Eight days on an overland truck through two countries will recalibrate you fast. Not in a soft, reflective way — more like the Zambezi recalibrates you when it flips your raft and you come up spitting water with no idea where the boat went. By the time I climbed out of that gorge, sweaty and grinning at the top in 22 minutes 18 seconds (yes, I timed it), I understood something about this corner of Africa that no amount of pre-trip research could have told me. The days that beat me up the most were the ones I’d be talking about for years. Here’s what it cost me to learn that.
1
The Overland Truck Looks Insane — Book It Anyway
Picture the chassis of a dump truck. Now instead of the dumping mechanism, someone welded a steel shipping container with 22 seats and cut windows into the sides. Tents and sleeping pads on the roof. Full fold-out kitchen underneath. It looks like something NATO would deploy to a conflict zone, not something you’d voluntarily climb into for eight days across Botswana. When I first laid eyes on the Nomad Tours rig outside Johannesburg, I genuinely questioned my judgment. Patrick, our guide and driver, called it a truck, not a bus, and he was right to make the distinction — this thing could survive a serious collision with the landscape and keep moving.
Here’s the thing: by day two, I’d stopped caring what it looked like. The people crammed into that container — Yurt and Melanie from outside Düsseldorf, Josephine and Philippe from Brugge, Elise and Gerard from Melbourne, Luke from London — became the whole point of the trip. Tbong cooked chicken curry with rice and vegetables over an open camp kitchen on the first night, we found the bar, and within 48 hours these strangers felt like people I’d known considerably longer. You don’t need comfort. You need the right people in a confined space with cold beer at the end of the day. The truck delivers exactly that.
2
Being Separated from Your Group Feels Like a Punishment Until It Doesn’t
Here’s where I made a genuine stink about something that turned out to be one of the best two days of the entire eight-week trip. When I booked the Nomad tour, I was told I’d gotten the last slot on the accommodated option. What I was not told was that I’d be the only accommodated passenger. Everyone else was camping. For the Okavango Delta portion, that meant the group poled off into the bush on traditional makoros for two nights with no facilities while I got flown into a full-service camp. I was not pleased. I booked a group tour specifically to be with people, and here I was getting peeled off from the group and dropped somewhere alone.
What I got instead was Gunn’s Camp — a place I’d rate 5 out of 5 without hesitation. Jinxy, an OU graduate who’d spent years in Oklahoma (Sooner shout-out delivered), met me on arrival. The entire cleaning staff was standing under a thatched roof singing and dancing as I walked up the path. For me alone. It was one of those moments where you feel equal parts moved and ridiculous. The “tent” had a private screened porch. Hippos walked by during dinner. And then there was Petros, who announced a fishing competition at the first stop and immediately caught one while I stood there holding a rod like a tourist. We ended 5-5, and I maintain the beer I cracked at the 4-4 tie is what turned the tide. Don’t fight the itinerary. Africa will route you somewhere better than you planned.
3
The Day Game Drive and the Evening Boat Cruise Are Not the Same Experience — Choose Accordingly
The afternoon game drive along the Chobe River cost considerably more than the 3.50 USD crocodile farm we’d stopped at earlier (which was its own kind of waste, but at least it was cheap). The heat was close to what I’d felt in Hurghada, Egypt — the kind that makes the air feel like it has texture. Dust everywhere. No breeze in the back of the game truck. Animals visible across the river, meaning basically specks. The group came back drenched, irritable, and underwhelmed. I’m not going to sugarcoat it: that was a bad afternoon for the money.
Then we got on the boat. Same river, same animals, completely different universe. Crocodiles and hippos literally feet from the hull. Because the summer dry season had dropped the water levels, a river island had become a refuge — no predators could reach it easily, so it was packed: elephants, rhino, warthog, water buffalo, gazelle. And the birds — I counted 38 fish eagles in one day on the delta, roughly 1.5 per kilometer. Then the sun dropped toward the horizon, and two elephants walked directly through it at the waterline while a pair of hippos floated nose-to-nose like they were actually kissing. The Chobe boat cruise is worth every dollar. The day land drive is optional at best.
