Return from the Okavango in 360 - Ep. 4 | The Okavango Experience

This is a place filled with magic. Everything has to have a reason: the movement of the grass, the core of an animal, the call of a bird. Everything, we're connected to all of it, and that is the most alive we can ever be. This is a sanctuary for these incredible animals just to be the way they've always been.

Giraffes are disappearing everywhere they exist, but not here in the Okavango Delta. Lions are perfectly adapted to the open floodplains of the Delta, so they thrive. The baboons are more like us than we would like to admit. They live connected to each other in the world around them, while dogs are endangered, threatened with extinction. With so few left, they are hardly ever seen.

The hippo, the Kabul, is the custodian of these waterways. It is the engineer; the hippo creates this environment, and without the hippo, we would not have the Okavango Delta. But while we move through this environment, we need to be aware of this animal. If we lose these places, then I think we're all lost, and to our connection to this planet that looks after us.

That's why I say we want to look after this one for children and the children of our children. We want it ever to be better. It's a downward slide into developments, in people and tourism. It's a basic human right to be able to experience a wilderness like this.

After 18 days in the wild, we are sad—not happy—to be leaving, returning to the developed world that threatens these last wild places. So, it's almost like a comedown, you know? From an amazing place, you just start realizing that the whole world's not like this.

Every single one of us will go to bed that night thinking, "Oh, I wish I was back out there." We all need to do everything we can to preserve our last remaining wild places before they're lost forever. Wilderness places like this around the world are formative to who we are as human beings, and without them, we lose something fundamental to who we are.