Honest Tawana Camp review from Christmas 2025. Rooms, wildlife, food, pricing ($1,895–$3,895/night), and whether this Okavango Delta flagship earns it. 4.5/5.
At a glance
- Location
- Moremi Game Reserve, Gomoti River (Okavango Delta)
- Price Class
- Moremi Game Reserve, Gomoti River (Okavango Delta)
- Best For
- Honeymooners, Wildife Lovers, Luxury Travellers, Wilddog Enthusiasts, Family Travel
- Sustainability
- Deep community heritage, Batawana tribal partnership and a conservation legacy three generations in the making
- Pairs Well With
- North Island and Jacks Camp
The Arrival
“Name” (that was our guide’s name) was waiting at the airstrip. No cold towels, no welcome ceremony. Just your guide, a Land Cruiser, some refreshments and a firm handshake. The fanfare comes later.
The drive in took over an hour, though “drive” undersells it. We hadn’t been on the dirt track for ten minutes before we stopped for our first sighting. Then another. Mopane scrub thinning out, the Gomoti River pulling the landscape open, and already the game was announcing itself. By the time we reached the lodge, we’d been on safari for an hour without technically starting one.
Then a woven boca tunnel. Cool shade, lowered voices, the feeling of crossing a threshold. And the Delta is in front of you. One of its arms, green and wide, with a horizon line that doesn’t quite exist. Staff waiting with cold towels and refreshments. The welcome choreography that the airstrip skipped, delivered here against a backdrop that earns it. This is the Okavango Delta at its most excessive: December, green season, everything saturated and overgrown and humming with insects.
The wowen-basket entrance to Tawana Camp by Natural Selection
Tawana opened in May 2024. When I visited over Christmas 2025, it was barely 18 months old. Here’s the context that matters: this is Natural Selection’s first lodge they fully own and operate. Not managed. Not co-branded. Theirs. After years building their reputation through North Island in the northern Delta, Jack’s Camp in the Makgadikgadi, Tuludi in the Khwai. This is the property where they put their name on the door and said, “Judge us by this.”
Eight suites on the Gomoti River, in the southeastern corner of Moremi Game Reserve. Their thesis statement as a safari company.
So does it hold up? Mostly. Beautifully. With one caveat I’ll get to.
The Vibe
Views from Tawana's deck
The bar at Tawana
The architecture hits you before the details do. Modern, but not trying to prove anything. Clean geometric lines softened by organic materials, pale wood and earthy tones pulled from the local Batawana tribal palette. Dorsia Travel’s Tom Cahalan called it “Bisate meets Miavana.” He’s not wrong. Blues and turquoise and teal, a nod to Botswana’s birdlife, apparently, though it reads more like someone with impeccable taste and a moodboard.
The camp is unfenced. Completely.
Elephants browse behind the suites. Baboons cross the walkways at 6 AM like commuters who haven’t had their coffee. An impala stood fifteen meters from the pool one afternoon, utterly indifferent to the fact that I was in it. This isn’t a lodge that promises wilderness proximity. It’s a lodge where wilderness has voting rights.
At night, the lighting shifts everything. Warm, low, architectural. The main area flows from an indoor dining zone through to a fire pit and then an outdoor lounge, all open-sided, all overlooking the Gomoti. The kind of place where a second gin feels inevitable.
But.
Here’s what keeps it from the top shelf. Walk through Duke’s Camp, part of Natural Selection’s collaboration with Uncharted Africa, older, rougher around the edges, and you feel personality radiating from every crooked bookshelf, every faded map on the wall, every lampshade that shouldn’t work but does. Jack’s Camp, another Uncharted Africa property in the portfolio, has its own mythology. These lodges have character that developed over time, or was embedded from the start by an obsessive founder with strange taste.
Tawana doesn’t have that yet. It’s gorgeous, immaculately designed, impressive in every measurable dimension. But “impressive” and “unforgettable” aren’t the same word. When I try to describe its personality, distinct from its aesthetics, I reach for something and come up slightly empty.
It can feel, at moments, generic. Which sounds harsh for a property this beautiful. But beauty without eccentricity is just a very expensive hotel.
And here’s the frustrating thing: the story is right there. Tawana Camp is named after Chief Tawana Moremi, the current paramount chief of the Batawana people and an active partner in the lodge. His grandmother, Elizabeth Pulane Moremi, regent queen of the Batawana from 1946 to 1964, convinced her people to set aside their ancestral hunting grounds and proclaim Moremi Game Reserve in 1963. The first wildlife reserve in Africa created by its indigenous people to protect their own land. Three generations of one family: the regent queen who saved the reserve, her son Letsholathebe II who became chief and continued the stewardship, and his son, Chief Tawana, who now lends his name to the lodge sitting on that same protected land. That’s not a marketing angle. That’s a legacy. And it’s barely visible at the property.
