Best New Trips in the World: Canoeing With Botswana’s Big Game

For our annual Adventure Travel issue, we scoured the globe to find the 25 Best New Trips in the World for 2010, complete with a Best Trips photo gallery. The world's far corners are now well within reach.

A few years ago, the 320,000 acres of land connecting the Okavango Delta with Botswana’s Linyanti marshes were a trophy hunter’s paradise. Then along came National Geographic Explorers-in-Residence Dereck and Beverly Joubert, who bought and transformed the region into the Selinda Reserve, a private sanctuary for lions, elephants, cape buffalo, leopards, and the rare aardwolf. The reserve’s centerpiece is the Selinda Spillway, a river that pours across the savanna, linking the delta with the marshes and providing thousands of animals with a massive watering hole. This year, the Spillway is at its highest level in three decades, which means more buffalo and elephants will come for a drink—and with them, more predators. To showcase the gathering, Explore Inc will lead canoe-camping trips in 2010.

Photograph Courtesy of Explore Inc

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