The Civilized Safari

We were between animals for the moment, a mile or two from the oasis of stilted bungalows and personal plunge pools that we called “camp.” The sun was sinking low in South Africa’s Mpumalanga province, and our Land Rover was purring through the bush. Lions, leopards, cheetahs, rhinos, elephants, giraffes, hyenas--we’d seen them all in the last 48 hours. I tossed out an idle question.

“Why is it,” I asked, “that we don’t look for elephants after dark?”

Because, said Sean Lindsey at the wheel, we’re afraid.

Of course he didn’t actually use the word “afraid.” Rangers never say “afraid.” Instead, Sean, who looked to be about 20, reminded me how dangerous elephants can be.

The animal will square off to face you if it feels confronted, then bluff a charge. If you lose your nerve and run, or maybe just make a sudden move as you’re seated in the Land Rover, the beast, weighing in at 4 tons to 6 tons, may charge in earnest.

In 1998, at a South African game reserve much like this one, a pair of German cameramen lost their nerve in the face of a bluffed elephant charge. One ran, the other yelled. With a tusk, an elephant speared the one who yelled. He was fatally impaled; the elephant was shot.

Sean didn’t tell us all this; just as they don’t say “afraid,” rangers tend to scorn the phrase “dead guest.” Instead, Sean simply explained that at night, when bush animals are more active but human senses are duller, an elephant is even more dangerous. That was good enough for me. Night fell.

Then we rounded a thickly wooded corner and the beam of our game tracker’s hand-held spotlight stopped dead ahead on a wall of gray. Gray flesh, deeply wrinkled. Half a dozen elephants, audibly unhappy elephants, stood in our path.

“Hmm,” said Sean in the professionally even tone of a fighter pilot whose instrument panel is melting before his eyes. “Elephant at night.”

Just moments before, I’d been thinking of all the costly comforts waiting back at camp. And now, out there in the meadow, an elephant was trumpeting--not a zoo sound effect, but the honest voice of potentially fatal nature--and I was thinking: “Ah. So this is how it feels to be a weak link in the food chain.”

*

FOR A CERTAIN STRIPE OF TRAVELER, THE IDEAL SAFARI HAS ALWAYS INVOLVED moments of mortal fear, surrounded by hours of creature comforts.

The thrill may be what drew the first European and American hunters here in the late 19th century, but the creature comforts were not far behind. Blaine Harden, author of “Africa: Dispatches From a Fragile Continent,” has noted that the Swahili word “safari” entered American vocabulary in 1909, when Theodore Roosevelt ventured into the East African bush on a hunting and specimen-collecting expedition with about 250 porters bearing such necessities as cases of Champagne, collapsible bathtubs and a library including works by Cervantes, Goethe and Moliere.

Guests these days wield long lenses instead of rifles. And as quaint as a collapsible bathtub sounds, we want more. In the scramble to capture the wealthiest international visitors, the continent’s leading safari lodges have been furiously renovating and rethinking their business, the better to deliver an experience both elemental and elaborate.

In Tanzania, home to many of the fanciest lodges, World Tourism Organization statistics show international tourist arrivals tripled, to 450,000 a year, between 1990 and 1998. In South Africa, where the proliferation of luxury lodges has followed the lifting of apartheid-era sanctions, the WTO has estimated 6.2 million arrivals in 1999--twice as many as in 1993.

Money has rolled in from investors and philanthropists you might not expect to be placing bets in Africa--Getty family money, for instance, and money from the Harvard-educated Shia Muslim Imam the Aga Khan, who in the past decade has invested more than $32 million in a string of Tanzanian luxury lodges. There is also money from Howard Buffett, son of stock market wizard Warren Buffett, and from the ever-spreading empire of Virgin Atlantic founder Richard Branson.

South Africa’s Londolozi is a big part of this trend. Ten years ago, it was an independent, family-run enterprise. Now it’s the flagship property of Conservation Corporation Africa, a company that owns or manages nearly two dozen high-priced wilderness lodges throughout Africa and counts the Getty family among its principal investors, and Howard Buffett among its philanthropic partners.

