Four countries, one river — Chobe elephant herds and sundowner boats at the meeting point of southern Africa
Kasane sits at the junction of four countries — Botswana, Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Namibia — where the Chobe River meets the Zambezi floodplain. The Chobe National Park, immediately south of town, holds the largest concentration of African elephants on earth: an estimated 120,000 animals that come to the river in the dry season, visible from the road and spectacularly from sunset boat cruises on the Chobe. Victoria Falls is 70km east across the Zimbabwean border.
Kasane developed as a colonial-era administrative post at the tip of the Caprivi Strip — the thin corridor of land Germany inserted into the Bechuanaland Protectorate (modern Botswana) to give German Southwest Africa access to the Zambezi River in 1890 (the Heligoland-Zanzibar Treaty). The strip was a diplomatic curiosity that never achieved its intended purpose; it now forms the Namibian Caprivi Strip, whose eastern tip terminates at the four-country confluence across from Kasane.