As time wore on, we returned to our plot of land on the Boteti, this time to build our lodge. We had developed a problem though and this was what to call the Lodge. Our Campsite, that we had built the previous year was called Xwaraga Campsite, but this name was proving difficult for visitors to pronounce. We needed a name for the Lodge that would epitomise what we had come to know of the place, was easy to pronounce, was african enough to encourage an explanation, but would be difficult to forget.What had we come to understand about the place. We were located on the very western edge of the Makgadikgadi Game Reserve, the boundary of which was the Boteti River which had not flowed for the past 14 years. At its time it must have been an amazing sight to behold as it was the major outlet for the Okavango Delta and had carved a scar in the Kalahari some 25 meters deep. Where we planned on building our lodge was on top of these cliffs overlooking the dry riverbed with a view eastwards into the Game Reserve.
It seemed that the last 14 dry years had not been time enough for the wildlife to have changed their ancient migratory habits and vast herds of Zebra and Wildebeest would find themselves up against the Boteti from June to December in a desperate attempt to eek out a living on poor grass reserves and feeble water points formed by an underground stream flowing under the sands in the Boteti that seeped to the surface at deeper corners in the rivers bed.
As we lived on our plot we were astounded by the seasonal abundance of animals for the second half of the year and the astounding beauty and variety of plant life and migratory and endemic birdlife during the first half of the year. None of this however made naming the lodge any easier. The predatory animals in the area helped nothing at al as in over a year now we had yet to see a single one. We couldn’t name the place after something seasonal we had to find a constant and so far the only constant we had was that on almost a daily basis we would see lion tracks. We settled on that and named the lodge Leroo-La-Tau, the tracks of the Lion.