Chobe

Declared in 1967, it was Botswana's first national park. It holds one of the greatest concentrations of African savannah elephants on the planet, with estimates of over 50,000 along the Chobe River alone — a figure high enough to have set off an intense scientific and political debate over whether the ecosystem's carrying capacity has been exceeded, and one that led Botswana in 2019 to lift a hunting moratorium in place since 2014, an extremely controversial decision internationally. Its sunset river cruises on the Chobe, with whole herds of elephants bathing alongside hippos and crocodiles, are reckoned among the finest water-based safaris anywhere in Africa.