Natural Selection has the bones. The Moremi heritage is there. The Gomoti River, perennial, game-rich, ecologically distinct, is there. If they lean harder into those threads, let you feel the weight of where you’re sleeping and why this land is still wild, this becomes the lodge people tell stories about. Not just the lodge they show photos of.
That gap? It’s the 0.5 this review turns on.
The Rooms
The bedroom is Tawana's Suite 5
Call them suites and you’d be underselling it. These are villas.
A hundred square meters each, 130 for the family configurations. And every one of them looks out over the wetlands. Not a partial view, not a glimpse through trees. You’re sitting on the edge of the Okavango Delta, watching the nature spectacle unfold from your bed, your bathtub, your plunge pool. Elephants crossing the floodplain. Herons working the shallows. The light shifting across the water every hour. It’s the kind of view that makes you late for game drives because you’re already watching game.
Coffee Station in your Room
Enjoying a morning coffee with the worlds best views
What’s clever is how the space is divided. A hundred square meters could feel cavernous, but Tawana breaks each villa into distinct worlds. The living room is its own zone: a Jura coffee machine with origin-labeled beans, coffee table books on Delta wildlife and birdlife that I actually opened, a minibar stocked with South African gins (Inverroche, The Botanist, Bombay, Bloedlemoen, no entry-level Gordon’s, no Tanqueray London Dry filler), seven or eight gins, a whiskey and cognac selection. You mix your own gin and tonic, settle into the chair, and you’re in a den. The bedroom is a separate room entirely. Quiet, dark when you need it, with beds of impeccable quality. The bathroom is its own space too, with indoor and outdoor showers and a freestanding bathtub deep enough to disappear into. And then the outside: a terrace with two hanging basket chairs (they look ridiculous, they’re extraordinarily comfortable), a plunge pool, and that wetland panorama stretching out in front of all of it. Each zone has its own character. You don’t wander the room. You move between moods.
This spatial separation is one of the clearest improvements over North Island, where the open-plan approach sometimes felt like sleeping in a very luxurious fishbowl.
Cork flooring underfoot. Silent. Cool. The kind of detail you don’t notice until you’ve stayed somewhere without it.
The glass balcony doors (here’s a thing that shouldn’t impress me as much as it does) actually close properly. They seal. At North Island, the doors fought you and leaked warm air back in like a personal grudge. At Tawana, you slide them shut and the air conditioning does its job. In a Botswana December, when the humidity is thick enough to lean against, this matters more than any design award.
Skipping a morning game drive and spending it on your terrace with that Jura espresso and a pair of binoculars? Not wasted time. Might be the point.
A dedicated housekeeping chamber hidden behind the room. Turndown service happens without you ever seeing a staff member enter your space. Thoughtful. The scent when you walk in, something I can’t quite identify. Not a diffuser. More like treated wood and clean linen. The room smells cared-for. And for a property on the edge of the Okavango Delta, it is remarkably, almost suspiciously bug-free.
Now. The light switches. Someone on the design team lost their mind. There are (I’m not exaggerating) somewhere around 73 switches per room. Bedside panel. Bathroom panel. Terrace panel. Main entrance panel. Each night became a puzzle: which combination of toggles would produce actual darkness? By night two I’d developed a system. By checkout I’d forgotten it.
A practical note: request rooms 5 through 7. They’re closest to the main area. Room 8 is beautiful but the walk to dinner takes long enough that you’ll start questioning your room choice somewhere around the third bend in the boardwalk.
And the toilet near the main entrance, I’ll say this plainly, has arguably the best view of any toilet in the world. You’re sitting on the throne, looking out through full glass at a Delta panorama, and there is a reasonable chance an elephant will walk past while you’re there. I don’t know how to rank that. But it deserves mention.
The Food (and the Wine That Saves It)
I’ll be direct. The food at Tawana is fine. Not bad. Not exciting. Fine.
This is a lodge that charges between $1,895 and $3,895 per person per night. At that price point, “fine” lands like a missed note. Not because it’s objectively poor, but because everything else around it is operating at a higher altitude.
