The art of doing nothing — and why Feline Fields has perfected it

Sometimes it's the best thing you can do on safari!

There is a particular kind of traveller who arrives at a safari camp with a list. Not a written list, necessarily, but a mental one: the Big Five to tick off, the sunrise drives to squeeze in, the sundowners to photograph, the mokoro trip to book before someone else does. They are not wrong to want these things. They are all magnificent. But somewhere between the relentless pursuit of the next experience and the quiet miracle of simply being in a place, something rather precious gets lost.

At Feline Fields, we have quietly, and with some considerable charm, made the case for doing nothing. Or at least, for doing a great deal less than you think you should. 

It begins, as most revelations do, unexpectedly. You return from the morning drive, breakfast is waiting, and then — nothing. No schedule. No itinerary pressing at your elbow. Just the long, golden sprawl of an African afternoon and the particular silence that settles over the bush when the heat is at its height and the animals have retreated to the shade.

At Feline Fields Lodge, in the breathtaking solitude of the Kalahari, this silence is something close to physical. This is a vast semi-arid savannah, not a desert in any conventional, bare-dunes sense, but a scrub-covered, wildlife-rich landscape of ancient sands that absorbs every drop of rain and gives nothing back to the surface. But it has a quality of stillness that cities actively suppress, a hush so complete that you become aware of sounds you had forgotten existed: the dry rustle of a hornbill in the acacia, the distant call of something you cannot name, the soft creak of your own chair as you shift to follow the shade. 

The Lodge’s huge lap pool gleams in the afternoon light, and the temptation to do nothing more ambitious than float in it, gazing up at a sky of improbable blue, is one you should absolutely surrender to. Or just immerse yourself in your Pool Suite's own, private sanctuary of turquoise and calm, cool water!

A lagoon unlike any other

At Feline Fields Vintage Camp the afternoon invitation is rather different, and arguably even harder to resist. The camp sits on the banks of the Mbudi Channel, an offshoot of the Khwai River that offers something you will find almost nowhere else in the Okavango Delta: the chance to actually get in the water in a croc and hippo-free lagoon. 

The lagoon is shallow and crystalline, its colour a beautiful deep tea, the tannins from the surrounding vegetation lending it that warm, amber quality you see in the best single-malt whisky. To wade in slowly, to feel the cool of it against the afternoon heat, to stand in a channel of the Okavango Delta with nothing between you and the African sky — this is not nothing, of course. But it's the kind of something that requires no effort, no planning and no ticking of boxes. It simply requires you to be there.

The philosophy behind the stillness

Our founders, Raphael and Marjan del Sarte, have built both properties with this quality of unhurried experience very deliberately in mind. There is a European sensibility at play here, one that understands the profound difference between a holiday and a rush, between travelling and arriving. Feline Fields Vintage Camp’s canvas aesthetic is a love letter to the explorers of old, men and women who moved slowly through Africa because there was no other way and who, in that slowness, saw everything. Feline Fields Lodge, with its architectural confidence and its extraordinary sense of place in the Kalahari, invites a different but equally contemplative mood: the ancient savannah demands patience, and rewards it magnificently.

What you notice when you stop looking

Here's the curious thing about doing nothing in the African wilderness. The moment you stop actively searching for the experience, the experience tends to find you... A herd of elephant coming to the waterhole at Feline Fields Lodge, quiet and purposeful, spotted not from a game vehicle but from a chair on your private terrace with a glass of something cold in hand... A family of hippos surfacing in the Mbudi Channel at dusk, their enormous heads catching the last of the light, seen from the camp where you had decided to stay for sundowners, simply because it felt like the right things to do... 

These are not lesser sightings for their accidental nature. If anything, they carry more weight. They belong to you entirely, unshared with a vehicle full of fellow guests, unannounced by a guide’s radio. They are the reward for stillness.

The other activities are still there

None of this is to suggest that Feline Fields is shy about its more energetic offerings. At Feline Fields Vintage Camp the game drives are exceptional, the walking activities transformative, the mokoro trips on the Mbudi Channel quietly magical. The San Bushmen experience at Feline Fields Lodge is one of those rare encounters that changes how you think about human beings and their relationship with the natural world. Horse riding, fat-bike cycling, bush golf and the extraordinary sleepout on the Kalahari’s ancient, scrub-covered dunes are all there as well, waiting. The point is simply that at Feline Fields, you are never made to feel that you ought to be doing any of them. The choice, and the pace, are always yours.

Come and do nothing beautifully

Botswana is one of the world’s great safari destinations precisely because it has refused to be hurried. Its wild places are enormous and largely undisturbed, its conservation ethic serious and deeply held. Feline Fields, with its two extraordinary properties in two of the country’s most iconic landscapes, understands this perfectly. We have taken the best of the old-fashioned safari spirit — the slowness, the attentiveness, the willingness to sit with a landscape and let it reveal itself — and wrapped it in something genuinely beautiful and genuinely fun.

So come. Bring your list if you must. But leave room in it for the long afternoon, the tea-dark lagoon, the chair in the shade, the sky above the Kalahari, and the particular, irreplaceable luxury of doing absolutely nothing at all.