I glanced down at the landscape below, marvelling at the contrast. Just a couple of months ago the bush looked barren, but now, trickling streams had become swollen rivers, bursting their banks, saturating floodplains and multiplying into thousands of channels and rivulets, coursing across the land like blue cracks on an emerald sheet of ice.
Elsewhere in Africa, it is the rains that spark spectacular transformations. Deserted dust-filled craters become refreshing, crowded waterholes and barren, sandy plains blossom into verdant, lush grasslands. The Okavango Delta also undergoes a rainy season rejuvenation (from late November to March), but it is the arrival of the annual flood a few months later that triggers an even more striking metamorphosis.
Originating from rainfall in the Angolan highlands some 1600km to the north, the floodwaters’ marathon journey takes several months, arriving just as natural rainfilled pans are drying out. Shrinking puddles rapidly swell into expansive lagoons, accommodating rafts of hippos and mass congregations of waterfowl.