In Africa, there’s a reason why luxury camping isn’t an oxymoron. Many of the game parks don’t allow permanent structures, and tents — even though they contain bath, showers and loos — get round this. But the newest hotel-style camps, from the Languedoc to Canada and Australia, seem to be going with tarpaulin as a lifestyle choice, in much the same way a fashion designer might decide that velvet is the key fabric next season. Even the Aman group, home of everything that is aesthetic in the hotel world, has embraced tented luxury.

“People are becoming fundamentally more interested in adventure,” explains Melinda Stevens, travel editor of Tatler. “They don’t want to be cocooned away in some vacuum-packed resort. In a tented camp you feel more involved, the experience is that much more immediate. You get dirt under your fingernails and you might find a snake in your loo. It’s all good stuff.”

The latest example of the luxury camping trend is the new Four Seasons Golden Triangle, part of a hotel group where dirty fingernails can’t even be found on the person doing extravagant flower arrangements in the lobby. Drive for an hour from Chiang Rai in Northern Thailand, take a boat along the caramel-coloured, reed-fringed Ruak River, and you will see 15 canvas constructions a few feet from the Burmese border.

Dragonflies hover, colonies of ants march across the paths, but this camp is staying put. After all, the tents are built on stilts, with verandas so large that they have their own spa area. How can it be a camp? Not that I’m complaining. Well, only a bit. I’m not sure that any tent should have air-conditioning.

At 500 acres (200ha), it’s a large site; at one point a fellow guest talks wistfully about golf carts to navigate the long paths between the different areas, but I like the long paths, and suspension bridges that traverse it. One big difference from a normal Four Seasons hotel is that everything is included in the price, from food and drink, to spa treatments, trips along the Mekong River and — the undoubted highlight for most people — elephant riding.

Rescued from the streets of Bangkok and cared for by an elephant sanctuary, the elephants now enjoy a life that is as luxurious, in elephant terms, as the guests. They have freedom to roam the jungle at night, their own pool and all the bamboo shoots they can eat.

Riding one is rather scarier than the normal Four Seasons diversions of spa treatments and fine dining. “If you’re feeling nervous, take a deep breath,” says Khun Aukkrachai, the head mahout, before we start the lesson, but in my specially designed mahout suit, made from tasteful light blue denim, I initially survive — and then thrive on — the experience. And there’s nothing like elephant riding, and the resultant loss of dignity involved in having to clamber on one, to bond with your fellow campers; an American family (with grown-up children, under-16s are not allowed here), two more Americans and a Portuguese man with his much younger, beautiful Ukrainian girlfriend (who, disarmingly, turns out to be a classical pianist, delightful and highly skilled at dismounting elephants). After the elephant riding and several strong drinks in the colonial-styled Burma bar at the far end of the camp — all hurricane lights and Bakelite telephones — we decide to eat together.

Jason Friedman, the 34-year-old New York-born general manager of the camp, would be pleased by this move. “Places such as this revolve around shared experience,” he says, before we get into a bit of tussle over the definition of a tent.

“It’s not a tent, not really,” I argue. “You can’t move it.”

Friedman replies: “Camping doesn’t have to be in a tent, it could be a cabin. Ultimately, camping is a self-contained outpost.”

And the air-conditioning? “If a three-dollar room in Chiang Rai is going to have it, so are we,” he says. “But we’ve taken away some of the ‘hotely’ things. There are no televisions and no room service. Camping is about gathering around the campfire.”

Or in the Four Seasons’ case, the restaurant, the colonial-style bar, or the wine cellar, which lays on wine and cheese each evening before dinner.

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