Chobe Gate Times, Riverfront Slots and the Ngoma Transit Road

Chobe is two parks as far as timing goes. There is the riverfront next to Kasane, 17 km of track between Sedudu Gate and the Serondela picnic site where nearly every day visitor ends up, and there is everything else. The gate hours are the same everywhere. The riverfront has an extra layer of rules on top, and that layer is what trips up people in their own cars.

Gate hours

Botswana sets one timetable for all its national parks and game reserves, written into the Fourth Schedule of the National Parks and Game Reserves Regulations. The environment minister read the same hours out in Parliament in February 2025.

Period	Gates open	Gates close
1 April to 30 September	06:00	18:30
1 October to 31 March	05:30	19:00

Last checked 12 October 2026. Two fixed seasons, and the switch happens on 1 April and 1 October.

Outside those hours you may not enter, and you may not drive, boat or wander beyond your lodge or campsite. Anyone sleeping at Ihaha, Savuti or Linyanti needs to be in camp by closing time, not at a gate. The regulations do allow night drives with a licensed guide in areas a park’s management plan sets aside for them, back by 22:00. Don’t assume the riverfront is one of them.

Which gate

Sedudu is the main one, about 6 km from Kasane on the tarred A33, and it is where the riverfront day traffic goes in. Ngoma sits at the western end of the riverfront beside the Ngoma Bridge border with Namibia, roughly 50 km from Sedudu by the tar road.

The other gates serve the sandy interior. Mababe is the southern gate, the way in from Maun, Khwai and Moremi towards Savuti. Ghoha is north of Savuti on the track coming down from Kachikau, and the German Wikivoyage page puts it 29 km from the Savuti campsite. Linyanti Gate is out west, about 40 km from Savuti by the same source. Poha, in the Nogatsaa area, is the least documented. The one traveller account I found used it to leave the park towards the Nata road and says you cannot enter there, so don’t plan an arrival around it without asking DWNP first.

Everyone signs the register at the gate. The regulations also let an officer ask for proof of age, residence or vehicle weight, and if you can’t show it you are charged the full non-resident rate or the heaviest vehicle class.

The riverfront time slots

This is the rule people argue about. The Department of Wildlife and National Parks (DWNP) wrote a decongestion strategy for the stretch from Sedudu to Serondela, and its table of sessions looks like this:

Season	Tour operators	Self-drivers and day trippers
1 April to 30 September	06:00 to 09:00 and 14:30 to 18:30	09:00 to 14:30
1 October to 31 March	05:30 to 09:00 and 14:30 to 19:00	09:00 to 14:30

The same paper splits the area into three one-way routes, each marked by a coloured token hung on the mirror: blue for the river bank, red for the upper route through the Sedudu valley, green for the Nogatsaa junction route. Each takes 25 vehicles a session, 75 in all, with two vehicles per company. Past Serondela the strategy stops applying.

How much of this you will meet at the gate is another matter. In 2021 the minister told Parliament that the law does not keep private vehicles out of the parks, and that the Chobe riverfront is the one place where traffic is a problem. In 2016 the acting park manager told the trade that operators kept ignoring the routes and crowding the water. In a 2017 thread on the 4x4 Community forum the regulars disagreed. One said self-drivers are let through Sedudu only from about 09:00. Another said the rule is enforced only sometimes, and that even then you can go in at opening so long as you keep off the river loops before Serondela. One blog says the window governs when you may enter, not when you must leave, and that it is dropped when the park is quiet. I found no DWNP statement from 2025 or 2026 confirming how strictly it is applied now, so treat 09:00 as the time you can count on and anything earlier as luck.

There are two ways round it. Camp at Ihaha: when the plan was announced in 2012, DWNP told an operator who phoned that Ihaha campers can drive freely west of Serondela, with the stretch between Serondela and Kasane still under the booking rules, and a more recent self-drive account says people staying inside the park are not held to the 09:00 entry window. Or come in at Ngoma, where one forum regular reports fewer entry restrictions, and drive the river east towards Serondela.

Fees and how to pay

Chobe and Moremi are Category A, the dearer of Botswana’s two fee bands. These are the rates in the fee schedule that took effect on 1 April 2022:

Per day	Fee
Non-resident adult	P270
Non-resident child, 8 and over	P135
Child under 8	Free
Resident or SADC national, adult	P205
Botswana citizen, adult	P30
Non-resident client of a Botswana tour operator	P190
Foreign-registered vehicle under 3,500 kg, private	P115
Botswana-registered vehicle under 3,500 kg, private	P30
Trailer or caravan, foreign / Botswana registered	P60 / P15

Last checked 12 October 2026. The 2022 sheet does not print a child rate. Half price from 8 and free under 8 is the rule on DWNP’s older sheet, and the P135 figure is the one booking agents quote. Sources put the top of the child band at 15, 17 or 18, so carry proof of age for teenagers. Two adults in a hire 4x4 with Namibian or South African plates pay P655 a day. In a Botswana-registered hire car it’s P570. Operators say fees are charged per calendar day, so one night inside the park costs two days.