To glimpse another view of this trend, get on the Internet and type the word “Ulusaba.” Richard Branson bought South Africa’s Ulusaba Private Game Reserve last year as an addition to his collection of luxury hotels worldwide. In the photos on the Ulusaba Web site, the lodge looks like a scene from a malarial dream: hilltop terraces, a garden full of Disneyesque stones, a mountaintop waterfall, a spa offering aromatherapy and reflexology, and a glass-walled dining room filled by a 40-foot-long candlelit table surrounded by chairs sprouting antlers. At any moment, Daktari, Clarence the Cross-Eyed Lion and Austin Powers seem likely to drop by for cocktails and an ostrich egg. It just doesn’t look real.

And it makes you wonder. What exactly does a guest get at a place like Londolozi or Ulusaba?

*

LONDOLOZI AND ULUSABA LIE ABOUT AN HOUR’S DRIVE APART, NESTLED in the animal-rich scrubland just west of Kruger National Park, South Africa’s best-known game preserve. Both lodgings, and about two dozen others, are within the 225-square-mile Sabi Sand Private Reserve area, so named for the Sabi and Sand rivers that run through it.

I began with Ulusaba. The only road in to the reserve’s Rock Lodge rises from the savanna, climbing and twisting improbably, like stripes up a candy cane, before concluding atop a tall hill. There, about 800 feet above the plain, stands a unique reward. The lodge is a cluster of outrageous public rooms, more or less built into the rock of the hill, then topped by a swimming pool and fringed by 10 guest rooms. At the foot of the hill you can see Ulusaba’s Safari Lodge, which includes 10 more rooms. The two lodges are connected by elevated wooden walkways and gently swinging rope bridges above a riverbed.

In the Rock and Safari lodges, designers Mark and Joanne Underwood had to live up to Branson’s vow to create “the world’s ultimate game lodge.” In response, they’ve gone exploring new frontiers in fabulousness, employing the entire rainbow of colors in beadwork, textiles, sculpted wood and stone, with a little mosquito netting romantically strewn over bedposts here and there.

Each of the 10 guest rooms in the Rock Lodge carries a different theme, each from an African tribal culture. I was in the Masai room, which included a bathroom fashioned as a grotto, with a toilet and shower of fake sculpted rock--an effect I found inescapably Graceland-like.

The game drives were routinely astonishing. The first began about four hours after my arrival. Following a quick introduction to ranger Trevor Carnaby and spotter James Mhlongo, we rolled into the bush and the amazements began.

First: a leopard and cub in a clearing. Then a tree trembling with baboons in its highest branches. Then a pride of seven lions lounging in golden grass--until they sniffed an antelope that our acquaintance the leopard had killed earlier. The leopard had dragged the carcass into a marula, a large tree with thick branches and a broad canopy. Following the scent of food, first one, then two, then three lions awkwardly clambered up the tree, a remarkable feat because lions are not good tree-climbers and rangers rarely see three in a single tree.

As the lions climbed, the leopard relinquished the kill and retreated into the highest branches, cut off from her cub on the ground. While the leopard cowered--her cub nowhere to be seen--the lions piled onto the antelope carcass, snarling and snapping at each other the way so many families do at dinner. Eventually five lions made their way out to the carcass on the teetering branch, while two waited in a dry riverbed below, just a few feet from our Land Rover. The air was brittle with crunching sounds: lions’ jaws, grinding antelope bones.

When three of the lions’ bellies were full, they descended. One flopped on a warm rock. Two headed toward the dry riverbed, passing three feet from me at the rear of the Land Rover.

“Now just be still,” Carnaby counseled softly. “Dead still.”

Leaving my camera where it rested at chest level, I relied on automatic everything and snapped off a couple of shots. When the film came back, the frames were filled with an off-kilter lion in dusky light. I got spooked all over again.

*

NO SUBSEQUENT DRIVE COULD QUITE MATCH THAT, BUT THE WONDERS did continue. The next afternoon, while stopped for tea and biltong (jerky), we watched 50 impala bound across a field and almost as many baboons cavorting in a tree. Later, we drew within 20 feet of a cheetah.

The game-drive routine, I came to learn, is similar among the lodges in the area. The day is dominated by a three-hour early-morning drive and a late-afternoon drive that usually lasts past sunset. At Ulusaba, the drives range throughout roughly 26,000 acres of wildlife viewing territory, most of which is shared with neighboring private lodges through complex “traversing” pacts.

