Royal Malewane guides will do their utmost to ensure you don't.

Anybody who listens in on Thornybush radio comms will hear Royal Malewane guides respond to reported sightings with the question "can you see the draad?" Draad is Afrikaans for wire. There is a marked reluctance to take guests to sightings within sight of a fence. Maybe that's because they market themselves as "a luxury Kruger Park Safari Lodge in South Africa." and "Royal Malewane is situated in the Thornybush Private Game Reserve which forms part of the Greater Kruger Area."

Well no, it does not.

Thornybush is more like an island in the Greater Kruger area. Not only is it fenced on all sides, is has public roads (Guernsey, Avoca and Orpen) on three of them for good measure.

There are advantages to fencing in your game. A fence keeps most of the animals in, so you more or less know what you've got, and you can also overstock desirable species to improve game viewing. Thornybush has easily the best black rhino viewing in southern Africa, and in my opinion also at least as good as in the Ngorongoro Crater and Nairobi National Park. Why? The rhinos can't run away, and are well habituated.

In a fenced reserve it also becomes necessary to manage game numbers. Thornybush tries to keep lion numbers just high enough to ensure enough sightings, but low enough to keep them from chowing too many prey animals. Once you have seen 'm all, you're not going to see any more. Sort of takes the suspense out of it.

Elephant numbers are also kept quite low. Personally, I rather like that, because it makes Thornybush botanically very interesting, but most guests would probably prefer to see large elephant herds, or aggregations of big bulls.

Thornybush is fairly large (around 14,000 hectares, off the top of my head), but also home to very many lodges. It can get very busy, with lots of vehicles lining up for ten-minute slots at sightings, etc. Royal Malelane usually tries to stay out of the scrum, but that's far from always possible.

Bottom line is that in Thornybush you can see all the same animals that Royal Malewane guests see at a fraction of the cost, and still stay at a very comfortable lodge and enjoy excellent cuisine and hospitality. For those who can survive without a butler or gold-plated faucets, that ought be good enough.

That's debatable. The frequent leopard sightings are the result of decades of strenuous habituation efforts more than anything else. Riverine gallery forest is generally excellent leopard habitat, but I can see no reason why the Sand should stand out amongst the perennial rivers that traverse the KNP. The Luvuvhu and Sabie rivers are certainly just as good, as are many stretches of the seasonal Shingwedzi. Even some of the lesser rivers, e.g. the Timbavati and the Mpongholo are excellent for leopard.

They are not the only ones, and tour operators and travel agents who have published their 2016 prices are already grumbling. The South African tourism industry is very prone to short-term profit seeking, and they just never seem to learn. I can recall at least two earlier occasions when a Rand depreciation was almost immediately followed by price hikes of 20% or more, only to be followed by panicky specials and discounts when it appreciated again. Maybe they are confident that this time the SA government will do everything and anything in its power to prevent a recovery.

Johan