On our latest trip to Africa we stayed overnight in Johannesburg at the Intercontinental at the airport, then stayed in four camps and spent four days at the Queen Victoria Hotel in Cape Town. I want to offer a summary of my views on each place.
We love the Intercontinental, even given it’s an airport hotel. The rooms are nice, the food is great, and the staff are wonderful. We always stay a night on arrival because it gives us a buffer if there’s a problem on our flight from the US, and this year we had a 12-hour delay! We didn’t have any real issues with connections because we’d taken the precaution of adding a night in the Intercontinental. We’ll keep doing that, and on years where we don’t stay in Cape Town at the end, we’ll add a night to wrap up the trip too.
Our first lodge on this trip was a repeat for us, Ol Donyo, which is one of the Great Plains lodges and a Relais & Chateaux property. It’s located in the Chyulu Hills in southern Kenya east of the Masai Mara. It’s a fairly small lodge, housing a maximum of about 20 guests in a succession of private villas strung along the edge of a hill overlooking the plain, where there are abundant critters running around for easy viewing even from your room or while dining. Each room is open to the outside, but a fence and ledge discourages anything from entering. We had a gennet visit our room on one trip, but even though there are monkeys and baboons that might take a drink from a plunge pool, they don’t seem to bother the rooms if you don’t leave food laying around.
There are no other lodges in this area, so one of the wonderful things about it is that you don’t usually even see another vehicle. We’ve spent all day roaming around looking for birds and animals without even seeing other guests. It’s a stark contrast to the Mara area, where even in the private concessions you’ll usually see other vehicles on every drive.
We absolutely love this camp. The facilities seem part of the landscape, wildlife abounds, and you have a sense of really being in Africa and not passing through. It’s not an ideal big five site, though; leopard and rhino are very rare (we never saw them here). We’ve seen plenty of the big five, and you can take a day trip to Amboseli National Park that gives you plenty of opportunity for more critters than are found local to the camp. I strongly recommend taking a day to do this trip because the wildlife is spectacular, but be sure to be in Amboseli by about 7:30 AM latest to see the elephants coming in. There are plenty of elephants on the property, and they regularly come to a drinking pond where they simply push the other animals away.
They might also drink from your plunge pool, which happened to us every night and sometimes during the day. The elephants have discovered their tusks are non-conductive so they use them to push the fence down to get in, where they eat the vegetation near the pool overflow and either drink or occasionally just blow bubbles. We even named one “Bubbles”! Our room was number two, at the far right facing out over the plain, and if you like animals that one gets the most action.
There are some exotic animals near the lodge, including the gerenuk, which is an antelope that looks like an impala whose neck was stretched. It’s arresting if you’ve never seen one, and they’re plentiful enough that you can see them every game drive if you like. We also saw a caracal, a tawny cat about the size of a large-ish dog, nocturnal, and rarely seen. In Amboseli we saw a serval, a spotted cat smaller than a caracal and also rare, particularly in daylight.
We stayed five days at Ol Donyo on this trip and we’ll probably stay a week next time!
Our next camp was the Olare Mara Kimpinski, located on the Ntiakitiak River in the Olare Motorogi Conservancy, which borders on the northeast of the Masai Mara National Reserve. If you’re familiar with the private reserves west of South Africa’s Kruger National Park, you know that the big benefit they offer is limited access and control of vehicles. The conservancies in Kenya are the same, but there are about five lodges in this one and so you will see other vehicles around, though there’s supposed to be a limit of four or less at a given sighting. Sometimes that was stretched a bit!
Kimpinski is a tented camp strung along the river, with the last room (the “Honeymoon Suite”) right at the edge of two hippo pools. If you are bothered by night noises you might want to pick a different spot here. However, this tent is more spacious and it has a plunge pool, which is nice on a hot afternoon when the tent can be warm despite the fans. There is electricity and running water in all the tents, but obviously no air conditioning.
We found the meals here were great, and the staff was wonderful. Our only complaint was that unlike nearly every other camp we stayed in, Kimpinski offered a limited wine/liquor set at no charge, and you had to pay for everything else. Something like Amarula, which we like in hot chocolate on game drives and which Linda drinks in the evening sometimes, can cost about eight dollars.
The terrain in the conservancy varies, and Kimpinski (and Mara Plains) are right in the heart of the very best area, at the river. Other lodges tend to come in to find the predators, in particular, which is why you’ll see other vehicles on most drives. The wildlife is good; everything except rhino is plentiful here and you can see wild dog and cheetah. You can also drive into the National Reserve, which is great if you are visiting at the right time for the Migration and the crossing of the Mara river. That happens in August and early September; we caught a crossing on our last trip to the Mara but not on this one, and we were only about a week later.
If you are a birder or have seen the Big Five already and you want to focus on something else, seriously consider getting a private vehicle here. You’ll pay for it (in most camps they’ll run perhaps $400 to $550 US per day, but a specific guide will be as much as $1,000 per day), but it’s worth it. Most visitors to the Mara area want to see a crossing (which you may not see even in the peak August timeframe but which will eat up a lot of waiting time nevertheless) and the Big Five, and so birding will be down on the list for a shared vehicle.