4
Victoria Falls in Dry Season Is Not a Consolation Prize
Everyone will tell you to go in rainy season when the water volume is at its peak. And sure, I get it — the falls in full flood are supposed to be something else entirely. But here’s what dry season gave me that a wall of mist cannot: I could see everything. Top to bottom of the gorge, the full arc of the falls, every tier and collection of cascades at once. No mist obscuring the drop. No spray soaking you before you get close enough to see anything. The falls curve in a long gentle arc, and walking upstream from where we entered, each turn produced a new angle, a new rainbow, a new perspective on the depth of that canyon.
The other thing dry season gave me was no safety infrastructure between me and a serious fall. The Zimbabwean philosophy on guardrails appears to be roughly Darwinian — if you’re coordinated enough to step back from a canyon rim, you’ll be fine; if not, well, the gene pool thanks you. I walked directly to the edge, looked straight down, and got a perspective on depth that no railing-equipped overlook platform ever provides. We timed our visit for late afternoon, which turned out to be a decision worth making twice. The falls shifted from white to gold as the sun got low, and watching that change happen in real time was the kind of thing you file away for a long time. Then we went and drank one-dollar beers at the loudest dive bar in Victoria Falls, the only tourists there, with music at a volume that interfered with cardiac function. That part was also non-negotiable.
5
The Zambezi Rafting — Do the Full Day or Stay on the Bank (Seriously, This Was Non-Negotiable)
I talked four people into the full-day raft on the Zambezi instead of the half-day option. Class 5 rapids, Victor from Victoria as our guide, and Colm from the group who had a complicated relationship with staying in the boat. The hike down into the gorge took a while. We practiced our commands — all forward, all back, down, and the fan favorite, out of the boat — and then we were moving. Rapid two was a class 5 and the nerves in the boat shifted noticeably into something closer to joy. Then rapid four happened, and I heard someone ask where Colm was. He came up from under the boat. Whether he jumped when the wave hit or the wave made the decision for him is a matter of ongoing debate. River 1, Colm 0.
A few rapids later the whole boat flipped — Luke’s flying body block tackle across the hull may have been a contributing factor — and suddenly all of us were running the rapids independently, feet first, paddles across our laps, safety crew pulling people out of the current with what I can only describe as cheerful efficiency. Everyone came up laughing. That’s the Zambezi: it beats you up and you love it. The Three Sisters rapids followed by the Angry Mother were the best sequence on the river, just relentless walls of water and paddling that left you soaked and completely alive. The hike out afterward was 25 minutes straight up the canyon wall. I made it in 22:18. The free beers at the top tasted like nothing I can adequately compare to anything else. Half a day on this river would have been like leaving a great meal after the appetizers.
6
Your “Five-Star” Room Means Nothing When the Day Was That Good — Book the Experience, Not the Bed
At Victoria Falls I was separated from the group again (a recurring theme on this tour) and put up in what was billed as a five-star hotel. Lumpy mattress. Sheets with the texture of sandpaper. AC that didn’t function. No ceiling fan. Meanwhile, the “tents” at Gunn’s Camp in the Okavango Delta had been genuinely luxurious — private screened porches, staff who treated a solo traveler like he was the only guest in the world (he was), hippos audible from the bed. The five-star hotel was a rundown business-class room that would have been unremarkable in any mid-tier city. It wasn’t the roughest place I’d slept on this trip, but the gap between the marketing and the reality was significant.
What made the Victoria Falls nights great had nothing to do with the room. It was dinner at Mamma Africa with the group — they were out of game meat, so we ate chicken curry and watched local performers dance until we were sweating just from observation — followed by that dollar-beer dive bar where the DJ played loud enough to rearrange your internal organs. Then the final night, Luke leveraged some London connection to get us into the Victoria Falls Hotel, a proper colonial-era property that actually earned its reputation, and we had dinner in the garden with wine and cocktails and a cool breeze rolling up from the gorge. The room you sleep in is just where you recover. The eight-dollar-a-day cost difference between a tent and a hotel room is irrelevant when you’re too tired from the river to care either way. Spend the money on the boat cruise. Spend it on the full-day raft. Spend it on the camp in the delta where Petros will beat you at fishing until the beer kicks in. If you want help figuring out where exactly to put those dollars on a Botswana or Zimbabwe trip, go ask WildWilliam AI — I built it specifically for questions like that, and it’ll give you a straight answer instead of a brochure.