra VIS systems and wildlife tracking supply spatial data to research on elephants, big cats and migratory birds. The levies also back anti-poaching units, human-wildlife conflict management and restoration efforts run through the Tuli Conservation Trust and NOTUGRE.
The coastal half of the collection
Set on Mozambique’s secluded coast in the Bazaruto area, Pambele operates completely off-grid. It makes its own solar power, produces all of its water by desalination, and pulls drinking water straight from atmospheric humidity. Each guest is handed a biodegradable wheatstraw refillable bottle, and the house partners with small-scale island suppliers wherever possible. A community clinic is among the projects currently underway. First built in 2007, the house was renovated in 2023 and relaunched in 2025 as a barefoot-luxury beach house welcoming up to ten guests on an exclusive-use basis.
Mozambique boasts over 2,500 kilometres of Indian Ocean coastline, dotted with reefs, dhow sailing and archipelagos that include Bazaruto and Quirimbas. Anyone weighing up Mozambique beach resorts to follow a week in the bush will find the combination works especially well in September, when a few days of diving, snorkelling, kayaking and leisurely beach dinners offset the early mornings of a safari. Since both sides belong to the same collection, a single team looks after the logistics of moving between them.
A collection with a stated purpose
Kaelo is drawn from the Setswana word meaning to guide, guardian, or to nurture, and the company shapes its stated values around that idea: conservation-first tourism, authentic experiences and community upliftment. Two properties have grown into a curated collection, and the group says that same purpose continues to carry through as new destinations come on board. The full picture of the walking season, the hides, the individual properties and current rates lives on the Kaelo Destinations website at https://kaelodestinations.com/.
About Kaelo Destinations
Kaelo Destinations is a southern African travel collection presenting safari lodges, tented camps and private homes in Botswana’s Northern Tuli Game Reserve, alongside an exclusive-use beach house on the Mozambican coast. Its properties fall into Luxury, Safari and Explorer collections and run on a conservation-first footing, with solar-powered camps, off-grid coastal infrastructure, local sourcing and conservation levies that fund anti-poaching, habitat restoration and community projects. Majority ownership rests with Maggie and Stephen Lansdown, whose ties to the Tuli region reach back to 2007. Reservations are managed from South Africa.
Media Contact
Kaelo Destinations
Email: [email protected]
Phone: +27 31 761 3440
Website: https://kaelodestinations.com/
