Aerial view at golden hour of a channel winding through reedbeds around a wooded island in the Okavango Delta, the lodge tucked under the trees at the water's edge

Botswana · Okavango Delta

Nxamaseri Island Lodge

Old, small and unhurried.

Nxamaseri Island Lodge sits on a private island in the permanent waters of Botswana's Okavango Delta, and it has been there long enough to count as one of the oldest lodges in the Delta. That longevity matters. Camps come and go in the Okavango; the ones that endure tend to have understood something about the place early.

It is small, and it has a distinct style of its own. Rather than importing a look, the lodge takes its cues from the permanent swamp that surrounds it and from the indigenous people whose home this is, expressing that culture quietly rather than turning it into a theme.

A rocky hill rising out of dry scrub at dusk, the sky fading from apricot to pale blue — Dusk, out toward the hills

Camps come and go in the Okavango; the ones that endure tend to have understood something about the place early.

Permanent water is the defining fact of a stay here. The channels and lagoons are always full, and the lodge's rhythm follows them. Days are spent on and around the water, and evenings end with the particular hush that only a swamp at dusk can produce.

Old, small and unhurried. In a Delta increasingly full of the new, those are the right three words.

The lodge

Open-sided main lounge under a thatched roof built around a living tree trunk, with a chandelier, a bar and cushioned sofas facing the floodplain — The lounge, built around a tree

Tented room with canvas walls under thatch: a bed with beaded cushions, a woven pendant light and doors open to a private deck in the trees — A room, open to the deck

Twin-bedded tented room with printed throws, a copper standing fan and a window onto the trees — Twin room

Under canvas

A bedroom under thatch with a round mirror above the bed, beside a canvas-walled shower with a rainfall head over cream tiles — Bedroom and shower, under one thatch

Long timber-floored room with a buffalo skull above the doorway and a passage of light leading past twin basins — Buffalo skull, twin basins

A crocodile lying in the grass at the water's edge, teeth showing along its closed jaw — Crocodile, at the water's edge

Nxamaseri Island Lodge

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