I t didn’t need to be this luxurious. Travelling in rural southern Africa is so exciting, refreshing, enabling and beautiful anyway, that as long as you have some of the basic modern tourist comforts, like a shower, a mosquito net, a working safari vehicle and night-time protection from predators (an electric fence, a ditch, a guy with an AK47, whatever), you don’t really need anything else. You certainly don’t need four-poster beds, antiques, a gym, a spa, fine wine, semi-tame meerkats feeding their babies at your feet, Michelin-level cooking, a library of grand old books on Africa, or your own actual swimming pool right outside your “tent”.
You don’t need these things because they will all pale in the memory beside recollections of an hour spent lying on your back in the middle of the Kalahari desert at night, gazing up at the Milky Way, or watching a herd of elephants, tiny as shrews, from a light aeroplane flying low over the Okavango Delta, or the startle of a huge unseen crocodile emerging angrily from the scrub at your feet when you thought it was just you and a lakeful of weary hippos ...
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