Spotting leopards in the trees for less
• Time to enjoy five-star luxury is now as game lodges slash their prices to attract locals
Conversations around the campfire at Simbambili Game Lodge are different these days. Excited guests still talk about how many lions or leopard they saw, or how close they came to elephants. The surprise comes when they swap stories about how many times they’ve returned to this lodge in the Sabi Sand reserve. Three times for one couple, four for another.
The voices are different too, with the previous European or American accents replaced by the twangs of Alberton, Sandton or Middelburg. Not because South Africans have discovered a new passion for the bush, but because prices have tumbled to finally make luxury lodges an achievable aspiration.
The pre-Covid-19 rate of R14,050 per person per night sharing was laughable for most, but the current R4,999 is bringing them in.
Simbambili’s manager, Mike Cowden, is cheerfully pragmatic about the price plunge. “We are losing money, but now we’re only losing thousands of rand, not millions,” he says. “Even at 70% occupancy we’re not covering the costs. But there were 40 to 50 staff members who had no income, so the whole objective was to keep our staff alive and drawing salaries.”
What you get for your money is spectacular. The lodge has chic open-plan lounges and a large deck where you dine looking out at a waterhole. A herd of elephants come to drink and take mud baths, then melt away as silently as they came.
The food is top-notch, with three meals a day and high tea if you can squeeze it in. Each of the nine suites has a deck with a day bed and a plunge pool, and Wi-Fi if you really have to work. There’s a gym, a conference room and a spa by the riverbank, where R1,000 buys an hour-long massage.
The game viewing is even more impressive. The guides will tell you that Sabi Sand has the densest leopard population in the world. Or perhaps they’re just more adept at finding them, with teamwork to constantly share information about the sightings. It’s one of the oldest reserves in the country too, so the animals grow up seeing game viewing vehicles and often completely ignore them.
At night we watched a magnificent male leopard sniffing the grass to check for females or rivals, then rolling in some dung to disguise his own smell ready for the hunt. There was the iconic “leopard in a tree” moment too, with a female guarding her kudu kill high in the marula branches.
Simbambili is operated by Thornybush, which used to manage and market 11 high-end properties. It’s now down to six, having pulled out of the others as the travel trade collapsed. It also slashed its rates, predicting that Covid-19 will cause chaos for a long time and only the SA market can keep it going.
Pre-Covid-19, South Africans made up less than 1% of Simbambili’s guests. Now local travellers are almost all they have, and Cowden says it’s mutually beneficial. “Abuse us now while you can because this rate is something we can’t guarantee for the future, although we will try our best,” he says.
“A lot of South Africans have holiday budgets that they would have spent in Europe or Mauritius and they still want their holidays, so they come out here. They’re using us because they can’t do anything else and we’re using them because we don’t have anybody else, so it works out well for us and them.”
It costs at least R1m a month to keep a high-end lodge ticking over, Cowden says. Though those costs are not covered by the current rate, he would like to retain the local discount after international guests return.
“South Africans have looked after us extremely well through this period and we are not going to dump them. But we can’t afford to have 50% of our occupancy taken by that market or we will fail,” he says.
While 80% international occupancy would leave 20% to sell locally, it could be difficult to find a room for a few consecutive nights, especially since the discount would probably only apply to shortnotice bookings. That means the time to enjoy five-star luxury is now, because economically and logistically it can’t last.
Numerous high-end lodges are offering discounts of 50% on their website, with some slashing off up to 82%. “This situation has made many in the industry more appreciative of the local market, and we hope the lodges will continue to offer some good specials going forward — but don’t expect them to be as good as the current specials,” says Kathy Nel, GM of the booking website Bushbreaks & More.
The lack of euro- or dollartoting foreigners has also hit the rural communities. Tracker Tiyiselani Sitole comes from Dixie, a community of about 1,500 people close to Sabi Sand. He’s a trustee of Dixie Community Development and chairs the school governing board. When Simbambili’s guests read about its community support schemes and made donations, he helped to channel the money into essential projects.
Donations have almost dried up now, though one SA family gave R20,000 to rebuild the school kitchen. “For South Africans it’s a little bit difficult because we are all struggling,” Sitole says.
Poverty has also soared, with an estimated 50% of Dixie’s adults now unemployed. “The people of Dixie rely on lodges — there’s nothing else happening here,” he says. About 1,000 people in the area worked in tourism, and most were retrenched when companies shrank or failed.
Despite the poverty, they haven’t turned to snaring bushmeat for food or become foot soldiers for rhino poachers, he says. “The people coming to poach don’t come from here. As the Dixie community we try to protect Sabi Sand and Kruger National Park itself because we know that this is our money. One day the business will come back and we will be reemployed.”