The often biscuit-dry, wild and eternally surprising Savuti region (also spelled “Savute”; it means “mystery”) is an entirely different experience to the Chobe Riverside. At its heart is the enigmatic 100km-long Savute Channel, which follows no laws visible to humans and flows only when it will – remaining dry for decades at a time. Tiny shifts in the tectonic plates below may hold the answers to the cycle, as might high water levels in the Zambezi and Chobe. Author Mike Main explains that in years when the Zambezi has exceptionally high water, the Chobe can flow backwards towards the Linyanti section. “If the Linyanti rises sufficiently, it will flood into Zibadianja Lagoon whic...
The often biscuit-dry, wild and eternally surprising Savuti region (also spelled “Savute”; it means “mystery”) is an entirely different experience to the Chobe Riverside. At its heart is the enigmatic 100km-long Savute Channel, which follows no laws visible to humans and flows only when it will – remaining dry for decades at a time. Tiny shifts in the tectonic plates below may hold the answers to the cycle, as might high water levels in the Zambezi and Chobe. Author Mike Main explains that in years when the Zambezi has exceptionally high water, the Chobe can flow backwards towards the Linyanti section. “If the Linyanti rises sufficiently, it will flood into Zibadianja Lagoon which, in turn, will overflow, flooding the Savute Channel once more.”
Whatever the source of the mystery, the Savute Channel is certainly erratic. Main says that David Livingstone found it flowing strongly in 1851 and hunter Frederick Courtney Selous saw it run in 1874. After a long wet period, “I walked the length of the channel in 1981 and it was drying up,” says Main. That drought lasted 30-odd years, resulting in spectacular and innovative animal behaviour. In around 2010 the Savute Channel flowed once more, and it is currently dry. It winds through the Gubatsaa hills to seep into the vast, flat floodplain of the Savute Marsh.
Water equals life in Africa, so the channel changes the landscape. The water transforms the Savute Marsh and Mababe Depression into wetlands, attracting literally hundreds of thousands of birds and beasts. One August in 1980, after the channel had been flowing for some years, a Wilderness Safaris guide remembers looking out over the marsh and ticking off “two huge herds of buffalo, a pride of 27 lions, a pack of wild dogs, zebra, giraffe, warthog, impala, sable, tssessebe, wildebeest, waterfowl and walking off the marsh towards us, a honey badger”.
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