If you’ve grown up travelling around southern Africa and made it up to the Okavango Delta you can count yourself fortunate. One of the region’s crown jewels, a tourist haven for locals and foreigners alike, some lucky scientists and explorers are now mapping out the region to a degree never attempted before.

Below is the account of James Kydd, one of the expedition photographers. Over to you James…

The Okavango Delta is the beating heart of Africa and one of the last great wildernesses in the world: home to the largest populations of hippo and buffalo, and almost half of our continent’s elephant. Last year it was declared UNESCO’s 1000th World Heritage Site, a long overdue accolade.

Yet the two source rivers that feed the Okavango remain unprotected, in fact the catchment of the Cuito, the longer of the two, is considered botanically to be one of the least explored stretches of river in the world. Outside of the military it had not been studied scientifically since the early 1900’s.

On May 22, our team, in partnership with National Geographic, began a 2400km expedition led by Capetonian Steve Boyes, a “megatransect,” starting at the source of the Cuito River in the Angolan Highlands and ending in the Makgadigadi Pans of Botswana. It’s a four-month journey on mekoros (dugout canoes) to conduct the most in-depth biodiversity survey ever undertaken in this river basin.

Our purpose is to better understand the intricacies of this wetland wilderness and how to protect it against present and future threats of damming, oil and mineral exploration, road expansion, and population growth. The team consists of scientists and explorers who are offering a live data expedition for anyone to experience by sharing all biometrics, sights, sounds, scientific findings, and movements in real-time via satellite and uploaded to our website: intotheokavango.org.

Our journey has been incredibly testing and full of twists and turns. We found a beautiful unmapped waterfall, have had 6 capsizes including one caused by a hippo, found a possible 8 new species of fish, met people that had not seen outsiders since 1974, and much more.

We are now in our fourth month of the journey, 1900km in, and camped on an island in the Okavango Delta. If you would like to follow the story daily, please find us on Instagram (HERE) and Twitter at @intotheokavango which we are updating via satellite.