Into The Wild

It’s no longer enough for Africa’s luxury lodges to offer stylish safaris—now travellers want proof their trips help save animals and ecosystems. Two new properties in Namibia, one of which is backed by Angelina Jolie, lead the way

- Oliver Giles

“You’re in room one, so if a lion roars in the night you’ll feel it in your bones,” says Etienne Fourie, camp manager at Anderssons at Ongava, a luxury safari lodge situated on the edge of Etosha National Park in a remote corner of northern Namibia.

He’s not joking. Anderssons, which opened in April, is made up of eight plush huts that curl into the surrounding scrub around a central waterhole, leaving black and white rhinos, elephants, whole herds of antelope and Africa’s famous big cats free to pad in and out of the camp in search of water, sometimes mere metres from guests’ beds. Room one is the farthest into the bush, giving a front-row seat to this parade of wildlife. Within an hour of my arrival, a family of glossy black-faced impala stride past, two calves pronking playfully. Shy kudu slip silently between acacia bushes. Six angular giraffes peek over the treetops. Later that night, the silence is broken by the snap of a twig followed by what sounds like a bird’s warning call. All I can do is peer vainly through my windows into the pitch black—at night, the outdoor deck is out of bounds. “You might not see the lions in the dark, but they will definitely see you,” my guide warns.

This complete immersion in the wilderness has long drawn travellers to Ongava, a 300-square-kilometre private game reserve that encompasses desert-like scrub, woodlands and vast open plains. At any of Ongava’s four lodges—of which the hyper-luxe Little Ongava and the new Anderssons are the top offerings—guests can watch wildlife from their rooms or venture out in Land Cruisers in search of hundreds of species that call the reserve home. But recently, Ongava’s team has discovered that people want to do more than look—they want to learn.