the river; post-dinner, I fall asleep to croaking
frogs and buzzing cicadas. If you gloss over
the occasional caterwaul of a mating baboon,
it’s heavenly.
On my final evening, Wiseman takes me
out to the sandstone amphitheatre of Lanner
Gorge, where a simple but sweaty scramble
brings us to a natural precipice some 500ft
above the riverbed. We’ve been joined by the
camp’s garrulous general manager, Godfrey
Baloyi, who worked up through the ranks after
starting his career as a guide. The view below
us is a limitless panorama of cliffs, trees and
ridges. Swifts carve through the air as the sky
melts into ice-lolly shades of orange. “What
a land,” laughs Godfrey, before he begins to
croon into the dusk. “When I, in awesome
wonder, consider all the worlds thy hands have
made,” he sings, his arms outstretched, his
voice resounding into the canyon. “How great
thou art, how great thou art.”A HANDS-ON EXPERIENCE
Two days later, and seven hours’ drive to the
southwest, my hands are resting on the hide
of a two-ton southern white rhino. The animal
has just staggered into the bush after being
immobilised by a dart from a helicopter, and a
team of more than a dozen people are helping
to keep it stable — hauling branches from
its path, monitoring its breathing — while a
collar is fixed to one of its hefty, tree-trunk
ankles. Its mighty body rises and falls undermy palms, its skin tough and warm, its
odour dry and strong. An hour later, with the
procedure long finished but my emotions still
in overdrive, the heat of the wild rhino still
lingers in my hands.
The collar, which sends an alert if unusual
movement is detected, may well save its life
from poachers. I’ve left the Greater Kruger
behind to reach the remarkable Marataba
Conservation Camps, an 80sq mile sprawl of
wilderness in the Waterberg area, some four
hours north of Johannesburg. An innovative
tourism-conservation model, it represents the
shared vision of Nelson Mandela and a Dutch
philanthropist named Paul van Vlissingen,
who in the year 2000 jointly proclaimed the
area, formerly farmland, as a protected reserve
to help safeguard wild species. A Noah’s Ark-
worth of native wildlife was then reintroduced
here, from predators to megaherbivores.
“It’s free-roam conservation at scale,” says
head of operations André Uys, as we look
across the plains at the ancient cliffs and
buttresses of the Waterberg Massif. Giraffe
silhouettes are visible in the middle distance.
“It’s remarkable what can be achieved.” A mass
rewilding scheme of this size is fiendishly
complex (ever considered how to move 50
elephants?), but more than two decades on, its
success is self-evident. Our first evening drive
reveals two cheetahs feasting on a freshly
caught baby wildebeest, antelope-studded
grasslands prowled by hyenas, and a lion,Above: Zebras at a watering hole
in Marataba, where, since 2020 ,
conservation has been moved to the
fore of the visitor experience