Eleven days in Zimbabwe and Botswana with Alex Dawson, and what a yoga retreat can be when someone builds it properly

It was almost pitch black when we boarded.

The boat was still docked on the Zambezi river, and the air had that particular pre-dawn cold that gets into your hands before you’ve noticed it. We were ushered up to the upper deck, where the mats had already been laid out in the dark, waiting. Nobody spoke. There was only the quiet hum of the engine as the boat slipped its mooring and moved out into what was, at that hour, simply nothing — no far bank, no horizon, no line between the river and the sky.

We were bundled up, still half asleep, and then Alex began to guide us.

What happened over the following forty minutes is difficult to write about . The simple version: the sky went from black to grey to a pale, impossible orange, and we moved through asana and vinyasa on a deck that was itself moving. There was the flow of the practice. There was the flow of the river. And there was the flow of the boat between them, so that the three became almost indistinguishable.

Then the sun cleared the treeline and the first rays landed on our skin — actual warmth, arriving in real time, as we lifted our arms overhead. Around us, the bush was waking: hippo somewhere off the port side, birds we couldn’t name, the whole enormous morning chorus of the Zambezi.

There is a new definition of sun salute available to you, and it is on a boat on that river at 6:15 in the morning, surrounded by the voices of the wild.

Why some retreats are different

We are, by now, something of a connoisseur of the yoga retreat. It is one of the genuine pleasures of this life: you can travel almost anywhere in the world in the company of like-minded people, and arrive somewhere unfamiliar with a built-in structure and a built-in group.

But the honest observation, after many of them, is that yoga retreats are not created equal. Some are a hotel with a class schedule attached. Some are a beautiful shala where nothing much happens between sessions. And a small number are something else entirely — where the destination, the practice, the group and the pacing all seem to have been thought about as a single organism rather than assembled from parts.

We keep trying to identify where that magic actually comes from. Our working theory is that it does not come from the location, the food, or even the quality of the asana instruction, though all three matter. It comes from the container — the invisible structure a teacher builds around a group of strangers so that they can travel into a foreign land together and come out the other side as something like friends.

Building that container is a separate skill from teaching yoga. It requires listening. More than that, it requires the ability to feel the energy of a group and adjust to it in real time — to know when to push, when to leave people alone, when the afternoon needs to be quieter than planned.

Which brings us to Botswana.

An unlikely destination

Botswana is not a country most people associate with yoga. It is a country people associate with elephants, with the Okavango, with some of the most serious wildlife on the continent. Getting there is not casual, either — you route through Johannesburg or Cape Town, and you commit.

We flew into Victoria Falls, on the Zimbabwean side, and began with the falls themselves: that gigantic, absurd wall of water that soaks you from a hundred metres away and makes conversation impossible. The first day was arrivals, lunch, the falls, and a welcome dinner — deliberately social, the group still figuring out who everyone was.

The second morning was the boat on the Zambezi. Then breakfast, and the group split in two for an e-bike tour of Victoria Falls and a visit into town and the market, swapping over after lunch. It is a small piece of scheduling but a telling one: rather than move twenty people through a market in a single herd, the group was halved so that each half could actually see something.

On the third day we crossed the border into Botswana, boarded a boat safari cruise, ate lunch on the water, and transferred onward to the place that gave this trip its centre of gravity.

Munga Plains

Munga Plains sits on the edge of Chobe National Park, and it is not a luxury safari camp. We want to be clear about that, because the phrase “safari retreat” conjures a certain kind of brochure, and this is not that.

It is a small camp, built out of wood, thatching grass and canvas, running on solar power and treating its own water. It takes one retreat group at a time — no other guests, no other agendas. The en-suite glamping tents are comfortable and unfussy. And then, roughly three hundred metres out from the main area, standing alone in the middle of what looks like nothing at all, there is the shala.

It is open on all sides and it looks out over the savannah. It is properly equipped — mats, blocks, belts, bolsters, room for twenty — which is a genuine surprise given where you are. You walk out to it in the early light, past whatever has wandered through in the night, and you practise facing open plains.

The camp works closely with the local Basubiya community, and this is the part we did not expect to be the thing we still think about. The warmth of the staff was constant and, frankly, disarming. Seeing the simplicity of daily life around the camp – It opens you. Several people in our group said the same thing, unprompted, at different points in the week.

The rhythm of the days

The structure at Munga Plains found a rhythm quickly, and it was a clever one: practice in the cool of the morning, wildlife when the wildlife is moving, and something restorative folded into the middle of the day.

