Few stretches of the year test the Northern Tuli Game Reserve like its final weeks of drought, and Mashatu is encouraging travellers to look closely at them. October marks the tail end of the dry season before the summer rains break, when temperatures climb steadily, water grows scarce and animals cluster around the handful of spots where they can still drink. The private reserve in eastern Botswana says that visitors willing to tolerate the heat are rewarded with tightly concentrated, close-up encounters that bear little resemblance to the lush summer season that arrives soon after.
Spanning 42,000 hectares of privately held land at the meeting point of the Limpopo and Shashe Rivers, the reserve sits where the borders of Botswana, South Africa and Zimbabwe converge. Open plains, riverine forest, rocky hills, marshland and sandstone ridges all feature across the terrain, and by October the long rainless stretch has drained most of it to shades of brown and red.
Why October is called the build-up
Mashatu does not sugar-coat the conditions in its own seasonal guide. Nights in October tend to sit around 19 degrees Celsius, while daytime highs push close to 39 degrees. As frontal systems move into the Limpopo Valley they carry superheated air, and locals call this stretch suicide month for the punishing heat that precedes the rains. The south-easterly winds that set in from August keep blowing through October. The occasional tropical thunderstorm may pass over, yet the…
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