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Botswana - In a luxury tourist lodge in Botswana's Central Kalahari Game Reserve, guests are sipping cold drinks.
The elegant, air-conditioned bar offers a magnificent view of the desert outside, where elephants or giraffes sometimes pass by.
If outsiders try to enter here, they are promptly told to leave. The lodge has been reserved for a small group of wealthy tourists.
This is African tourism at its most exclusive, and it is a model Botswana intends to preserve, even if the numbers of visitors to the southern African country are increasing.
About 400 000 leisure travellers were recorded in Botswana in 2010, up from 276 000 in 2001, according to the latest government figures.
Tourists to Botswana have some relatively cheap options, such as last-minute offers or camping in game parks, said Dimari Oliver from the safari company &Beyond.
But the country remains best known for the likes of Spain's former king Juan Carlos and Britain's Prince Harry - visitors in line with its "high value, low volume" tourism policy.
It is a policy that allows Botswana to make money from tourism while limiting the numbers of visitors in order to preserve the wildlife that attracts them.
"Botswana has the last true wilderness in Africa," said Glen Stephen from the safari company Liquid Giraffe.
"In Kenyan game parks, you can see large numbers of [tourist] vehicles surrounding a single kill" done by a lion, he snorted. "That would never happen here."
Observers attribute Botswana's dedication to wildlife protection to the presence of visionary conservationists and to politicians such as President Ian Khama, a wildlife enthusiast himself.
Guests are whisked straight from airports to five-star lodges or luxury tents in game parks where it is easy to see "the big five" - the elephant, the lion, the leopard, the buffalo and the rhino.
Game drives may alternate with massage, beauty treatments or hot stone therapy. The price of such holidays can come up to 2 000 dollars per night, Oliver said.
"It is an once-in-a-lifetime experience, which people plan a long time ahead," she added.
Tourism - including business travel and people visiting relatives - is expected to generate 8.6 per cent of Botswana's gross domestic product in 2014.
It is one of the sectors the government counts on to diversify the country's largely diamond-based economy - but only to a point.
Prices are kept high by limiting the numbers of beds in lodges located in protected wildlife areas and by collecting levies from tourism operators.
"We will allow growth in areas that are not eco-sensitive, such as Gaborone or villages which tourists visit to get to know local culture in southern Botswana," said a spokesperson for the governmental Botswana Tourism Organization.
Many Botswanans see tourism as a valuable source of income and employment, with more than 11 000 people working in accommodation facilities alone in 2013.
There are complaints, though, that many safari companies are run by white people - often from neighbouring South Africa - while nearly all visitors to game parks are also white.
"Black Africans don't pay to see animals they have seen all their lives," a local photographer said.
But with the increase of urbanization and children receiving wildlife classes in school, there is a growing market for black tourism as well, Stephen said.
Many tourism companies support schools or local projects to win acceptance in places where they operate.
The reputation of Botswanan tourism has suffered some damage over the country's treatment of its Bushmen, regarded as descendants of the original inhabitants of southern Africa, thousands of whom were moved from the Central Kalahari Game Reserve to resettlement camps between 1997 and 2002.
Lobby group Survival International is campaigning for a boycott of Botswanan tourism over the resettlement.
But Oliver and Stephen are not worried about the calls for a boycott. "Tourists love Botswana," Oliver said.