A typical day began with a light breakfast in the dark, then yoga and metta meditation in the shala as the sun came up, then a proper brunch. One day this was followed by a breathwork journey and sound bath — then high tea, then the group split again for mokoro  excursions, poled out onto the water in dugout canoes at the exact hour the light turns gold. Sundowners. Dinner.

Another day was given over entirely to a full-day game drive, packed breakfast and lunch in the bush, and then — genuinely inspired scheduling — yin yoga in the late afternoon, when everyone’s hips had spent nine hours in a safari vehicle. It was the most gratefully received class of the trip.

There was a bush dinner under the open sky, followed by a night drive, which is its own category of experience: the spotlight sweeping, the eyes coming back at you out of the dark, the sudden absolute stillness of twenty people who have all stopped breathing at once.

And there was a day built around the local culture. Yoga and chakra meditation in the morning, then a cultural village visit — where we learned about basket weaving, a craft with a great deal more structure and lineage to it than we had understood — then high tea, a breathwork journey, and a drumming workshop. The drumming and the healing traditions we were introduced to sounded genuinely foreign to our ears, in the best possible sense: not a performance arranged for visitors, but something being explained to us by the people it belongs to. The day closed with a traditional dinner.

Then the camp packed up and we went mobile.

Savuti

The mobile safari to Savuti was the wildest section of the trip in every sense. Two days of morning and afternoon game drives, meals in camp, and — running quietly underneath it all — what Alex called the Wild Serenity practice: a slower, more internal session held in the middle of the day.

Both nights ended around a campfire.This is the point in a retreat where the container either holds or doesn’t. Ours held. People talked about things they had not planned to talk about.

We flew back on a scenic bush flight to Kasane and transferred to Victoria Falls for sundowners at Shongwe Lookout and a farewell dinner. And on the final morning, before the airport transfers began, there was yoga with elephants — which we will not attempt to justify or explain, only report.

What Alex Dawson actually brings

It is worth setting out the credentials, because they explain a great deal about why this worked.

Alex Dawson has been teaching yoga since 2002, completing her teacher training at Sonic Yoga in New York the following year. She is a Yoga Alliance E-RYT 500. Her own practice runs deeper and wider than the vinyasa she is best known for, drawing from Ashtanga, Kula Yoga, Vipassana meditation in the Goenka tradition, and mindfulness with Tara Brach and Jack Kornfield, with whom she completed the Mindful Meditation Teacher Certification in 2023. She is certified in breathwork with David Elliott, in sound healing through Soundology, and has spent years in a bhakti mentorship with Tony Khalife.

That range is why a retreat like this can hold metta meditation, chakra meditation, yin, breathwork, sound bath and a vigorous morning vinyasa without any of it feeling like a menu. She is not sampling. She has actually studied all of it.

But the more relevant qualification is the one that does not appear on a certificate. Alex led her first retreat in Ojai, California in 2007 and has led more than fourty worldwide since — roughly ninety per cent of them self-produced, which means she is not a guest teacher dropped into someone else’s programme. She builds them. Azores in 2024. The Dolomites in 2025. Zimbabwe and Botswana in 2026. Before those: Morocco, Bali, Guatemala, Sicily, Le Marche, Mexico many times over.

Her own line for this is the best summary of it we have heard: teaching is listening. Listening to the energy of the room, to the physical capacities of the students, and guiding the journey accordingly. On a ten-day trip across two countries with strangers, that is not a nice sentiment. It is the entire job.

How to choose a yoga retreat

So: how do you find one of these?

In an ideal world you already know the teacher. You have taken their classes, you know their style, you know what their voice does to your nervous system at six in the morning. That is the strongest signal available, and if you have it, trust it.

If you don’t, go looking for the track record. Not the photographs of the destination — anyone can license a photograph of a destination. Look at where the teacher has run retreats before, how many, and over how many years. Look at whether they produce their own or simply show up at someone else’s venue. Look at whether people come back. Ask around. Follow recommendations from people whose judgement you already trust.

Because in the end it is not really about the yoga. The yoga is the spine of the thing, and it needs to be good — but what you are actually buying is a group of strangers, a foreign place, and someone competent enough to hold both. You are buying the feeling of community. The making of new friends. The sense of being safe somewhere unfamiliar enough to be genuinely thrilling.

And in an era of template retreats — same schedule, same superfoods, same infinity pool, different postcode — that is the rarest thing on the market.

We were lucky. We went to Botswana with a teacher who has been building these journeys for nearly twenty years, and we came home with a new definition of sun salute.

Look for the ones built by someone who is actually listening.

Alex Dawson leads Dream Big Yoga Retreats worldwide. Her Zimbabwe and Botswana retreat sold out in two weeks, nine months before departure, as her retreats generally do. alexdawsonyoga.com