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@natgeosociety Explorer / @intotheokavango Project Leader / @wildbirdtrust Chairman / @tedfellow / @greatspineofafrica Leader / @capeparrotproject
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“I live in the center of the Okavango Delta. We have a special delta because of this river.” Those are Water’s words, our Wayeyi guide and poler, in this early trailer for Into the Okavango. Then he says what we all felt: “This is very, very bad. We want to do something. Steve called me. We go together to Angola.”
And so we did. In 2015, a small team of Angolan, Botswanan and South African explorers drove through minefields to the previously undocumented source lake of the Cuito River, the little-known source of the Okavango Delta in the remote eastern Angolan Highlands. There was no river to follow. We dragged seven overloaded dug-out canoes across spongy peatlands for 11 days before we could launch. We passed through burnt forests, silent valleys and the ghosts of a long war. We were flipped by a hippo. We doubted everything, and kept going.
After 121 days and 2,476km, poling and paddling downriver in Angola, through Namibia, into Botswana, we became the floodwaters themselves. The hippos and elephants accepted us. True exploration is an act of surrender, going far enough into something that you forget where you came from. Ask me now if I miss it and I will tell you I’m still there.
Into the Okavango, directed by Neil Gelinas, follows that journey from source to sand. It became the @insidenatgeo Okavango Wilderness Project, more than a decade of exploration, science and partnership with the people who guard these rivers. After eight years streaming on Disney+, the full film is now free to watch on YouTube.
This is a film about water, and about where it comes from. Over 95 percent of the water that floods the Okavango Delta falls as rain in the Angolan Highlands, the Lisima lya Mwono, the “Source of Life”. Protect the source and you protect everything downstream: the people, the elephants, the birds, the lilies, the fish, a desert jewel visible from space.
Watch it with your family, ideally on a big screen. Share it with someone who has never seen a wild river. And when the credits roll, remember that the journey didn’t end at the Kalahari sands. It is still going, and you are invited.
Watch Into the Okavango in full on YouTube. Link in bio.
11 Oct 2026
“Okavango & the Source of Life” is available wherever books are sold. Find it through the link in my bio, order a copy, give it to someone who loves wild places, and help us carry the Okavango into as many hearts and homes as possible. At the end of this photo series, you’ll also find a QR code for a limited-time Amazon.com discount.
At first glance, this is a classic @natgeobooks expedition story: thunderstorms and floods, hippos and crocodiles, ghost elephants and source lakes, triumphs and failures, near-misses and catastrophes.
But beneath the exploration is something older and more urgent. A story about belonging. About pride, ownership, community and purpose. About what happens when we love a place deeply enough that protecting what keeps it alive becomes part of who we are.
At the turn of the century, living in the Okavango Delta, I began to understand that wilderness is a state of attention. Walking alone, impalas taught me how to move, lechwes how to watch, and baboons that we were never meant to live separately. From a mokoro, talking to hippos, harvesting water lilies and following channels through papyrus and sky, the Wayeyi taught me about “Mother Okavango”—and what it means to belong to a wild place.
Forest, water, reeds, fire, memory. This book is about how a river can become a life. About becoming part of a place so completely that you spend the rest of your life defending its wildlife, invisible processes, source waters, stories, people and ancient agreements with wind and rain.
River Guardians, ancestors, hunters and kings. Ghost elephants moving through forgotten valleys. The Milky Way still knows how to dream here. Some places remind us that the world is still becoming, and that we can choose what survives.
“Okavango & the Source of Life” is ultimately the story of a team, built over 25 years: guides, polers, scientists, elders, trackers, filmmakers, friends, leaders and dreamers who believe wilderness deserves a future.
I hope when you open it, you hear water moving past, smell rain on wild sage, and remember that magic and mystery still exist in the wild.
