A safari experience at Samara Karoo Reserve

There’s something about listening to lions roar at night when all there is between you and them is a thin wall of canvas.

It’s not always conducive to deep sleep – not on your first night, anyway – but there is a sense of primal wonder that for once in your life you’re close, really close, to the King of the Jungle.

“Can they get in?” came the small voice of my girlfriend from next to me in the pitch blackness of our tent on the plains of Samara Karoo Reserve near Graaff-Reinet.

“Yes, but they won’t.”

Tented camps are becoming increasingly popular in SA game reserves. However, the owners of these properties are extremely unlikely to put their guests at risk and, indeed, I can’t think of a single case where a tourist has been mauled in a “home invasion” by a member of species Pantheraleo.

Facing lions in the wild

Vastly experienced guides insist people have nothing to fear from lions. Sure, their claws could slash a tent wall to ribbons but, say the experts, animals don’t reason the same way as humans: they see a sheet of canvas as being as impenetrable as a wall.

Even if they can smell you, they can’t get to you unless they go round to the other side of the wall.

It’s why they’ll often walk round and round a tent before heading off in perplexed disgust.

Leave a tent flap or flysheet unzipped though…

I love going to the bush and, as far as I’m concerned, spending nights under canvas enhances the experience. I’ve been fortunate to have stayed at perhaps a score of tented camps – sometimes called explorer camps if the facilities are more basic – and, for me, less is definitely more.

The aptly named Plains Camp is the latest accommodation offering at Samara and it certainly tends more to the adventure side of glamping, especially since it is unfenced and guests are supplied with a whistle for emergencies.

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Amenities and connectivity at the camp

They are also given handheld walkie-talkie radios with which to summon camp staff to act as escorts back and forth to the mess tent – no walking back unescorted to your repose after dark – or provide hot water for the (outside) canvas bucket shower or basin.

I get the concept of getting back to nature and “roughing it” in the bush but I think guests, especially those from abroad, expect a certain level of comfort and Samara’s management could investigate the possibility of installing gas-powered water heaters.

“Grey” water can always be recycled. The tents are not electrified and there are limited cellphone recharging facilities in the mess tent. There is no mobile reception on the reserve but, since most people use cellphones as their cameras, recharging is vital.

The four tents sleep two people each and the camp was full the day Rose-mariè and I arrived. I didn’t hear a single peep from our fellow safari-goers because they couldn’t phone home (Scotland and Ecuador in the case of the “furriners”) or surf the Net.

Social atmosphere at the camp

The small size of the camp and the fact that everyone dines (very well, I might add) at a communal table – ensures great conviviality. There is none of the aloofness one sometimes encounters in some of the really “posh” establishments.

It’s also hard to be hoity-toity when the entire group dissolves into wine-induced fits of giggles at dinner about how no-one has yet braved the elements to take a shower. There’ll be plenty of time once we get back to “civilisation” seemed to be the consensus.

While staying at the Plains Camp is relatively expensive, it is not extortionately so: I’ve stayed in some “tents” where the level of luxury is, frankly, ridiculous and the daily rack rate reflects this.

I understand you spend a lot of time between game drives eating, drinking and lounging but the safari experience is what you’re paying for and that offered by Samara ranks with the best at a third of the cost.

Not only did we have a very competent guide in Roelof Wiesner, but our tracker Rowin Benade was a gem… hardly surprising because he’s the son of Pokkie Benade, one of just a handful master trackers in the country.

The Plains of Camdeboo

Wiesner also proved himself a dab hand at mixing a mocha-chocca-rula (coffee, hot chocolate and Amarula liqueur), that delightful confection without which sub-zero winter morning drives on the Plains of Camdeboo would be unbearable. It gets so cold that the carapace we found in the veld of a long dead tortoise was covered in a layer of ice.

Samara Karoo Reserve covers a total area of 27 000ha, of which only a fraction is generally used for game-viewing, and is a lifelong labour of love for Sarah and Mark Tompkins.

“Apieskloof became the first farm that formed the nucleus of Samara and, in 1997, we happily became its owner. The dream continued – amass enough land to have a self-sustaining ecosystem that would support wildlife: the herds of antelope that used to inhabit this area and the predators to keep the balance,” says Sarah.

Samara’s rewilding success story

“Twenty-five years later, Samara’s rewilding journey has picked up pace. The land is beginning to recover from the effects of generations of agricultural exploitation.

“The haunting beauty of the landscape that first inspired this campaign of rejuvenation has returned.”

A quarter century of careful game restocking and conservation later, Samara Karoo Reserve is home to the Big Five (lion, leopard, elephant, rhino and Cape buffalo), as well as cheetah, the most endangered of Africa’s big cats.

Samara, it is said, has one of the largest populations of free roaming cheetah of private game reserves in southern Africa.

This proud achievement is largely thanks to the efforts and fecundity of a single female who was known as Sibella.

Sibella the cheetah

According to the Tompkins’, Sibella was born in the wild in North West Province where she was lucky to escape death at the hands of poachers. Rescued by the De Wildt Cheetah and Wildlife Trust, she underwent five hours of emergency surgery and extensive rehabilitation.

Sibella began her new life at Samara in December 2003, when she was introduced to the reserve with two male cheetahs.

“From the moment of her release, all those involved in her rehabilitation were anxious to see whether she would be able to fend for herself. She soon put our fears to rest, proving to be a capable hunter and outliving most wild cheetah.”

Sibella died of natural causes in 2015, after having raised 19 cubs in four litters.

“She was an exemplary mother, giving birth on steep mountain slopes to avoid potential predators and eating only after her young had their fill.”

Apart from an abundance of animals, more than 225 bird species are found on Samara.

Guests at Plains Camp are taken on a bush walk in the morning. Tracks, flowering bushes, ostrich eggs and beetles are identified by the guide and tracker team, bringing to life the semi-arid landscape. Game drives take place in the afternoon.

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