Camp Moremi

The Californian's camp under the ebony trees

Jessie Neil was a rich American, a Californian by her old company’s account, who had been coming to the Okavango for six or seven years when, in 1980, she got permission to build a lodge of her own. She was given a lease on an island called Nxaragha and put up Camp Okavango. Two years later came a second lease, at Xakanaxa inside Moremi, and she built Camp Moremi on the same pattern. The two camps were registered together as Desert and Delta Safaris.

She lasted a decade. By 1991, the firm’s own history says, she had grown wary of how commercial the business was getting. In 1992 she sold, and her two camps were joined with Chobe Game Lodge in a new company, Chobe Holdings, which is listed on the Botswana Stock Exchange. Camp Moremi’s guides still drive out to a spot called Jessie’s Pools.

A lawn you could play cricket on

Before the rebuild the camp centred on what it called the Moremi Tree Lodge, a raised building under giant ebony trees holding the lounge, a wildlife library, the dining room and the bar. One couple who arrived by boat in November 2007 for a single night were not won over. They described a lawn big enough for cricket, mown every day and watered by sprinklers, and thought the place could have been on the edge of Johannesburg.

The whole camp was redesigned and rebuilt in 2018. The ebonies stayed.

Lempheditse Odumetse, a Maun man known as Mc, started here as a waiter in 1999, qualified as a guide the next year and later managed the camp. Since February 2022 he has been group managing director of Chobe Holdings.

Ghost, the Darkness and Paradise Pools

Paradise Pools is an open flat of short grass and dead trees where lechwe and impala gather, and it is where the stories come from. One afternoon in March 2019 a Camp Moremi guide called Gwist showed the operator’s marketing manager a young male lion at the crossing there, one of three brothers who had turned up a few days before. Next morning two big males were at Jessie’s Pools, noses up, looking for the youngsters they had beaten up in the night. Two had fled. The third broke from bushes a few metres from the vehicle and only got away by swimming. The marketing man has called the big pair Ghost and the Darkness ever since.

Wild dogs use the same ground. A guest at the camp next door wrote of a late afternoon in the winter of 2018 when a pack of 22, chasing impala, ran into a lioness and her cub at the pools and mobbed her. Both lions walked away.

Do not bank on dogs. Only two travellers have logged their sightings with Expert Africa since 2022, a thin sample, and one of them saw a single dog, after a guide named Gee had gone to great lengths to track the pack. Both saw lion. Leopard and cheetah were each seen by one of the two. The leopard the operator was writing about in the winter of 2024 was a seven year old female who had lost a cub to a giraffe’s kick the year before.

Eighty minutes of bad road

The roads are rough. Expert Africa’s own writer says so, and a couple who stayed in May 2025 timed the track out at 80 minutes before they reached open country with more game, nearly half the morning drive gone. They found little near camp. A 2022 guest was surprised how small an area the drives covered. Three lodges and a public campsite share these roads, self-drivers come in from Maun, and the lodge guides radio each other, so a good sighting draws a queue. A traveller in 2008 was already writing about small traffic jams.