Please read it, share it, gift it—help us tell the story of @intotheokavango
10 Oct 2026
In Ghost Elephants, Werner Herzog follows us into the “Land at the End of the Earth” in search of something the world was no longer sure it believed in. A herd of elephants. A memory. A rumour carried by hunters, kings, trackers, spirits, forests, and rivers. A living presence that had slipped beyond evidence into legend. We went looking for scientific proof at the “Source of Life”, and, after a decade, we had to accept that some truths don’t arrive as facts at first, they arrive as tracks in sand, broken branches, old stories, silences, and dreams.
Modern society has become almost unbearable in its need to expose everything. We confuse visibility with value, importance, and security. We need to explain everything. In the remote Angolan highlands, in vast forests preserved by war, absence, fear, and accident, life has been moving quietly beneath the surface of history. Springs become streams. Streams become rivers. Rivers become the Okavango, the Zambezi, the life-blood of southern Africa. The foundations of whole worlds begin here, hidden in moss, mist, peat, and patience. The ghost elephants are part of this deeper order. Invisible, but not absent. Elusive, but not imaginary. Foundational, but almost entirely unseen.
This film isn’t only a search for elephants, it’s a search for humility, for the primordial human capacity to stand at the edge of what we know and feel wonder instead of fear. We need to admit that the world is larger than our explanations and mystery isn’t the opposite of truth. Mystery keeps truth alive. The KhoiSan master trackers, the Luchaze hunters, the Angolan kings, the scientists, the explorers, we all became witnesses to a landscape leading us beyond certainty. Ghost Elephants is an invitation to slow down, to feel the strange freedom of unanswered questions, to see wilderness not as scenery, but as a living intelligence older than us, indifferent to us, and yet somehow still offering us a way home. In a time when so much of life is spectacle, this film asks us to care about what remains hidden and mysterious. Disappearance isn’t always absence. Sometimes it’s protection. Sometimes it’s memory. Sometimes it’s the last form of freedom.
28 May 2026
"The River Continues"
Exploring a wild river from its source you sense the origin of all things. There’s a subtle unspoken knowing in a shimmer, a ripple, a whispering through the reeds, in a small fish skipping across the surface, in the way my paddle adjusts to the current, in shadows of trees leaning into the water. If there’s magic on Earth, it’s contained in water; where nature remembers how to begin.
08 Nov 2026
"Golden Hour"
In the evening the river turns to gold. Light dances on the water, a hippo surfaces with a soft sigh, and a lone tree stands black against a fading sky. This is the hour when the whole wilderness exhales and the frogs begin to sing. You listen to every bird and every animal. You listen to the silence. Out here, sunset isn't something you watch. It is something you become part of. Take a deep breath, let your shoulders drop, and let the day go.
08 Nov 2026
"The River of Life"
Life is an expedition down the river of life. From the source to the end of your river. If you just sit there, steering your canoe in the current, avoiding rocks, rapids and dangerous animals, you will get to where you are going. The river of life only flows one direction. You cannot get lost. Sometimes we have to portage when things become impossible.
07 Nov 2026
"Walking on a Sponge"
Then came the discovery that changed everything. We were walking on peat. These deposits can hold many times their own weight in water, releasing it slowly. We were literally walking on the sponge that holds the water that floods the Okavango Delta. Peat is also a vast carbon store built over thousands of years. For water security and for our climate, this was an incredible discovery.
Watch Into the Okavango in full on YouTube. Link in bio.
07 Nov 2026
Arnaud Boetsch (left), Global Director of Communication and Image, and Jean-Frédéric Dufour (right), CEO of @Rolex at the premiere of Africa’s Earths Wild Home in London. The most powerful partnerships begin with a shared willingness to attempt the impossible. Five years ago, Rolex and The Wilderness Project came together around an audacious idea: build the scientific knowledge and partnerships required to help protect Africa’s great freshwater wildernesses at a continental scale.
Through the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, we launched the @GreatSpineofAfrica, a commitment to build on the groundbreaking work of the @natgeosociety’s Okavango Wilderness Project by exploring the full-lengths, from source to end, of all of Africa’s major rivers and tributaries spanning the continent’s great inland river basins – the Okavango, Zambezi, Congo, Nile, Chad, and Niger – by 2030. Objective: Reach 200 river expeditions in just 8 years. Plan: Paddle the equivalent of almost twice around the equator in canoes to conduct the most detailed scientific study of Africa’s rivers ever undertaken. We take this commitment very seriously. Rolex helped us believe the impossible was only a starting point.
