Nxai Pan Camp

the only lodge in this little-visited area

Nxai Pan Camp is located in the Nxai Game Reserve area of central Botswana.

The camp is sometimes referred to as Nxai Pan Lodge, in order to avoid confusion with Nxai Pan Campground, the main public access facility in the reserve

The camp is set on a lightly wooded ‘tree island’ on the western flank of Nxai Pan itself, in the heart of the national park and is the only permanent facility in the area.

It is a very pleasant permanent lodge, centred on a large main building with dining areas to one side and a lounge to the other, both leading out to a deck area, with a campfire in front and a pool to one side and views out to a distant natural waterhole. There is also a small gift-shop.

Rooms

Guest accommodation at Nxai Pan Camp is in eight tented suites arranged either side, accessed by ground-level pathways and with private bathrooms. One of the rooms is a family unit, which has a small additional bedroom.

Activities

Nxai Pan Camp provides the following guided activities …

• Vehicle safari
• Famous baobab trees
• Bushman walks

When it comes to trip durations in Botswana, most visitors combine 2, 3 or 4 lodges by light aircraft over 6-12 nights, often in combination with further nights at the Victoria Falls and/or down in the Cape.

Longer trips may include a camp in one of the desert areas, such as here in Nxai Pan, in order to provide variation and contrast.

Most guests choose to stay at one lodge in Nxai Pan, usually for 3-4 nights.

Seasonality

The Nxai area has converse seasons to the main safari areas of the Okavango Delta and Linyanti Waterfront.

Wildlife highlights during the May-Oct dry season include desert specialists, whilst during the converse green season large migration herds pass through.

The Jun-Oct dry season offers a very subtle desert experience, when the pans are dry and the migratory animals have departed, leaving behind a relatively sparse population of desert specialists to struggle through the dry winter months, including ostriches, springboks, aardvarks, brown hyenas and black-maned lions.

The Nov-May green season brings rich wildlife viewing, as these critical pans fill with rainwater and attract in the migrating herds of zebras, wildebeest and giraffes, along with an unusual range of predators including cheetahs, leopards, spotted hyenas and aardwolves. However, the timing of these wildlife movements is famously unpredictable in Nxai, far more so than in the larger Makgadikgadi area to the south, where the herds tend to linger whilst calving.

During the May-Jun transition season, temperatures can drop towards freezing during the night.

During the Oct-Nov transition, temperatures and humidities can become uncomfortably high in advance of the rains.

Getting there

Nxai Pan Camp is almost always accessed by light aircraft into Nxai Pan Airstrip, either from Maun International Airport or directly from other camp airstrips in the Okavango Delta and elsewhere in the Kalahari.

From the airstrip it is a short vehicle safari of around 15 minutes into camp

It is also possible to access the camp by private road transfer from Maun, a journey of around 4-5 hours.

usually visited in combination with the Okavango Delta area