Marataba Safari Company a five star hospitality operation in all departments…

Off I went together with my wife to Limpopo for a weekend getaway at Marataba Safari Company , recently. Our drive would have been shorter, had my wife listened to my suggestion of travelling from Roodepoort via Rustenburg and not following the directions provided on Marataba’s website, since it assumed we were driving from OR Tambo International Airport. This resulted in us taking almost 4 hours as we passed through Pretoria during peak hour traffic on a Friday afternoon and the heavy rain between Pretoria and Brits made driving an unpleasant experience.

We finally arrived at the lodge at 6.30pm, having left Roodepoort at 2.30pm. The game lodge is located in bushy surroundings, offering luxury tents for guests. We were ushered to guest-room 16, which offers a true bush experience since all game is directly accessible as it’s not fenced off from the natural surroundings.

The duty manager on the day welcomed and gave us a brief background about the facility, before we were escorted to our guestroom. It is important to indicate that these luxury tents don’t come with a television set, which clearly drives the point home that you’re here to relax and enjoy the peace away from city life.

taking a pose

khotsong, charging on us

tent 16, where we spent the night

inside tent 16

Waterberg Mountains

Getting free swimming lessons from Peter Henman

Click here to view all photographs

After familiarizing ourselves with everything and having refreshed we were ready for dinner at 8pm. I observed that the dining hall was very intimate as dining guests were about 15 in total. I’m used to a large crowd on my travels and this was very refreshing. During all our dinners, I also observed that local music is highly promoted, which plays on the background. South African artists must be proud that here is a tourism offering promoting their music…instead of the normal trend of using DMX Music which doesn’t have South African music on rotation.

The food was great and I must confess that their menu was too sophisticated for my limited cuisine exposure. Strangely I was left wanting with my knowledge of the dinner menus because of the nature of sophistication…however the breakfast menu was very much something familiar to me.

We were meant to take four game drives however we felt the morning and afternoon drives on Saturday were more than enough for us…so we did not join the morning drive on our last day on Sunday, after having missed the afternoon drive when we arrived on Friday.

Saturday morning we woke up at 5.30am in order to get ready for our first game drive which took off at 6am and we returned to our base at 9am. The Waterberg area was sunny and already early in the morning the heart was building up. Our first encounter was an elephant named ‘Khostong’ which gave us a fright as it charged on us, forcing Arie (our well informed tour guide) to continuously reverse vehicle. It was such a pleasure to be hosted by Arie on all the game drives as he was equally skilled in educating us about the bush and its habitants.

Apparently this elephant was on heat ‘ready to mate’ which is why it was aggressive to us. It was a first such experience to come across an aggressive male elephant, though I enjoyed the first hand encounter. This went on for a while until Khotsong decided to pave way for us to continue with our drive after about 20 minutes of terrorizing us.

My other highlight was coming across lions resting under a tree…I was surprised that they did not run away or charge on us. They completely ignored us and continued relaxing under the trees, irrespective that our vehicles made noise when in motion.

Related Stories

• Conde Nast Traveller nominates Marataba Safari Company as World’s Most Wanted in Africa
• Safari & Adventure Co. appoints Simon Stobbs on company development
• Protea Hotel Kimberley in pictures
• Mossel Bay company takes honours at World Design Award
• Davison’s Camp joins the Safari & Adventure Co. Portfolio

FREE  for 30 days

 Email This  Print This