The problem is the buffets. The kitchen defaults to that generic safari-lodge format too often: warm chafing dishes, stainless steel lids, the faint metallic smell of a hotel breakfast bar. You queue, you serve yourself, you sit down. The beef fillets came out overcooked more than once. The sides felt interchangeable across meals, the same roasted vegetables in slightly different configurations. When your room has origin-labeled coffee beans and a gin selection that rivals a Cape Town cocktail bar, a buffet lunch feels like it belongs to a different property.
Magical Botswana sunsets by the boma
Two happy campers by boma for Sunset
Busy tying capturing the best sunset shot
The boma dinners are the exception to the buffet problem, and they’re beautiful. Eating outdoors overlooking the wetlands, candles and lanterns scattered across the table, the sounds of the Delta pressing in from every direction. The setting does most of the work here. The food is adequate. The atmosphere carries it.
Breakfast is the other exception, and a genuine standout. Quality yogurts, proper pastries (not the defrosted kind), smoothies that change daily. Mornings at Tawana are when the kitchen shows what it can do when it decides to try.
Ragna during high-tea
Afternoon tea at 3:30 PM. Solid. A good selection of sweet and savory that I ate more of than I’d admit. Dinner offers limited choice (one starter, two mains, three desserts) with portions that run small, though the staff bring more if you ask. The wood-fired pizza oven is a welcome break in the rotation, though the self-assembly format (you get a pre-made base and toppings) undercuts what could have been a proper artisan moment. Fresh dough, stretched to order. That’s what this lodge should be doing. Pre-made bases at $3,000 a night? A miss.
And if you’re visiting multiple Natural Selection properties on the same trip (Tuludi into Tawana, say, or adding Sable Alley) the menus repeat. Recipes travel between lodges. On a standalone visit this won’t register. On a circuit, it will.
The Tawana team spoling us to a nice Christmas Lunch
Now. The wine program. This is where Tawana overcorrects for the kitchen, and overcorrects beautifully.
A walk-in wine cellar. Cool stone air when you step inside, the temperature drop sharp enough to make you pause. I’ve stood in the Singita cellars. Tawana isn’t at that level, but it’s closer than you’d expect from a lodge that opened 18 months ago. The range is wide and genuinely South African: Chenin Blancs, Sauvignon Blancs, Chardonnays, reds that span the Stellenbosch-to-Swartland spectrum. Standard included wines plus a premium selection that would hold up in most Cape Town restaurants. For bottles that reach Moremi Game Reserve by light aircraft, the depth is impressive.
The sommelier, ET, is the real find. Trained in Stellenbosch, flown there specifically to learn the craft, and you can feel the difference between someone performing wine knowledge and someone who actually cares about what’s in the glass. He uses proper stemware (a detail most bush lodges botch), talks about the wine without lecturing, and organized cellar tastings between the morning and afternoon game drives that I’d rank above the pool as a use of that midday gap. Comparative tastings in a bush cellar with a guy who knows his Chenin Blanc from his Chardonnay. Not something I expected to find in the Okavango Delta.
The bar follows the same logic. Inverroche, The Botanist, Bombay, Bloedlemoen. Seven or eight gins, none of them filler, alongside a whiskey and cognac selection that suggests the drinks program was built by someone who actually drinks. Sundowner hour has options. Good ones.
Does the wine save the food score? Not entirely. But it turns a 3/5 into a situation where you’re having too good a time to care.
Wildlife & Activities
Let me deal with the restrictions first, because they’ll show up in every Tawana review and they sound worse than they are.
Moremi Game Reserve is a national park. That means: sunset curfew at 6:30 PM. No walking safaris. No boating. No night drives. If you’re comparing this to a private concession, where you can track leopards on foot, cruise the Delta channels, and drive after dark with a spotlight, the activity menu here looks thin.
On paper, it is.
In practice, the game concentration on the Gomoti River corridor makes the restrictions feel like a footnote. You have two drives a day, morning and afternoon. That’s it. And two drives were enough for some of the finest sightings I’ve had in the Okavango Delta.
My visit: green season, late December, supposedly the quiet time when thick vegetation swallows visibility and the animals scatter. That’s the theory, anyway.
