It’s 6 am, and I’m not at all keen to get out of bed. I drag myself out from under the warm duvet and head to the dining room to grab some coffee and make my way to the waiting game drive vehicle. We head out on our drive, warmly tucked up under blankets and with a flask of hot coffee in hand.

The early morning light shines over the reserve as our guide steers down the rugged dirt tracks of the reserve. Within what feels like minutes, we come across a breeding herd of elephants. The young calves play while the matriarch watches over them, stripping branches from a spekboom as she waits. A few decades ago, this scene would have been unimaginable. The land was overgrazed farmland, stripped of both wildlife and vegetation. But today, thanks to a bold experiment in rewilding, it’s home to the full array of safari animals, from antelope to apex predators, and has become one of the country’s most inspiring conservation success stories.

At the heart of this transformation are two properties: Shamwari Private Game Reserve and the smaller, adjacent, Founders Lodge by Mantis. Together, they represent not just a top safari destination, but also a living case study of what happens when ecology, vision, dedication, and tourism come together.

Shamwari’s story is legend in African conservation circles. In the early 1990s, farms exhausted by the overgrazing of livestock were purchased; with the plan being to restore the land. Fences came down. Grasslands and Albany thickets were nursed back to health. Then came the wildlife. Elephants, white rhinos, and hippos were the first to return, their browsing helping to regenerate the soil and disperse seeds. Black rhinos and buffalo followed. Then came predators, lion, cheetah, brown hyena, and eventually leopard. Within a decade, Shamwari had become the first Big Five game reserve in the Eastern Cape. “We wanted to show that conservation could be profitable, sustainable, and deeply human,” says Adrian Gardiner, the man behind Shamwari and Founders.

Gardiner insists he never saw this as a ‘quick fix’, nor did he see it as a short-term project. “Conservation does not have an end date. It’s a lifelong commitment,” he tells me, and the evidence is all around us. Shamwari now spans more than 60,000 hectares, and is home to healthy wildlife populations, including several endangered species. What’s more, the reserve has become a model for similar projects across the province. Shamwari’s success has inspired neighbouring landowners to rewild, too; creating a corridor of wildlife reserves where once there was only farmland.

Founders Lodge represents a more personal side to this story. Originally Gardiner’s family home, the lodge sits on 400 hectares of rolling hills, adjacent to the Shamwari reserve. Today it operates as a boutique eco-lodge, with seven suites, plus a 5-berth restored railway carriage, perched on a hill a short distance away.

The main building retains a classic farmhouse feel, with wide verandas, stone walls, and open lawns. The outdoor fire pit and shaded terrace invite sun-soaked lunches and quiet evenings sitting out under the stars, while the swimming pool and gym give you a place to stretch your body between game drives. What sets the lodge apart, however, is not just its design or décor, but rather its direct link to the wider Shamwari landscape and the conservation journey that began here.

Back at Founders, after our morning game drive, I sit on the verandah outside my room. I can see rhinos grazing just a few metres away, the only thing between us, a knee-high electric fence. Over the years Founders has become a sanctuary for rhinos, with many of the rhinos here being survivors of the horrific poaching trade – indeed, some still carry bullet fragments in their bodies. Poaching remains a constant threat, and both reserves invest heavily in round-the-clock monitoring, dehorning programs, and anti-poaching units. So seeing them here, grazing so peacefully, is wonderful.

Beyond the lawn and the rhinos, but within the lodge’s grounds, zebras graze, and in the distance I can see a magnificent male kudu, with his stunning corkscrew horns. After lunch I head to the underground photographic hide, positioned at the lodge’s waterhole. I’m just in time to see a giraffe bending awkwardly down to drink. Shortly afterwards, a rhino and her calf arrive for a mud bath and general wallow in the waterhole.

Afternoon comes, and we head out on another game drive. The distinctive roar of a lion reverberates from somewhere in the reserve. We head in the direction of the sound, one synonymous with the African bush, and after many twists and turns, and a detour past a cheetah who’s using the top of a termite mound as a lookout point, we’re rewarded with the sight of a thick-maned male lion patrolling his territory, and announcing his presence for all to hear. We sit and watch for a while, transfixed by the size and strength of this powerful predator.