As safari novices learn, the differences between a state-run park and a private reserve can be crucial. Inside Kruger National Park, travelers sleep in basic, affordable lodges, often cooking for themselves. Vehicles must stay on roads and visitors must stay in the vehicles. When animals turn up, traffic can jam up. No vehicles are allowed out after dark in Kruger.

In the privately owned reserve areas, the government allows more flexible arrangements. Rangers, who double as drivers, can take their vehicles off road. They can also take guests on night rides and, under carefully controlled circumstances, can lead game walks on foot. To prevent traffic jams, lodges have agreed that no more than three vehicles may congregate at a single site.

As for the creature comforts at Ulusaba lodges, there’s more than most guests can exploit during the average stay of two to three nights, but at a hefty price. When Branson arrived last year, he paid a reported $6.5 million for the place, invested a reported $2 million to $3 million in upgrades, including two tennis courts and a gym, then quintupled rates. Rates are $1,280 to $1,600 per couple per night to stay in the Rock Lodge, $720 to $1,120 per night in the Safari Lodge, with meals, game rides, bar tab and laundry built into the packages.

Meals were excellent. I had pork medallions one evening, barbecued wild boar the next, and one lunch concluded with heated strawberries with creme anglais and white chocolate. All alcohol is included in the daily tariff; the wine list is long, and if you’ve got a favorite whiskey and give the staff notice, they’ll order a bottle or two for you. In the spa area, aromatherapy, facials, pedicures, massages and wax jobs await, at the cost of a few extra rand.

Ulusaba’s management also has made a strategic subtraction: no rangers at the dinner table. Safari lodges usually have rangers take the role of hosts at dinner, and guests often cleave to them in the lounge and dining room. At Ulusaba, unless there’s a dinner staged in the bush (which happens every few nights), rangers melt away after the evening drive. This may serve to make the experience feel more exclusive and encourage guest interaction, but I would have enjoyed having a ranger to field questions and spin stories.

In the Rock Lodge, guests assemble in the candlelight at the 40-foot dining table in a sort of Africanized Mad Hatter’s tea party. In this memorable setting, I met an affable New York banker who’d brought his mother; an enthusiastic Toronto investment advisor who’d brought his 15-year-old son and 13-year-old daughter; a family from Mozambique; and the Ulusaba designers, Mark and Joanne Netherwood, who were there to oversee renovation of the Safari Lodge, which was just concluding.

Looking along the table, then down to the savanna below, and then to the soaring ceilings of the surrounding rooms, I felt a deeper sense of surreality than I had when looking at the Web page photo. The wilderness and the animals and the rangers were not so far away. But somehow, the spirits of Daktari, Clarence and Austin Powers seemed nearer. And my spirit was ready to move along.

*

NOW CAME LONDOLOZI AND THAT FROZEN MOMENT IN the bush, when we wandered into those annoyed elephants. That moment actually got worse before it got better.

It was my second night at the lodge. As the elephants edged off to our right, we gingerly advanced in the Land Rover, thinking we’d skirted trouble. Instead we found we were now well and truly between animals.

To our right stood the six elephants, glaring in our direction. And what was that rustling to our left? From his perch upon our left headlight, Ephraim Sithole, our game tracker, swept his spotlight beam and hit fur. Lions. Several, in fact. Using their superior quickness and perhaps hoping to kill a baby elephant, the lions had been advancing and retreating in the tall grass. Now we were in the tall grass, too.

There were seven of us in the Land Rover--ranger, tracker, myself and two upscale South African moms with their 6-year-old daughters. On all sides, we heard beastly rustling.

Ranger Sean may have looked 20, but he had four years of rangering, and he showed his cool nerves. First, a polite call for quiet, which the 6-year-olds fortunately heeded. Then a bit of backing up, and a seven-point turn in the grass. Finally, a gentle, liberating acceleration into the night. (In fact, animal attacks on Land Rovers are quite rare. Though lodges typically ask guests to sign liability-release waivers, I found only two recent South African safari lodge fatalities. They were the German cameraman at Phinda Game Reserve in 1998, and, in the same reserve, the fatal lion mauling in 1992 of a female guest from South Africa as she walked at night from a dining area toward her room.)

In a flash we were back amid the protection and privilege of camp. At Londolozi, there’s plenty of both: about 180 staffers serve a guest population that never exceeds 72. That night we had dinner in the boma, a traditional enclosure under the stars. Heat was provided by campfire. But soon enough, the king-sized bed and electric blanket in my suite beckoned.

