Roar power of the private safari
With rhinos in the garden, personal chefs and butlers, this swish South African game reserve is a wildly exclusive treat
ALOG fire is casting soft shadows across cocktail hour and I can hear the chink-chunk of my sons playing a gentlemanly game of billiards. Next door, an elegant dining room is being laid by candlelight, just for the four of us. Later, in the library, there’ll be time to dip into The Southern African Household Guide, which is like Mrs Beeton but with added emergency bush medicine.
Staying at Mantis Founders Lodge, an hour-and-a-half from Gqeberha (formerly Port Elizabeth) on South Africa’s Eastern Cape, is like being in the country house of grand but kindly relatives, not least because this was, until recently, a private home. Built in the 1940s for the godfather of South African conservation, Adrian Gardiner, it’s now a seven-suite hotel with rhinos at the end of the garden.
The library was originally Mr Gardiner’s office, where he created the pioneering private game reserve Shamwari (beloved of Brad Pitt and King Charles).
He doesn’t live here any more but still phones at 8pm most nights to ask after his guests. Founders is about as personal as a safari gets.
Bump down a track for a few minutes and you’ll find the private railway carriage in which earlier generations of Gardiners once criss-crossed southern Africa. The glorious exterior livery has been flawlessly restored while inside there’s enough burnished brass and velvet drapes to keep the Dowager Countess of Grantham happy.
Before we move into the main Lodge, (it’s ours for one night), with dinner by chef Lloyd and served on the deck by butler Bongiwe, Ranger Sikhumbuzo has got a fire blazing and around us and the sound of animals is turned up to the max.
Founders is how Mr Gardiner continued to build sustainable tourism after his Shamwari years – rewilding exhausted farmland, reintroducing the Big Five – rhinos, elephants, lions, leopards and buffalo – and the smaller creatures with which they cohabit: the red-billed oxpeckers that pick out their ticks, for instance, as well as dung beetles to fertilise the orange earth.
His ambitious eco-project is the antithesis of a ‘Ferrari Safari’ – ticking off animals at high speed. At Founders you can watch a pride of lionesses take down a warthog or a dozen orange-eyed hippos singing in their mud bath.
But you’ll stop for the marigold flash of a Cape Daisy, too, the distant flap of a martial eagle’s wings or to inhale the super-stink of a patrolling hyena. It’s such an intimate place that only the leopards prove more elusive than the sight of other tourists.
Founders is also an outpost of Bear Grylls’s empire, offering a survival masterclass for young guests. Parents are supposed to disappear but, like the nosy giraffe watching on, my husband and I, and our eldest son, 16, were far too interested in what our 12-year-old was doing.
Stuck in the South African bush? Lash up a shelter with rope made from the bark of an acacia tree.
Later we use some of the acacia bark rope to make bracelets, with happy memories woven in.
We return to Gqeberha, a historic, sunny city that is well served by short flights from Johannesburg an hour-and-a-half away.
Here you can book-end your safari with whale and penguinwatching, surfing and sailing out of the Lodge’s sister hotel Mantis No 5. It’s a white and blue Miami-lookalike just 100 metres from Gqeberha’s Indian Ocean beach. No5 has one of the city’s best restaurants, The Jazz Room, a private cinema modelled on the one in Clarence House and 200 pieces of art, many from Mr Gardiner’s collection.
But amid the city’s urban cool we have only to glance at our bracelets to feel the tug of the immersive natural world of Founders – and what a privilege it has been to experience it.