Place to stay · North-West District
Gomoti River Lodge
Tented chalets on raised decks above the Gomoti floodplain at Mokhokhelo, about an hour by road from Maun, with day drives into Moremi Game Reserve.
Gomoti River Lodge is a small tented lodge on the Gomoti River at Mokhokhelo, on the Maun side of the Okavango Delta. Its selling point is simple and the lodge says it plainly: you drive here from Maun in about an hour, so there is no light aircraft to pay for. For a delta stay that is unusual, and it suits people on a self-drive trip who still want a night or two with water and hippos in front of them.
What to expect
The chalets are canvas on raised wooden decks under camelthorn and jackalberry trees, each facing the river and its floodplain. They have their own bathrooms with solar-heated water, mosquito nets, electricity and a private deck. Raised walkways lead to the dining area and the main viewing deck. There is a lounge with a small library, a bar, a pool and two bomas.
The lodge says hippos graze near the chalets, elephant and impala are regular, and lion turn up now and then. Activities are guided walks, game drives, night drives and mokoro trips, the last only when there is enough water. The longer outing is a guided day drive into Moremi Game Reserve. A shorter one turns round at Xini Lagoon and Black Pools. With the whole day it can reach Third Bridge and Xakanaxa. Birders get fish eagle, malachite kingfisher, African jacana and saddle-billed stork around camp.
Practical details
- GPS from the lodge: S19° 38.815’ E23° 42.330’.
- Reservations are handled on a Namibian number, with a separate Botswana number for the lodge itself.
- Booking is online through the lodge website.
Good to know
Mokoro outings depend on the flood, so ask about water levels before you count on one. The website gives no directions or road notes beyond the coordinates, so confirm the route when you book and ask if it needs a 4x4.
Last updated 12 October 2026. Sources: Gomoti River Lodge, Gomoti River Lodge, tented chalets, Gomoti River Lodge, contact.
Sneezing wild dogs and a river that keeps its own calendar
Wild dogs vote by sneezing. A resting pack gets up, mills about in a noisy greeting, and then either trots off to hunt or flops down again. Researchers from the wild dog project based at Dog Camp, just outside Moremi, watched 68 of these rallies in five packs between June 2014 and May 2015 and counted the sneezes. If a dominant dog started things, three sneezes were enough to get the pack moving. If a junior dog did, it took ten or more. The paper came out in 2017.
The packs they watched live in and around the reserve the lodge’s vehicles go into on a Moremi day.
The neighbours with the collars
Tico McNutt began following wild dogs here in 1989, living in a tent outside the reserve, and the project is still going. Now called Botswana Predator Conservation, it keeps track of 14 packs across roughly 3,000 square kilometres and has widened to lion, leopard, cheetah and spotted hyena. One of its collared lions, a male the researchers call Mason, usually keeps to the country near Xini Lagoon, which is where the lodge’s shorter Moremi drive goes.
Something else recorded in the Okavango is easy to picture under the trees at the lodge. Packs here eat fallen jackalberry fruit just before a hunt, the older dogs more than the young ones, a habit not reported anywhere else. Jackalberries fruit in the dry season, do well on termite mounds, and their trunks have long been cut into canoes.
Water that arrives when the rain has gone
The Gomoti does not follow the weather outside your tent. Rain that falls in the Angolan highlands in January and February reaches the top of the delta in about a month, then takes another four to creep across it, because the land drops only some 60 metres between Mohembo and Maun. Water is highest somewhere between May and August, in the middle of the dry winter, two to six months out of step with local rain. After that it falls away until about February. So the cold, dusty months should be the better bet for a mokoro, and the hot end of the year the worst.
The researchers describe the Gomoti as passable one week and not the next. Out looking for Mason in the rains, one team sank a Land Rover, then sank a second trying to free it. More than 70 mm fell that night, and both stayed put until a third arrived the next day and pulled them out one at a time. They say the water rules the dogs too: in low-flood years dogs may cross from the east of the delta to the west, and at peak flood they cannot.
What the odds look like
There is no published sightings record for this lodge, so take the nearest thing. At a camp in the private NG32 concession, under 20 km to the west on the same river, Expert Africa’s travellers have logged what they saw since 2018: 95% of them saw lion, 56% leopard, 42% cheetah and 30% wild dog. Those guests are out for several days on a private concession, night drives included. A day visitor from the lodge has the park roads and daylight, so expect less. It still shows which animals are a fair bet on this side of the delta and which are luck.
The reserve those day drives go into exists because Elizabeth Pulane Moremi, widow of the Batawana chief Moremi III, worried about what hunting was doing to the game. It was proclaimed in 1963.
