Place to stay · Mababe
Hideaways Mogotlho Safari Lodge
Off-grid tented lodge of 13 tents on the Khwai River in the NG41 Mababe concession, between Moremi and Chobe, with drives, night drives and seasonal walks.
Mogotlho is a tented lodge on the Khwai River inside NG41, the Mababe concession, with Moremi Game Reserve on one side and Chobe National Park on the other. It is run by Hideaways, a group with camps in Botswana, Zambia, Zimbabwe and South Africa.
What to expect
There are 13 tents sleeping 24 people, every one facing the river from its own deck. Two are family tents for two adults and two children. The main area has a dining room, lounge, bar and a pool and deck looking over the river. It is built off the grid.
Two shared activities a day are part of a stay, usually a morning and an afternoon drive. Night drives are offered as well. Walks depend on the season and on a guide being free. Mokoro trips are an extra and only run when the river is high enough, which Hideaways puts at April to October.
The lodge lists elephant, buffalo, giraffe, zebra and hippo as the animals you can count on, with lion met frequently, leopard often, and wild dog and spotted hyena present.
Practical details
- By air: about 40 minutes from Maun or an hour from Kasane to Khwai Private Airstrip, then a game drive transfer.
- By road from Maun: 2 to 2.5 hours through Shorobe and Sankuyo.
- Self-drivers are asked to contact reservations before setting out, as the road changes with the season.
- Children from age 7.
- Wi-Fi in the main area only. Mobile signal is limited.
Good to know
July to October is the lodge’s own pick for game. Days sit around 26°C but nights fall below 10°C, so pack a jacket. November to March is hot and wet, with young animals and migrant birds. If the mokoro matters to you, ask about water levels before booking.
Last updated 12 October 2026. Sources: Hideaways, Mogotlho Safari Lodge, Hideaways, Khwai River.
Mogotlho: a log bridge, a camel thorn and a pack of eighteen
In August 2009 the Khwai River spilled far wider than usual around Mababe. The new road bridge, due that April, was still not in place, and a member of the 4x4 Community forum told someone planning to camp there that the only way across was a log bridge used by “nearby Mogotlho Lodge”. It is the earliest dated trace of the lodge I could find.
One tree, two camps
Mogotlho is the Setswana name for the camel thorn, the acacia with pale grey thorns and ear-shaped pods that elephants eat in its shade. A guest on a sunrise walk wrote that she learnt where the name came from while looking at a fish eagle perched in one.
The name causes confusion. About 15 km upriver in a straight line, on the Khwai community’s land, is a campsite spelt Magotho, and people who write about it do not agree on the spelling. A 2012 mobile safari report of wild dogs failing to kill almost every morning around “Mogothlo” in Khwai is almost certainly about the campsite, not this lodge. Check which one a writer slept at.
Three names over the door, one landlord
Legend Hospitality Group added the lodge to its list in August 2015. In July 2020 the Botswana Daily News reported from Mababe that the old tents had been pulled down and roomier ones put up, to lift the place from two stars to four. The paper called it a joint venture between Kalahari Tours, Africa Field Sports and the Mababe Zokotsama Community Trust. Hideaways was showing the rebuilt lodge to the travel trade by early 2021.
The village trust is the landlord. Its chairperson, Itumeleng Mogodu, told the same paper in 2019 that the lodge’s rent and the community campsites were how the trust earned its money. In December 2021 the lodge and its partners served 160 meals at a party in Mababe and gave a hamper each to 20 of the village’s elders. Two of its guides, Roy Ngele and Keoikagetsa “Kaizer” Mphoyamodimo, went through the African Guide Academy to qualify for leading walks.
The dogs, and how much to believe
Nearly every account of the game here is published by the lodge itself, written by its staff, its guests or trade visitors it hosted. Read them as what has been seen, not as odds.
Wild dogs are the real story. Hideaways says 2026 was the third season running that a pack of 18 favoured the area round the lodge. On 1 May guide King George judged the alpha female heavily pregnant. Someone who arrived less than a week later saw no dogs at all. A third, arriving on 22 May, found her lying alone outside a den just beyond the concession boundary, three days after whelping, and the next morning watched bloodied dogs come back to feed her. The hunt that visitor actually saw failed, with impala scattering and wildebeest turning to chase the dogs. The lodge expected the pack to stay round the den until September. In 2024 a different visitor counted five pups on an afternoon drive.
Guides talk of a Mogotlho pride. That same 2024 visitor watched two males and four lionesses from an invading pride feeding on an elephant carcass. The resident males had seen them off by the next morning, and hyenas moved in after. A trade group that year met a leopard the guides call Mr Ears, after his battle-scarred ears, on an impala kill a quarter of an hour short of the lodge, then failed to find lions the following morning.
After dark, one of that group lay listening to a hippo grazing round the tent. The night drive is for springhares and pearl-spotted owlets.