Khaudum National Park

The trekkers at Leeupan and the hippo that walked to Khaudum

In July 1878 the wagons of three separate Dorsland trek parties came together at Leeupan, a pan in what is now Khaudum. They were in a bad way. Malaria had been killing them along the Okavango since the previous October and tsetse fly had taken their oxen. One party of about 65 people under Gert du Preez lost every man, and a rescue party had to fetch the surviving women and children to the laager at the pan. There the trekkers elected new leaders, wrote a set of rules for a single united trek and, by the park’s own account, shot elephants. The unity did not last. Most went on towards the Okavango, one group turned back for the Transvaal, and the following year those still trekking reached Etosha and the Kaokoveld. Nobody of European descent ever settled here. Leeupan is still on the park map, as one of the waterholes.

People were here long before the wagons. Pottery dated to the 1500s has turned up near Sikereti, and San hunters used this sandveld for longer than anyone can put a date to. The park itself began with land the Gciriku Traditional Authority pledged in the 1980s.

A park named for an animal it no longer has

Khaudum is usually translated as “omuramba of the buffalo”. There are no buffalo now, though the ministry’s own guide map says there once were. The omiramba, the shallow grassy watercourses that cross the sand, were a game route between Etosha and the Okavango Delta. Fences in both countries and the border fence between them put an end to that. A 2022 study built on tracking data from 261 elephants across southern Africa found that Khaudum’s herds cannot easily reach the elephants on the western side of the Delta, close as it is.

The elephants are the other thing that has changed. Before boreholes they were seasonal visitors that left as the pans dried. Permanent water turned around 3,000 of them into more or less full-time residents, and the battered bush around the waterholes is the result. Even so, most still leave once the rains fill the pans outside the park, many of them south into Nyae Nyae. Dirk Heinrich, reporting from the park in 2025, puts their normal absence at December to July or August. That gap is when the bush and the groundwater recover. In the drought he was writing about it never came. The best rain measured in the park was 200 mm against a normal 400 to 600, the elephants stayed, and the ministry had pumped for 15 months instead of three or four.

The hippo at Tsoanafontein

In 2016 floodwater spilling out of Botswana brought eleven hippos into the Nyae Nyae pans south of the park. Most went back as the water shrank. One, probably a bull, did not. He walked more than 60 km on the last leg and settled at Tsoanafontein, the spring in the south-west corner near Sikereti. The travel writer Willie Olivier was shown a phone photograph of the animal by a barman in Tsumkwe in late November 2018, and did not believe the story until he saw it. He never got to the waterhole. Elephants wrecked the solar pump, the water ran out, and with no shade to speak of the animal was dead within days. Olivier heard the news in early December.

What turns up, and when

Timing decides almost everything. Anja Denker, who camped here one January, found Doringstraat, Leeupan, Tsau and Burkea without a single large animal, though she did see three ground hornbills at Burkea and roan in the distance at Soncana. A family who crossed the park in March 2025 wrote much the same: green bush, tall grass and very little game in three days.

Later in the year the picture flips. A party in August 2025 sat down to lunch at a deserted Doringstraat and ended up counting about 75 elephants, walking in from four directions and waiting their turn at the water. Olivier once counted more than a hundred in a single herd. The park’s advice is to sit at a waterhole through the hot hours and drive the open omuramba grass early and late.

Khaudum holds the largest roan population in Namibia, and animals from here have been moved back to parts of their former range. The usual group is a dozen or so cows and calves with one bull. One August a photographer met herds of 20 to 30 and one of more than 50.

Lions are heard far more than seen, but they are less rare than the park’s reputation suggests, and the guide map lists them among the predators seen most often. Winter campers on the dune at Khaudum Camp keep reporting them. One party in 2025 heard lions and hyaenas from the first night and found them a short way below the camp on the second morning. Another had three lions in the camp itself in June 2024. Wild dogs are a lottery. Olivier once found six lying in the shade of the Tsoanafontein platform.

Branches on the track

What visitors agree on is how empty it is. The March family met their first other vehicle after three days, a June party saw no other tourists at all, and the first new faces the August convoy saw were three rangers at Dussi. Three separate accounts call the game skittish or easily spooked. Elephants leave broken branches and whole trees across the two-track, and two drivers on the 4x4 forums swear by a machete. One party at Khaudum Camp heard what they took for rain on the roof in the night. In the morning the tree beside them had been stripped of its seed pods and there were elephant tracks in the sand next to it.

Fire is part of the place too. From July to September the air is often hazy with smoke from bushfires in Botswana, and in 2011 someone who had been visiting for 22 years told The Namibian that most of the park had burnt inside a month. The game is counted at the waterholes over a full moon each year. For one count in the drought the people taking part paid their own way, brought diesel for the pump generators and manned eleven water points for 72 hours.