What it is
The dried bed of a lake that once covered much of northern Botswana. Sua and Ntwetwe are the two big pans, with Nxai Pan and Baines' Baobabs to the north. In the dry months the surface is hard white crust with nothing standing on it. In the wet it is water, mud and flamingos, and driving on it is out of the question.
Why go
Quad biking or walking out onto the crust, and sleeping on it, is an experience no game drive matches. Habituated meerkat groups in the grassland will let you sit among them. Between December and March zebra and wildebeest move onto Nxai Pan in numbers, which is Botswana's real migration and gets a fraction of the attention.
When to go
Two separate seasons for two different trips. May to October for the pan surface, the quad bikes and the meerkats. December to March for the zebra, the green grass and the birds, but the pans themselves are then off limits.
Most people stay 2-3 nights.