Londolozi was born as a family game-hunting property in 1926, about the same time that the national park was being created next door. It remained a hunters’ place until the 1960s, when two major changes arrived.

First, in 1962, the South African government recognized the Sabi Sand area as a private game reserve, thereby restricting hunting. Then in 1969, brothers John and Dave Varty--still in their teens--inherited a half-share in the property. Their neighbors at the Mala Mala reserve and lodge had already pioneered the photo safari idea in the Sabi Sand region, and the Vartys began a similar, low-budget undertaking. Guests slept in rustic rondavels (round huts); a single Land Rover handled all game drives; meals were basic campfire affairs; and daily rates began at three South African rand--at today’s exchange rates, about 50 cents.

But as business grew and the family learned land management techniques that lured more animals, the Varty family targeted a more upscale market. By the late 1980s, Londolozi was famous for its leopards, and the lodge was counted among the most luxurious and animal-rich on the continent. Guests have included Tina Turner, Brooke Shields and John Major.

In 1990, Dave Varty took the family’s ambitions to another level by joining with partner Alan Bernstein to create Conservation Corporation Africa. The idea was that preservation of land and animals can be combined profitably with “low-impact, high-yield tourism” and local economic development. Aiming to create “the ultimate African safari circuit,” the company now owns or manages 22 safari lodges in Botswana, South Africa, Kenya, Tanzania, Namibia and Zimbabwe, with rates that rarely slip below $400 per couple per night. When the company bought Tanzania’s Ngorongoro Crater Lodge in 1996 and bankrolled a lavish $7-million renovation in 1997, one critic labeled the place “a Masai Versailles,” and Travel & Leisure magazine called it “hilariously overdone.”

But as more lodges in the mode of Ngorongoro Crater Lodge and Ulusaba crop up, their outlandishness will look more and more mainstream.

Londolozi hasn’t gone that way, at least not yet. The thatched roofs and open-air patios are a logical response to the weather and available materials, and because most of Londolozi’s buildings are tucked in with foliage along a riverbed, the place seems rooted in the earth, and nearly invisible from a distance. Londolozi lacks Ulusaba’s amenities--no tennis, no spa, no treadmills, no televisions--and prices are generally lower, at $990 to $1,300 per couple per day.

My suite in Pioneer Camp was completed this year, part of an upgrade that left Londolozi with 22 chalets and 14 fancier suites spread among four different “camps,” each with an open-air lounge and dining area. (Drinks on Londolozi’s game drives are included in the room rates; drinks in the lounge cost extra.)

My digs had a fireplace, indoor and outdoor showers and a firm four-poster with mosquito netting. The walls were lined with black-and-white photos from long-ago hunting expeditions. Like the rooms at Ulusaba, the lodgings of Londolozi are air-conditioned.

Still, the wilderness isn’t far. On my first night at Londolozi, a security guard came to collect me, as prescribed, for the escorted walk to dinner. But he was a few minutes late, and panting.

“I was chasing a buffalo from your door,” he explained. Then he showed me the tracks. I’d heard nothing.

Situated at the east end of the Sabi Sand reserve area, the Londolozi lodge gives its guests access to about 35,000 acres of bush--a bush that is remarkably densely occupied.

One morning at 11:30, I joined a nature walk led by a tracker who grew up in a town nearby. The first order of business was a peek at the dirt road for tracks. Here were traces of a snake--maybe a Mozambique spitting cobra? Here was elephant scat. Here was a tree whose boiled leaves help clear the respiratory system. Here was one whose leaves cause blindness and death (but whose branches make sturdy furniture). Here was an acacia tree caked with mud--probably left by a buffalo scraping himself off. And if we ever needed a cure for headaches? Set elephant dung afire and sniff.

With a rifle-bearing Bennet Mathonsi leading the way, we tiptoed down to the Sabi River’s edge and peered across at a few lazing hippos and crocs. Just as I was thinking, “Alone, I’d die out here in about an hour,” another guest, a man from Johannesburg, piped up: “I’m sure God designed man to live like this, and not in the city.”

God designed me, I’m pretty sure, to eat dinner from a plate. Both dinners during my visit were very good, from lamb to roasted squash to potatoes. On most mornings, guests get a cold buffet and hot breakfasts made to order at the lodge. But every few days, weather permitting, there’s a surprise bush breakfast, the full meal. We had one my last morning in Londolozi, with folding tables and steaming thermoses of coffee under a broad African sky. A collapsible bathtub would have just about fit in.

