Leroo La Tau Lodge

Seven tents above a river that was not there

When Leroo La Tau opened in 1998 it was seven Meru tents on wooden platforms, looking down at a river that had already stopped coming. Chris McIntyre’s early Bradt guide to Botswana caught it at that stage. The main building had one wall of glass, a video recorder and a shelf of wildlife tapes. The shower water came out of the ground smelling faintly of sulphur. Bookings went through an outfit in Maun called Traction Safaris, and with no airstrip the fly-in circuits mostly left it alone.

A few minutes’ walk away was a campsite called Xwaraga, five pitches under camelthorn trees. Each pitch had its own standpipe until the elephants found them.

A neck of land with park on three sides

The lodge stands at the eastern end of a bend in the Boteti, on a tongue of ground that pokes into Makgadikgadi Pans National Park. McIntyre put the tongue at about 10 km by 4 to 5 km, with park on three sides, and in the tented years the drives mostly stayed on it. Now the day drives go over the river into the park, by a small vehicle ferry or by boat to vehicles left on the far bank. The park allows no driving after dark, so night drives still happen on the neck.

Desert and Delta Safaris added the place to their circuit in 2008. A guest who came that October wrote that it had been refurbished and reopened in June, and described a balcony over “the dry river bed and water hole” and a zebra herd she called spectacular. The Boteti began running again upstream late in 2008, and researchers writing about lions and cattle on this boundary date its return along the park to 2009.

The birds a guide rates above the zebra

Olepeng Maitapiso, Ollie to guests, was born in the Okavango Delta and had been with Desert and Delta more than twelve years when the company wrote a profile of him. A couple who stayed in November 2016 praised a guide called Ollie for spotting what others missed. In the profile the animal he talks up is the white-backed vulture. The birds live along the riverbed in large numbers, fed by what the migration leaves behind. Each pair raises a single chick, and by his account the family stays together for about eight months. Expert Africa’s team, after their own drives, called the number of vultures along the river perhaps the most notable thing they saw.

Ollie’s rule for the herds is that they start back towards the river around May, once the rain stops. A poor rainy season brings them early. A wet one, with water still standing at Nxai Pan, holds them back. McIntyre has the riverfront still filling until November, and Expert Africa gives July to October as the best months. That 2016 couple, there in mid-November, counted themselves lucky the zebra were still coming to the river.

What the guides say you may not see

Lions follow the herds to the river in the peak months, but hearing them is not seeing them. Expert Africa’s people heard roaring in the night and could not find the animals next day. The lodge’s guides told them leopard are rarely seen, and cheetah and spotted hyena hardly ever. What they did get was hippo, kudu, giraffe, ostrich and black-backed jackal, nearly all of it along the river, which is also where every other vehicle is. Once the rains come the herds leave the river, some of them north to Nxai Pan, and from December to April the same writers call the game viewing sparse.

The lodge translates its name as lion’s paw. At least one agent gives it as footprints of the lion, which fits better.