What makes both Shamwari and Founders unique though, is that game drives here are not just about ticking lists of animals seen. Yes, the ‘Big Five’ are here, but what’s special about this place is that it’s more than just the animals, it’s the entire story behind the reserve – the removal of the fences, the regeneration of the vegetation, the reintroduction of the wildlife. Community partnerships are also central to the model. Right from the beginning, both Shamwari and Founders have prioritised training and employing local people, along with supporting local schools and running conservation education programmes. This has shifted attitudes towards wildlife. What was once seen as competition for land is now a source of livelihood and pride.  

Today, South Africa’s Eastern Cape is firmly on the safari map. Once overlooked in favour of Kruger or KwaZulu-Natal, it now offers a malaria-free safari experience, milder weather, and a landscape that’s been completely regenerated. Shamwari has become a global name, welcoming celebrities and conservationists alike, while Founders offers a smaller-scale, but still very personal way to connect with the same legacy.

Practical information

Founders Lodge by Mantis is located in South Africa’s Eastern Cape, around 75km from Port Elizabeth (Gqeberha) airport, which is well connected to Johannesburg and Cape Town. The region is malaria-free, making it great for families, and private use options are available for multi-generational families or small groups.

It must be encoded there, in the childhood memories of our synapses and our cells — how we came out of the ocean 35 trillion yesterdays ago, small and slippery, gills trembling with the shock of air, fins budding feet, limbs growing sinewy and furred, then unfurred, spine unfurling beneath the bone cave housing three pounds of pink flesh laced with one hundred trillion synapses that still sing with pleasure and awe when touched by the wildness of the world.

Even as the merchants of silicon and code try to render us disembodied intellects caged behind screens, something in our animal body knows where we came from and where we belong.

“Our origins are of the earth,” Rachel Carson wrote. “And so there is in us a deeply seated response to the natural universe, which is part of our humanity.” A century before her, William Henry Hudson (August 4, 1841–August 18, 1922) — another of humanity’s great writers devoted to rewilding the human spirit — captured the essence of what science now calls “soft fascination”: the way our brains and bodies respond when we immerse ourselves in the natural world. In a passage from his altogether wonderful 1893 book Idle Days in Patagonia (public domain), Hudson writes:

What has truly entered our soul and become psychical is our environment — that wild nature in which and to which we were born at an inconceivably remote period, and which made us what we are. It is true that we are eminently adaptive, that we have created, and exist in some sort of harmony with new conditions, widely different from those to which we were originally adapted; but the old harmony was infinitely more perfect than the new, and if there be such a thing as historical memory in us, it is not strange that the sweetest moment in any life, pleasant or dreary, should be when Nature draws near to it, and, taking up her neglected instrument, plays a fragment of some ancient melody, long unheard on the earth… Nature has at times this peculiar effect on us, restoring instantaneously the old vanished harmony between organism and environment.

At the end of his life, looking back on how becoming “a better observer” made him “a happier creature,” Hudson writes in his wonderful Book of a Naturalist (public domain):

The power, beauty, and grace of the wild creature, its perfect harmony in nature, the exquisite correspondence between organism, form and faculties, and the environment, with the plasticity and intelligence for the readjustment of the vital machinery, daily, hourly, momentarily, to meet all changes in the conditions, all contingencies; and thus, amidst perpetual mutations and conflict with hostile and destructive forces, to perpetuate a form, a type, a species for thousands and millions of years! … [One feels] the wonderfulness and eternal mystery of life itself; this formative, informing energy — this flame that burns in and shines through the case, the habit, which in lighting another dies, and albeit dying yet endures for ever; and the sense, too, that this flame of life was one, and of my kinship with it in all its appearances, in all organic shapes, however different from the human… the roe-deer, the leopard and wild horse, the swallow cleaving the air, the butterfly toying with a flower, and the dragon-fly dreaming on the river; the monster whale, the silver flying-fish, and the nautilus with rose and purple tinted sails spread to the wind.

Tuning into this primal resonance between us and the rest of nature is the mightiest act of unselfing I know — a vital quieting of our ruminative self-reference that is the dynamo of most of our suffering. Perhaps to be a happier creature means simply to be more of a creature — a life-form among life-forms, alive only because countless other creatures died along the way to perfect this form in a world that didn’t have to be beautiful, didn’t even have to exist.