A rise was due on 1 April 2026. In February the minister said some of the new fees would start that day, and the ministry then postponed them on 31 March after the trade objected. Gabz FM reported a two-year delay. They are postponed, not scrapped, so check again before a 2027 trip.

You pay at the gate, or in advance at a DWNP office, which gives you a voucher to hand over. The DWNP reservations office in Gaborone is on +267 318 0774. On cards the sources disagree: Tawana Self Drive says the gates take cash or card, while a Kasane booking agent warns that the machines don’t always work. Carry enough pula for every day you plan to be inside. Kasane has ATMs. The park has none.

Boat cruises

The afternoon cruise from Kasane is the other half of a Chobe day, and the boats are in park water for most of it. The regulations say nobody may enter a park by boat without a permit, so you owe the park fee on a cruise even if you never go near Sedudu Gate. Guests of a licensed Botswana operator get the P190 rate. Ask whether it is in the quoted price. Wild Horizons’ page for its Victoria Falls day trip lists park fees among the inclusions under a heading that says “excl park fees”, which is reason enough to ask.

Boats are tied to the same clock as cars and must be off the park’s water by closing time, which is why sunset cruises turn for home when they do. The decongestion paper has boats going one way, clockwise, round Sedudu Island from the DWNP jetty, with no more than 15 boats on the route at once and two boats and 45 clients per company per session.

Bringing your own boat is not realistic for a visitor. The 2022 schedule has a P30 daily fee for Botswana-registered power boats and no rate at all for foreign ones, and inflatables are banned unless the park says otherwise.

Day trips from Kasane, Kazungula and Victoria Falls

From Kasane and Kazungula it is simple: a three-hour game drive through Sedudu in one of the operator sessions, and a boat in the afternoon. Since operators own the early slot, a guided morning drive gets you onto the river loops hours before your own car would.

From Victoria Falls the day is longer but well worn. Wild Horizons, a Victoria Falls operator, drives guests to the Kazungula border, where a Botswana guide takes over for a morning cruise that ends around 12:30, lunch at a riverside hotel and an afternoon game drive before the handover back at the border. Botswana’s immigration department lists the Kazungula road border with Zimbabwe as open 06:00 to 20:00, and the Kazungula Bridge post to Zambia as 06:00 to 22:00, with a move to 24 hours announced in February 2026.

On visas, British passport holders get 90 days in Botswana without one. If you hold a KAZA Univisa for Zambia and Zimbabwe, the Zambia Tourism website says it also gives you a one-day pass into Botswana through the Kazungula border post.

Driving inside the park

The legal limit is 40 km/h on park roads and tracks. Other rules from the regulations that catch people out:

• Stay on designated roads and tracks. No off-road driving at all.
• Nobody rides on the roof or roof rack.
• Get out only where you have a clear view around you, never within 100 metres of a dangerous animal, and stay within 25 metres of the car. Serondela and the signed stretch points are the sensible places.
• Some tracks are marked four-wheel drive only, and a two-wheel drive car needs written permission to use them. In practice everything off the tar is sand.
• Take your rubbish out with you.

DWNP’s code of conduct for the riverfront adds a 300 to 500 metre gap between vehicles, four vehicles at a sighting and five minutes each.

The transit road to Ngoma

The A33 between Sedudu and Ngoma is tar, runs through the park and is the normal road from Kasane to Namibia and to the Chobe Enclave villages of Kavimba, Kachikau and Parakarungu. It is a transit road, which means no park fees as long as you don’t turn off it. Leave the tar for a river track and you need a permit like anyone else.

Until 2025 the road kept park hours, stretched to 21:00 for ordinary transit and 23:00 with a late-entry permit. Since 1 April 2025 it has been open 24 hours a day. The speed limit on a tarred transit route through a park is 80 km/h, and that is generous for this one. The minister who opened it warned that the animals aren’t used to night traffic, and DWNP’s acting regional officer for Chobe said in December 2025 that wildlife crosses the A33 daily between forest and river. If you are heading for Namibia there is no point arriving in the dark anyway: Botswana lists the Ngoma border post as open 07:00 to 18:00.

Our Chobe National Park page has the camps and lodges inside the park, and the Kasane page covers where to stay outside Sedudu Gate.