We liked this camp a lot, and unless we find another with a plunge pool and electricity, we’ll probably return here.
On the South Africa part of our trip, our first camp was Leadwood, part of the Exeter camp complex that at the time we made reservations was managed by andBeyond. The camp has now changed management to Dulini, but it’s still an andBeyond partner property. It’s located at the junction of the Sand and Mabrak Rivers in Sabi Sands, west of Kruger. On this trip, the Mabrak was dry and the Sand river was a trickle, but wildlife was still abundant in the river area.
There are only four villas here, each with three sections (living, bedroom, and bath) and a deck and plunge pool. Room 1 sits on the Mabrak side, alone to the left of the main area as you face the river, and the other three sit to the right. That makes Room 1 the most private and most visited by wildlife; we had an elephant and some antelope drinking from our plunge pool. The decks are outside the fence, so be careful going out after dark.
The meals here were great, and the staff and management were incredibly committed and enthusiastic. We had a private bird guide here, and he ate with Linda and I apart from the other guests. They accommodated this arrangement quite well, partly because there are four different places you can eat in the main lodge area. All of them have a view of the Sand river, and you may see leopard stalking around after dark.
What sets all the Sabi Sands properties apart is the Big Five viewing, and in particular leopards. We saw all the Big Five by 9 AM one morning and we saw nine different leopards in a single four-day visit. Sabi Sands is a bit of a patchwork of reserves, some of which have transit agreements, and you will see other vehicles on your game drives. Generally they try to control how many show up for a given sighting, and if you get lucky (or your ranger and tracker are good!) you’ll have some great ones to yourself or share them with a single vehicle.
We like Leadwood the best of all the Sabi properties, even more expensive ones like Londolozi or Mala Mala. We’ll be making this our standard Sabi spot on future trips.
Our last camp in South Africa was Jabulani, which is located in the Kapama game reserve, near Timbavati or Hoedspruit, northwest of Kruger. We stayed here a couple years ago, in large part because it has a resident herd of elephants rescued from various places. This was the last year for elephant-back safaris there, and we wanted to do it again. The lodge is another of the Relais & Chateaux category, and food and accommodations were great on our last trip. Sadly, we had some issues on this one.
We’d booked a private guide for birding here, as we did everywhere else on this trip. Our ranger was a nice guy, knew African animals well, and had a fair knowledge of birds as well. The problem was that he’d been in the lodge only two weeks, and so he was forced to refer to a map to find his way around and ask directions of other vehicles. This tended to distract him from looking for birds, not to mention getting us lost and late to some sightings or activities.
The second problem was that while we’d reserved our room over a year in advance and asked for a specific room (Jabulani, the one furthest from the main facility) we ended up in Room 3, closest to the main lodge. That, in my view, is the worst room in the camp because of the noise from the lodge and from people coming and going.
The final problem was the menu. We were asked on arrival for any dietary restrictions, and we told our ranger that we didn’t eat any game, nor would we eat baby animals (lamb, veal) or duck. We preferred chicken, seafood, pork (except pork belly; too fatty), or beef. We also told the male half of the camp manager team, and yet we had only one option we could eat for the first dinner and none for the second. When we complained to the female manager, she said we should have told the chef. Why, then, ask for dietary preferences? Anyway, once that was straightened out we had great dishes.
After some reflection, we told our travel agent and suggested we’d wasted the money for a private vehicle here. The agent asked for a refund of the charge, which camp management refused. The agent then contacted the owners, who agreed to the refund.
We loved the elephants here. We loved our experience on elephant-back, all the more for the fact that this is the end of the last year it’s offered. We loved watching them bathe in a pool. The dining and room staffs were great, but the camp’s new management was a problem. I doubt we’ll come back here unless there’s a management change.
We wrapped the trip up at the Queen Victoria Hotel in Cape Town. The hotel sits on a small rise across the road from the waterfront area of Cape Town, just a short walk from the Victoria & Alfred where we’d stayed the last couple of times. The V&A was undergoing renovations so we decided to move, and we loved the Queen Victoria so much we’ll stay there from now on.
This is a small hotel, with perhaps 35 rooms. The best are on the top floor facing out toward the waterfront or 90 degrees clockwise toward Table Mountain. We had a room (1304) that faced both, with extensive balcony space. We didn’t dine at the hotel except for breakfast, which was a very nice buffet, and we had them pack a lunch for us while birding, which was also excellent.
The nice thing about this hotel is its combination of view and access. You’re closer to the waterfront attractions, restaurants, and shops than the Cape Grace where we stayed our first time in Africa, the location is quiet (unlike the V&A which can be noisy if it’s a weekend), and the view from the top of the small hill is better than you’d get from anything lower down. The staff was excellent and helpful too, and we’ve already booked our return.
Good accommodations, particularly good lodges/camps, are hard to come by and if you want to get a good room in a good place you need to book far in advance. We book over a year ahead, and even then don’t always get exactly what we want. If you’re planning a trip to Africa and want the best outcome, remember that timing issue to avoid disappointment.