Astonishingly, we’re now halfway. We actually ahead of schedule. For me, completing our 100th expedition is much bigger than a milestone. It represents trust. Rolex believed in a vision whose scale was difficult to comprehend when we began. Not one expedition. Not one river basin. Not one protected area. All of them. An interconnected network of mountains, forests, rivers, wetlands, and wilderness areas stretching across the African continent. Together, we have reached and surveyed Africa’s remotest headwaters for the first time in history, established unprecedented scientific baselines, documented hundreds of new species to science, supported hundreds of local scientists, explorers, and storytellers, strengthened community-led conservation efforts across Africa, and elevated the Africa’s keystone watersheds onto the international agenda. Most importantly, we have demonstrated what sustained exploration can become when given time and purpose.
Photo: @avalonentertainmentandmusic
07 Nov 2026
Five years ago, we set out to do something that seemed impossible. Explore 200 of Africa’s great rivers by 2030. Source to sea. Across an entire continent – the Great Spine of Africa – building the knowledge, relationships, and momentum needed to protect the freshwater wildernesses that sustain hundreds of millions of Africans, and our megafauna and extraordinary biodiversity. This year, with the support of the @Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, we completed our 100th expedition…
We’re halfway. When I think back to the rivers themselves – Cassai, Cuito, Kwando, Luangwa, Linyanti, Luapula, Lungwevungu – names of legend, places of myth, I lose myself. We passed untold tributaries, streams, inlets, lagoons, lakes, and islands. We waded through undocumented headwaters, searched little-known forests for source springs, and portaged heavily-laden canoes around waterfalls and through impenetrable swamps, while counting, measuring, and documenting everything we saw along the way. Rapids, flooded forests, hippos, crocodiles, elephants and the Milky Way; months away from home; tens of thousands of kilometres following water. Now, we must do it again: faster, better, further.
This is 21st century exploration. We’re establishing early 21st century hydrological, ecological, and socio-economic baselines for all of Africa’s major rivers and tributaries. Across these first 100 expeditions, hundreds of African explorers, scientists, and storytellers have worked passionately, risking their lives, missing their families, to document extraordinary biodiversity, establish new frontiers in our scientific understanding of our rivers, map forgotten, often misidentified, sources and headwaters, and work alongside local communities, the “Guardians of the River”, to protect them. We’ve found problems and opportunities. Opportunities to protect watersheds at scale; problems to be solved right now. Africa has the most free-flowing rivers of any continent and over 65% of the world’s remaining uncultivated arable land. This is about water and food security through the large-scale protection of Africa’s great water towers; a chance, an opportunity, for us all.
Photo: @jameskydd
05 Nov 2026
"Letting Go"
There is a moment at the edge of every waterfall when the river lets go. All that calm water, gathered over hundreds of kilometres, tips over the lip and falls into the light. It doesn't resist. It trusts that there is more river waiting below, and there always is. I think about that often, on the river and at home. Sometimes the bravest thing we can do is let go and trust the journey. Then the river gathers itself again, calmer than before, and carries on.
04 Nov 2026
"Lifetide"
In the lifetide, time is irrelevant. All we could feel was constant change. Alone at dawn yet connected to everything, I remember sensing myself for the first time. It sounds strange, but I was alive. I wasn’t the river. I was life itself. It’s the conscious flow of everything, without which there would be nothing. At dawn, on the Cuito, I saw it.
03 Nov 2026
Eight Hours of Pulling
With no river, there was only one way to get our mokoros to the water: drag them. Fully loaded, each weighed about 400 kilograms. Every pull took everything we had, through a valley no one we knew had ever been to, in the heart of the old war zone. After eight hours of pulling you could still see where you started that morning. Still, we kept moving.
Watch Into the Okavango in full on YouTube. Link in bio.
03 Nov 2026
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