Campfires and close encounters: is this the world’s most intrepid sleepover?

The next day we fly back to Maun, the terrain below us scratched with elephant tracks and blackened with bushes like sprinkled ash, and on towards Makgadikgadi Pans National Park, the empty Boteti river snaking beneath us. Leroo La Tau Lodge, 140 km south of Maun, is also run by Desert and Delta, and sits on the western bank of the Boteti, an unrivalled position from which to see zebra migration, one of the largest mass animal movements in the world. The dry river bank is a hazy dustbowl…