Smiley90

Just want to update this: We just (finally!) finished 3 nights at Thabamati and it was absolutely amazing. Both the lodge and the game-viewing were brilliant. Only 4 tents, and for 2 of the 3 nights we were there, there was only one other couple. The husband/wife team that runs the lodge has hostess & guide are incredibly friendly, the hard product (e.g. tents themselves and main lodge grounds) are spanking new but incredibly natural-looking.

There's a herd (or maybe 2 herds) of around 30 elephants that comes by the dam daily, usually around breakfast time. Among others, we followed a pride of 11 female lionesses around, saw an elderly lion fight off a couple hyenas to protect his wildebeest kill, saw 4 packs of hyenas fight over a waterhole, saw a group of 6 white rhinos and, perhaps most amazingly, witnessed two leopards mating and got the whole thing on video(you can probably find it on their Instagram soon ) Absolutely fantastic experience and at "only" 800/night for a couple, the price point is much lower than similar camps in Sabi Sands and I don't know how this could be exceeded, both on the game viewing and lodge side. Thanks to Johan for bringing Shindzela and thus indirectly Thabamati (same owner) to our attention!

We're now off to Sabi Sands to see how Arathusa stacks up with this, but it'll be incredibly hard to top.

MarkP24

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