My review of North Island Okavango

The place is luxurious without trying too hard. What it does not yet have is the accumulated character older camps wear without trying. That is an observation about age rather than a criticism. Camps grow into themselves.

The Vibe

The main area is arranged in a spacious and modern way: separate lounge and dining spaces linked by a deck, the deck running out towards a hippo-filled lagoon, a fire pit at the end of it for the stargazing hour. A library, a spa, a pool, a sunbathing area that catches the right light in the afternoon.

What I kept returning to was a small jetty deck out over the water. Early morning, coffee, nobody else awake. It is the single best square metre on the property.

The Rooms

Now the compromise, and it is the one thing separating this camp from its sister in the south. The front of the room is mosquito mesh and net rather than glass, so there is nothing to close. The air conditioning runs over the bed on a 24-hour solar supply, but it is fighting an opening it cannot seal, and around Christmas, when we visited, it never quite won.

What you get in exchange is the reason people come to the Delta in the first place. Air moves through the room all night. You hear hippos working the channel. You hear lions.

The other differences from Tawana are smaller. The minibar is a shade less stocked. The coffee machine is a Nespresso rather than the fancy milk-foaming Jura with origin-labelled beans. Not complaints so much as an observation: Natural Selection built North Island first, learned from it, and spent the learnings at Tawana.

I will be direct, because I was direct about the same thing at Tawana. The food is the least inspiring part of North Island. It is competent, it arrives on time, and nobody goes hungry. But at a camp in this bracket the kitchen should be one of the reasons you remember the stay, and there is less creativity in it than the rest of the property leads you to expect by the time you sit down.

The wood-fired oven at lunch is one of my favourite things here, and the one I most want them to push further. The pizza is aimed squarely at the children. The bases arrive pre-made, and you add the toppings, which makes it a lovely activity but stops short of what the oven can actually do. Fresh dough stretched to order would change that in an afternoon, and an oven like this can carry far more than pizza: think focaccia, flatbreads, something roasted and brought to the table to share.

The Water

The Okavango does not behave like a normal river system: the flood arrives from the Angolan highlands, then works its way down to Botswana over a season. North Island sits at the upstream end of the river, at the top of the delta. Natural Selection notes that this area is the first to receive the annual floodwaters, and it is the last to give them up.

The mokoro. I was sceptical. Before my first trip to the Delta, I assumed a mokoro was another activity on a list. It is not, and the reason is that there is no engine. A mokoro is a dugout canoe, traditionally carved from the trunk of a large straight tree, usually ebony or the African sausage tree, and poled from the stern like a punt. Most are fibreglass now, lighter and more durable, and it takes the pressure off the big trees that used to be cut for them.

You sit low, eyes at the level of the reeds. Our expert guide navigates us through the water channel. What you notice is the silence. Not an absence of noise; the frogs and the birds are all working, but an absence of machinery, no engine note underneath. There could be elephants. There are certainly hippos.

The sundowner. Given the choice between chasing one more animal in the last light and stopping for a proper drink, I will take the drink almost every time. North Island is very good at this and best at it on the water: you anchor somewhere worth anchoring, the crew turn the boat into an instant bar, and you float into the sunset with a gin and tonic. On a two-night stay, it was one of the two or three things I would go back for.

Whether that belongs on safari is a real question, and I am not going to pretend to settle it. Personally, I liked it. Being able to send a video of a wild dog kill to my family twenty minutes after it happened, and to my team the same evening, added something rather than taking something away. If you want the opposite, the fix is simple: leave the phone in the room and go and sit on the deck.

The Verdict

North Island is an outstanding choice, and the reason is where it sits.

The water runs all year, and everything good about this camp follows from that. You are never choosing between a game drive and a boat, because you can have both on the same day, in March as easily as in September. The game backs it up: two nights gave us two wild dog kills, a leopard on the hunt, lions, buffalo and elephant, from the vehicle and from the water. And because this is a private concession rather than a public park, night drives are on the table and the ground is largely yours. Year-round water, game at that density, and that much space to yourself is a combination very few properties in the Delta can offer at once.

The lodge itself is beautiful and genuinely generous. Villa-scale rooms, a private plunge pool and a sundeck to each one, and a main area that knows exactly what it is looking at. It does not hit every note as cleanly as its sister in the south: Tawana has the glass doors that seal, the Jura coffee machine, the cellar, the air-conditioned gym. North Island has none of those, and none of it stops this being a stunning property. It only means Tawana got the second draft.
The food is where it falls short. That is the same sentence I wrote about Tawana, and it is the one category here that does not match the setting around it. Decent, but never the reason you remember the day. Overall an easy fix.
The other thing still coming is character. Two years in, the camp is working out who it is, and that is a matter of time rather than a fault. A few small touches and this goes from a great lodge to an outstanding one.