The game drives were just as rich as those at Ulusaba. In fact, it wasn’t until my 10th game drive in South Africa that I succeeded in not seeing a lion. I didn’t get anywhere near giraffes and zebras, however, until my third of four drives at Londolozi.

On one drive we saw two giraffes, drawing close enough to watch one awkwardly bend to sip from a pond. Then two rhinos. Then a cheetah with two cubs and a fresh, blood-soaked kill under a tree.

Here are my scribbles from another morning foray: “Leopard rolling in grass. Two hyena slouching along the road. One rhino, one kudu. Four lions.”

This last is inadequate. They were four lions at the river’s edge, gorging on a crumpled and half-submerged buffalo carcass. In the morning sun, the water was half brown from mud, half red from blood. Creeping forward on the other side of the river, our Land Rover drew within perhaps 20 feet of the feast.

This is the marvelous irony that underpins the luxury safari. You spend a fortune to ensure unfailing service and stimulating surroundings. You take care to select a lodge with animal-rich territory. To get there, you fly through the air for the better part of 24 hours. And then you go out in the dust and look for dung, hoping it will lead to fur, bone and sinew and blood.

Guidebook: Safari Deluxe

Telephone numbers and prices: The country code for South Africa is 27. The local code for the Sabi Sands area is 13 from outside the country, 013 from within. All prices are approximate and are computed at a rate of seven South African rand to the dollar. Safari lodge rates are for a double room for one night, with meals, game drives, drinks and laundry included.

Getting there: Connecting service from Los Angeles to Johannesburg is available on Air France (via Paris), Alitalia (via Milan), British Airways (via London), KLM (via Amsterdam), Lufthansa (via Frankfurt) and Virgin Atlantic Airways (via London). For those who prefer making connections in the United States via a domestic carrier, South African Airways flies nonstop to Johannesburg from New York and Atlanta. From Johannesburg, South African Airways has three daily flights to Skukuza, the airport nearest Kruger National Park. From Skukuza it’s about a 90-minute drive to either Ulusaba or Londolozi. Both lodges provide airport transport for a fee. (The Sabi Sand reserve and the western edge of Kruger National Park lie about 200 miles northeast of Johannesburg. The park’s eastern edge marks South Africa’s border with Mozambique.)

Where to stay: Londolozi Private Game Reserve, telephone from the States, 011-27-11-809-4300, fax 809-4400, https://www.ccafrica.

com. Thirty-six rooms and suites are spread among four camps. Rates: $990 to $1,300. Ulusaba Private Game Reserve. Reservations (800) 557-4255, fax (203) 602-2265, https://www.ulusaba.com, or phone the lodge directly, 735-5608 or 5546. Includes 10 Rock Lodge rooms and suites and 10 Safari Lodge rooms. Rates: $1,280 to $1,600 in Rock Lodge, $720 to $1,120 in Safari Lodge.

Staying healthy: Kruger National Park, the surrounding private game lodges and much of rural South Africa are in a malaria-risk zone. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control urge travelers to get a prescription for an anti-malarial drug and begin dosages (typically one pill weekly) at least a week before arrival. Because malaria and other diseases are carried by mosquitoes, the CDC also advises travelers to use insect repellent and wear long-sleeved shirts and long pants.

When to go: The most popular time to visit South African safari lodges is November through April, when it’s summer in the Southern hemisphere, the bush is green from frequent showers and temperatures often reach the 90s. I went in August, mid-winter, when highs are in the 60s and 70s, lows sink to around 40 and brush is thinner, which makes animals easier to see. Many lodges offer lower rates May through October.

Safety in South Africa: The U.S. State Department warned in December that “crime in South Africa is perceived to be a significant threat. . . . Though most tourists experience no problems, criminal activity, such as assault and armed robbery, is particularly high in areas surrounding many hotels and public transportation centers, especially in major cities.” But security is tight at private game reserves, especially at the upscale lodges of Sabi Sand.

For more information: South African Tourism, 500 5th Ave., Suite 2040, New York, N.Y. 10110; (800) 822-5368 or (212) 730-2929, fax (212) 764-1980, https://www.satour.org.