What actually happened: leopards mating in a tree, close enough to the vehicle that I could hear the sound. Guttural, unhurried, like it had been going on for hours and would go on for hours more. A pride of twenty lions sleeping on the road, sprawled across the track like they owned it and had no intention of moving. They didn’t. Towers of giraffe with their young, backlit by the kind of light that only exists between a thunderstorm and sunset, bruised purple giving way to clean gold in about four minutes. Buffalo herds in the hundreds, slow and heavy, parting around the Land Cruiser like dark water. Elephant families, groups of twenty, mothers and calves interacting, the babies stumbling over their own trunks. And birds. Two hundred marabou storks standing in a single clearing, prehistoric and motionless, like a painting someone forgot to finish. Rollers, bee-eaters, fish eagles. Green season turns the Gomoti corridor into a birding destination disguised as a predator hotspot.
The game density here is extraordinary, and what surprised me most was the privacy. Barely another vehicle in two days, despite this being a public concession area. Moremi’s southeastern corner is, for now, under the radar. It’s one of the quietest game drive areas I’ve been in. A helicopter flight, available at additional cost, reveals the floodplains from 500 feet and changes your understanding of the Delta’s scale entirely.
Sundowner stops in the bush were some of my favourite moments. Engine off. Inverroche gin in hand. The Mukwa palm trees catching the last amber light, insects starting their evening shift, the air cooling just enough to feel it on your arms. The Delta at that hour doesn’t need narration. You just sit there.
The guiding. Here’s where I’ll be honest because the guide, Name, is a good man with deep experience. He’s been in this reserve for decades, calm and measured, the kind of presence that puts you at ease. He opened Bar 2000 in Maun, a local watering hole that became a gathering spot for safari guides and industry staff, which tells you something about his standing in the community. He showed me photos on his Facebook page, genuinely proud of what he’d built.
But for a lodge of this caliber, where the wildlife practically delivers itself, I wanted more theatre. More storytelling. More of that guide who turns a leopard sighting into a forty-minute narrative about the animal’s territory, its mother, its odds. The calm, measured approach is pleasant. It’s also not the thing you’ll mention first at dinner. With game this abundant, the bar for guiding goes up, not down. A great guide here, someone with Name’s knowledge but a storyteller’s instinct, would make Tawana untouchable.
Other notes: a 16-meter lap pool, impressive by bush standards, plus a separate family pool. A gym with Technogym equipment. Proper weights, lat machine, hack squat, dumbbells, enough for a micro Hyrox session if you’re that person. In-room spa treatments only, no dedicated spa building.
The Verdict
Bathub views from Tawana
Natural Selection built something extraordinary here. The most visually impressive lodge in the Okavango Delta. I’ll stand by that. The design is sharp without being cold. The rooms improve on everything they learned at North Island, and the improvements are the kind you feel (sealed doors, cork floors, spatial separation) rather than the kind you photograph. The wildlife on the Gomoti River justifies the trip on its own terms, park restrictions and all.
You can smell the wet grass from your terrace after a thunderstorm. Hear the hippos grunting in the channel at 2 AM. Feel the December heat break as the rain starts and the air goes from thick to electric in thirty seconds. The Delta doesn’t need your permission to be overwhelming.
The food is the weakest category. Overcooked beef fillets and buffet trays at a price point that should mean plated service and a chef who knows your name. ET and the wine cellar don’t fully erase that, though they come close enough that the sting fades by the second glass of Stellenbosch Chenin Blanc.
The activity restrictions matter less than you’d expect. And here’s the smart play: pair Tawana with Duke’s Camp or North Island on the same circuit. Duke’s sits on a private concession: walking safaris, night drives, mokoro excursions, all the things Moremi’s rules don’t allow. North Island adds the water experience in the northern Delta. Tawana gives you predators and design. The sister properties fill the gaps. That’s how you build a Botswana trip with no holes in it.
What’s missing? Personality. The 0.5 it didn’t earn. Duke’s Camp (the Uncharted Africa collaboration) has crooked bookshelves and faded maps that make it feel like an eccentric uncle’s house. Jack’s Camp has mythology built into its bones. Tawana has beauty, precision, and comfort, but not yet a story. Not yet the one idiosyncratic detail that makes a guest say “this lodge” instead of “that really nice place in Moremi.”
It’s 18 months old. These things can develop. Three generations of the Moremi family protected this land: Elizabeth, Letsholathebe, Chief Tawana. That story is the soul waiting to surface. If Natural Selection lets you feel it, not just in the name above the door but in the experience, this becomes a 5/5 property. The bones are there. The heritage is there. The lodge just needs to wear it.
Is it worth $1,895 to $3,895 a night? For the leopards and the wine cellar and the rooms and that toilet with the elephant view? Yes. Worth every cent.
Alfredo Seidemann
Founder & CEO
"Yawning is a silent scream for coffee."
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