AUDI CAMP HISTORY

Audi Camp started up in 1993 (Audi means fish eagle in the local language - Setswana). The original campsite was an old derelict site that was littered with scrap vehicles, holes in the ground and lots of goats milling about. We put a lot of elbow grease into cleaning and getting basic facilities set-up to provide just a nice, inexpensive place for campers to stay. I can't remember how many times people in the area would tell us that it would never work – and there were times when we thought it wouldn't. We were trying something that was going in the opposite direction of traditional tourism in Botswana, which has been high cost, low volume. We wanted to try to provide a low cost, but high quality facility for travellers coming through Botswana. The first few months of operation were quiet frightening, I can remember one month when we had a total of 10 campers and didn't have enough money to buy beer for the stores. But we stuck it out and slowly through word of mouth and with a lot of help from the Lonely Planet write up, we started to grow.

In 1995, Botswana was going through a severe drought, with cattle dying everywhere and crops failing. We were approached by one of the communities on the southern end of the delta – they were struggling and asked us to help them in some way, possibly to employ them. But rather then just employ the people, we proposed that we help them set up there own business.

They would provide mokoro services and we would market and get them clients. The community started off with 5-6 mekoro the first year, by the second year they were buying and making many more, eventually ending up with over 50 mekoro and well over 70 people involved in the business. Suddenly the tourist industry became their major source of revenue instead of cattle. As one poler put it – the tourists are now our cows.

We started up the vehicle safaris in 1995, again with the approach that we wanted to give a good quality safari without the hype. We wanted to do safaris as we would do a normal camping trip into the bush – comfortable and nice without going overboard about everything. We also wanted the type of guiding to be more down to earth – competent but personable. We want people to gain not only a knowledge of the animals and the bush but also some of the funny things that can happen, some of the little details that you normally don't get told about, insights that make the wilderness seem less intimidating and more friendly.

In 2001 we opened our a la carte restaurant and new bar and in 2004 we started erecting en suite tents of which we hope to eventually have six. These are situated on wooden decks in a quite shaded part of the camp overlooking the river.

In 2005 we upgraded our ablution facilities. We have also up graded some of our safaris and now offer a luxury mobile with all the comforts.