Savute Safari Lodge

Fifty elephants at dinner, drinking from a river that left

In October 2015 a guest at Savute Safari Lodge counted about fifty elephants at the water in front of the dining deck when he came in to dinner. Over three evenings he put the total at 300 to 400, the matriarchs and their young squabbling over a place to drink. The Savute Channel they were standing in had already run dry. What they were drinking came out of a pipe.

A river view with no river

That is the thing to understand before you book. The channel started flowing again in about 2009. By late 2015 it had gone from this end. One visitor that August watched a leopard fish barely living catfish out of the last damp stretch. Since then the outlook has been a sandy bed with pumped waterholes in it, and the elephants come because there is so little else to drink. The October guest saw two working. A couple a month earlier found only one.

That couple, there in 40°C heat in late September, also timed the elephants. At midday they saw one to three. After dark there were forty or fifty, coming and going, at a water’s edge about 20 metres from the dinner tables. The wet months are different: guests in April 2015 were disappointed to find the elephants widely dispersed, and a couple in March 2026 wrote of long grass, partly flooded tracks and kudu at the waterhole. Those are the zebra months though. One visitor in March 2015 wrote of zebra in their thousands, another in April 2011 of a herd reaching as far as she could see.

Water was reported pushing into the top of the channel again in June 2026, over on the Linyanti side. Nobody can say if or when it reaches the lodge.

Thirty lions and the pumps

The paper behind Savuti’s elephant-killing lions is by John Power and Shem Compion, published in African Zoology in 2009. They report that the lions switch to elephants late in the dry season, from August to November, and that a pride of 30, watched at night with infrared equipment, killed one roughly every three days. Seven of the eight carcasses they aged were between four and eleven years old.

Their explanation is the uncomfortable part. The usual prey thins out when the herds migrate, and pumped water has made the elephants more inclined to stay put. If they are right, the kind of waterhole that makes dinner so entertaining helped set up the hunt. The operator says its own waterhole appeared in the BBC’s Planet Earth, whose 2006 night sequence showed just such a pride of thirty.

Don’t book for it. In forty guest reports going back to 2007 there is one elephant kill, in October 2013, when a couple watched lionesses pull one down.

Lloyd’s Camp, then a new building in 2024

This was Lloyd’s Camp, one of the original safari camps at Savuti. Chobe Holdings bought it in 1998 and turned it into Savute Safari Lodge under its Desert & Delta name, a company started in 1980 by a Californian, Jessie Neil. The lodge has since been rebuilt from scratch in thatch and canvas, with the reopening announced for 1 June 2024. Anything written before then describes rooms that no longer exist.

Ten vehicles and two wild dogs

It is national park, so the rules of the rest of Chobe apply. Vehicles must be back by sunset and may not leave the tracks, which frustrated several guests who had been to private concessions first. Sightings get shared too. A guest in March 2018 complained of ten vehicles circling two wild dogs. The rock painting walk can be called off when the grass is long: one couple in May 2017 were told it was too dangerous.