I don’t have a bucket list of any kind, but thanks to stints at lifestyle magazines, including this one, I have been lucky enough to expose myself to some unique experiences. I won’t bore you, like some others I know, by going into the details, but let me just say that few of those come close to a luxury safari in Africa.
Earlier this year, after cutting a wide arc across South Africa and sipping some excellent wines, I landed at Skukuza, in the eastern part of the country, and proceeded, as we exited the tiny airport, to gawk at the clarity of the African sky and the vastness of Kruger National Park. Yellowstone might have invented the concept of the national park, but Kruger, which turned 100 this year, is right up there among the world’s iconic parks. Founded by its namesake, a zealous Afrikaner Calvinist, Kruger, about the size of Wales, is home to, besides the Big Five, an astounding, multihued avian diversity that even caught the attention of non-birders such as this writer. Kruger gets nearly two million visitors annually, but not everyone experiences it the ultra-luxury way.
Lion Sands Tinga Lodge, my base for the next few days, is set on a private concession on the banks of the Sabie River, offering both the run of the national park and the seclusion of a private reserve. Since Tinga’s nine suites, set well apart from each other, lie within Kruger itself, guests are requested to vacate their en suite plunge pools by late evening and generally not get startled at the sight of a hippo outside their large windows. The little touches do the real talking: a host assigned for the length of the stay, tastefully chosen complimentary South African wines, delicious-smelling toiletries, and mosquito netting draped over the king-size bed like something out of an old colonial photograph.
Days begin early at the lodge and, fortified with muffins and coffee, I’m ready for my game drive at 6.30 am the next morning, accompanied by my guide Jabu and his tracker companion. The good thing about being in a private concession like Tinga is that you can actually drive deep into the bush, following trails of elephant droppings and broken branches snapped clean off at shoulder height—tracking that looks like guesswork to an untrained eye, but is really closer to reading. Just because you’ve paid big money doesn’t always mean you’ll get to see the big boys of the bush right away. During my first morning, I was instead treated to a polychromatic procession of avian life, a rhino, and shy nyalas.
Back at the lodge, I spent the afternoon discovering the two versions of Kruger: a great conservation story, no doubt, but also a place with a complex past. Communities living inside what are now the park’s boundaries were moved, sometimes by negotiation, sometimes not, over the better part of a century. Kruger’s most documented case is the Makuleke, a Tsonga-speaking community settled for centuries in the park’s far north, forcibly removed in 1969 under apartheid. It took until 1998, four years into South African democracy, for that land to be formally restored to them—a reminder, even to an Indian visitor, that the story behind a wilderness is rarely as clean as the wilderness itself.
In a couple of hours, though, I was back to the business of admiring it. The harvest was bountiful that evening and the morning that followed: a leopard sprawled on the branch of a massive tree; zebras quizzically meeting our gaze from a distance; camera-shy giraffes; and, finally, lions lounging under the late evening sun. Then, somewhere along a dirt track as the light started to go gold and then blue, the vehicle simply stopped, and the bonnet became a bar. I especially remember savouring the experience with a glass of South African white while the bush went quiet and dark around us.
One evening, we swapped the usual sundowner spot for one of Lion Sands’ treehouses — a raised, open-air perch with a clear view straight down onto the Sabie River. Hornbills moved through the trees overhead while we settled in, and below, a small herd of elephants worked the riverbank in no particular hurry. It was the kind of moment luxury influencers sell their integrity for.
A week before I landed at Skukuza, the river I admired during my stay had broken its banks, along with several others that run through and around the reserve. Scientists will tell you that flooding is part of Kruger’s natural rhythm, a periodic reset that the ecosystem has adapted to over millennia. What’s different now is the scale and frequency — the kind of “once-in-a-generation” events, both mega-floods and droughts, that seem to be arriving every few years rather than every few decades.
Over the last hundred-odd years, Kruger has survived rampant hunting, the Boer War and apartheid. Whether it survives the next hundred is the one question nobody at the lodge, or elsewhere, has a good answer for.
Lion Sands Tinga Lodge is located within a private concession in Kruger National Park and is accessible per person, per night, including accommodation, meals and game drives
