Meet the best bush guide in Botswana

It was when he launched into an impassioned tribute to the eco-aware termite ant that we twigged there was something singularly compelling about Botswana safari guide Gavin Ford.

"Over millennia, whole kingdoms rise and fall," he announced, as if on voice-over duties at Pinewood. Sure enough, the insects' weird lunar towers suddenly took on a new and epic aspect as we sat in our Jeep in the dry flood plains of the Moremi Game Reserve - the officially protected part of the Okavango Delta.

Acacia trees chattered with birdlife, scratched against a bleached sky. Ford waxed further: "A termite nest has a very biological role. Every termite area above the flood water becomes colonised by trees and plant life. If a tree falls, all that energy will be locked out of the eco-system, but termites will eat that wood. And everything eats termites. Eagles spend their lives travelling up and down Africa feeding on them.

"They're amazing," he concluded, his interest straying to a pair of green pigeons in a leadwood tree. "Ah, proper acrobats. Did you know the largest pigeon in the world is from New Guinea?"

Gavin Ford - aka Indiana Attenborough - could snatch an Oscar for nature narration. Forty-five, knotty-limbed and Harrison-Ford craggy, he has turned a hobby into a way of life, as he wasted no time pointing out. "This is my office," he declared, gesturing to the grassy expanses where buffalo roam.

A Zimbabwean with a degree in biological science and a sackful of well-I-never wildlife wisdom, he specialised in a skimpy line in khaki that had girls' hearts aflutter. Who could have guessed, when this hushed, bush-hatted figure helped our pallid bunch off the flea-sized Cessna at Chief's Camp airstrip, that he could seduce half a dozen safari virgins with a simple: "All insects are subject to water loss - it's one of the major limiting factors of their lives"?

The bush is supposedly about encounters with big things fanged, tusked and horned (and that's just the honeymooning Winterbottoms from Weybridge). But while we sat waiting for flashes of distant hide, Gavin Ford worked dawn to dusk to widen eyes to a parallel world beyond our vision.

"Inside, there's a fibrous matrix like a loofah," he might explain, leaping enthusiastically from the Jeep to fondle a sausage-tree fruit as the party stared transfixed. Yet such bookish knowledge he tempered with infectious nonchalance. "I only add this out of interest," he confided, having pulled up in a plume of dust to examine quill tracks in the dirt, "but a porcupine's willy is quite extensive. It has to be - copulation is fraught with technical difficulties."

Botswana is democratic, diamond-wealthy and driven by low-volume, high-return tourism, so base camp was the anything-but-base Chief's Camp: a scattering of 12 luxury, stilted lodges with Conranesque interiors of waffle cotton, terracotta-and-chrome sinks and canvas, roll-front closets edged with Zimbabwean teak. Beyond slatted door blinds, sun decks surveyed moving grasses and a hot, cloudless sky. The idle ship's creak of the eucalyptus frames, hypnotic as the fans overhead, was disturbed only by the odd drone of a tiny plane.

There was high tea at three, sundowners at six round the boma, when sparks pirouetted into the dark. Yet though Gavin partook of the dainty buffets, you knew he was comfier in the back office, radioing his wife in the bush capital, Maun, or roaming the Moremi emptiness with Prayer, his Botswanan co-guide.

Prayer dealt fascinating info you didn't necessarily need straight after breakfast - "The young zebra after it born just eat the mother's droppings for nutrients" - and was a godsend when it came to a loo break, clambering out to check clearings before ushering: "Ladies that side, man that side." Later that day, giraffes wheeled about at our approach, vanishing in dusty slo-mo. If it hadn't been for Prayer, we wouldn't have learned that they have valves behind their ears to control the blood coursing from their turbo-charged hearts. So that's why you never read of giraffes blowing their own brains out.

Safari in Botswana, despite the odd vile racist remark from a South African round the campfire, was reassuringly devoid of bloated types doused in Scotch. It was impromptu G&Ts as cindery palm silhouettes formed against liquid-pink sunsets over advancing floodwaters from Angola - by June these would render the Moremi navigable by mokoro canoe.

It was the camp staff singing, quite heartbreakingly, their harmonies - "bee-yoo-tiful Bot-swa-na" - rising hymn-like above the rain trees to where Orion and the Southern Cross were pinned against the sky. And it was Gavin Ford with his gentle, mesmerising observations. Spying a rare slaty egret on a flood plain one afternoon, he told us: "If you were a bird- watcher you'd be allowed to jump for joy." We weren't. But we very nearly did.

Way to go
Nick Redman travelled to Botswana with Abercrombie and Kent (0845 0700 611). Chief's Camp features on various itineraries: seven nights, including three at Chief's, two at Stanley's Camp and two at Chobe Chilwero, costs from £3,160pp full board, with flights.