Place to stay · Makgadikgadi Pans National Park
Moela Safari Lodge
Moela Safari Lodge has eight thatched suites on the high bank of the Boteti River near Khumaga, in a 770 hectare tribal reserve facing Makgadikgadi Pans National Park.
Moela Safari Lodge sits on the high bank of the Boteti River near Khumaga village, looking across at Makgadikgadi Pans National Park. It is not inside the park. The lodge is in the Ngande Reserve, 770 hectares of tribal land that Chief Ngande of Khumaga turned from farming to wildlife in the early 1980s, and which has an open border with the park. The draw is the zebra and wildebeest that mass along the river in the dry months.
What to expect
Eight thatched suites, each with a bedroom, bathroom, living area and a private deck facing the river. Beds have mosquito nets. Families with children are welcome. The lodge says it was built by Batswana craftspeople from local materials, and the central living area is clay and thatch.
Activities are game drives in the reserve and in the national park, walks, a Bushman experience, trips out to the Makgadikgadi salt pans, photographic trips and helicopter flights.
The lodge is a partnership between David Dugmore, who has worked in Botswana safaris for close to 40 years, and Mr Moela and his wife Gloria, who are from the local community.
Practical details
- A lodge shuttle from Maun Airport takes about 2 hours on good roads. It leaves Maun between 1pm and 2pm and leaves the lodge at 10am.
- Self-drivers get a map and directions from the lodge.
- Charter flights use the Khumaga airstrip.
- Power is a solar hybrid system. Wi-Fi is at reception only.
Good to know
Timing matters more here than at most lodges. By the lodge’s account the herds gather in the river valley from June to November, when the Boteti is the only water around, and from November to May they move east across the park to graze. The Boteti is fed from the Okavango Delta through Maun, so its level changes from year to year.
Last updated 12 October 2026. Sources: The Lands Travel, Moela Safari Lodge, The Lands Travel, The Moela Story, The Lands Travel, Contact, Wikipedia, Boteti River.
Twenty thousand mud bricks above the Boteti
On 11 November 2023 the president of the day, Mokgweetsi Masisi, came to Khumaga to open eight rooms on a riverbank. He told anyone in doubt to go to Khumaga and look, and the detail he picked out was the beds, which are made of mud like the walls.
The engineer who drew it himself
Legatilemang Moela never trained as an architect. He spent 20 years as a mechanical engineer at Debswana, the diamond miner, left in 2002 to run his own firm servicing the mine, and then went into cattle. When he turned to tourism he told the Botswana Daily News that his model was Shompole, a lodge in Kenya built from local materials on a Maasai group ranch. Shompole had closed in September 2011, years before he started.
Khumaga people made him 20,000 mud bricks. Nine in ten of the builders were local, led by older women who still knew how to raise a clay wall. Lekgapho is the patterned finish those women work into mud by hand, and Masisi used his speech to ask the owners to help them teach it to younger ones.
It took six years. The village agreed to the lease in October 2017, the environmental study was finished in April 2019 and building began that month. By Moela’s account Covid then stopped the work for the whole of 2020 and 2021, and lenders turned him down. In July 2020 his company still handed out food for 280 Khumaga households. The partner who got it finished was David Dugmore.
Whose land this is
The landlord is Ngande Trust, which belongs to the residents of Khumaga. In 2019 its chairman, Budzani Baitse, told a reporter that elephants had damaged the trust’s own Gwaraga Game Park and destroyed boreholes and water tanks. Moela’s lease was for 700 hectares over 15 years. The lodge now gives the reserve as 770.
The lodge says the reserve has an open border with the national park, and the reason is where the fence went. In 2015 the government decided to rebuild it on the village side of the Boteti, about 105 km of it, with the river inside. Early in 2019 the minister, Kitso Mokaila, admitted at the Khumaga kgotla that the state had gone ahead without the village’s agreement. Baitse saw both sides: people were uneasy about the line, he said, but it could be good for game drives. At the lodge’s opening the vice president praised the trust for having no reported infighting and no misused money.
What turns up below the decks
There are two public decks, Nest high on the bank and Riverbed at ground level, and a live camera run with Africam. Its clips from late September and early October 2026 are mostly elephants: swimming, mud bathing, one crossing to catch up with the herd. A hippo with a calf leaves the water after dark.
The lodge’s newsletters posted in 2025 describe a dry season spent waiting for the Okavango flood, which it said was the biggest it had seen since 2019/2020. About eighty hippos were crowded into the last pools. As the heat built towards the rains, zebra and wildebeest packed the seeps and waterholes from dawn to dusk, and by October elephants had taken over the waterholes. A borehole Moela drilled before the lodge opened pumps water for wildlife in the dry months. The lodge says two rescued hippos were later moved to a dam at Mokolodi, near Gaborone.
Lions the lodge itself calls occasional. Boat trips depend on the season and the water level, so do not count on one.
Park fees
Moela Safari Lodge is inside Makgadikgadi Pans National Park. International visitors pay from US$14 €13 · P190 a day. See all Makgadikgadi Pans National Park fees
