odd-balls-encave

Some camps announce themselves with polished brochures and carefully composed welcome speeches. Oddballs’ does not. It announces itself with the sound of a mokoro pole moving through still water, the smell of the communal dishes cooking from an open kitchen, and the sight of an elephant moving between the ancient trees at the edge of camp. It has always been this way. Oddballs' is the oldest camp in Botswana, and there is a reason it has never needed to change.rnrnBuilt on a secluded island on the edge of Chief's Island, accessible only by light aircraft, Oddballs' sits in the heart of the Okavango Delta where the floodplains of the Xaxaba Concession open into one of Africa's great wildernesses. The Moremi Game Reserve borders the island. Lion, leopard and wild dog move through. The birdlife is staggering. And none of it requires an engine to reach.rnrnThis is a camp that draws a particular kind of guest, and draws them back.

There is a generation of travellers who knew Oddballs' before the word "ecotourism" existed, who sat on this same deck watching the same hippos surface in the same channel, and who have been measuring every subsequent safari against that first experience. They know exactly what they are returning to, and that is precisely why they return. For them, Oddballs' is not a discovery. It is a homecoming.rnrnThere are journalists and writers and people who work in conservation, in travel, in the industries that talk endlessly about places like the Okavango, who arrive here needing to remember why any of it matters. A few days at Oddballs' tends to settle that question.rnrnAnd then there are the ones we cannot wait to introduce to this place: younger travellers from across southern Africa and beyond, nature enthusiasts who have grown up knowing the Delta by name but not yet by feel, the weight of a mokoro paddle, the sound a herd of elephants makes moving through shallow water at dusk, the particular quality of silence that settles over this island after dinner when the generator has never existed and the stars are very close. For them, Oddballs' is not a nostalgia trip. It is a first encounter with something they will spend the rest of their lives returning to.