Luxurious safaris in the Cape Floral Kingdom

The Gondwana Game Reserve between the Swartberg and Outeniqua mountain ranges offers luxurious accommodation for visitors, and an opportunity for guests to become residents. Brian Berkman reports.

- Brian Berkman

“It was the true khaki-fever cliché,” says Wendy Rutherford, recalling her meeting and whirlwind romance with her future husband Mark, then an environmental scientist working for the De Beerslinked Tswalu Kalahari Reserve.

Rutherford, at that stage a New York advertising executive working on the De Beers diamond campaign, had been flown out to South Africa with a few colleagues by De Beers as a reward for helping to achieve outstanding US diamond sales results. Mark was helping to take care of the group, and the rest, as they say, is history.

The couple spent eight glorious months in the Kalahari, but Mark had already set his heart on an ambitious goal: to establish his own game reserve. And remarkably, it was a visit to his American father-in-law, who was involved in a non-profit organisation called Open Lands on the outskirts of Chicago, that inspired the structure of Gondwana Game Reserve.

A BUSH ESTATE

“Mark felt that the Open Lands model of preserving tracts of land on the suburban fringe, funded through residential sales on a small portion of the open land, could be applied on a larger scale to the establishment of a South African game reserve,” recalls Rutherford. “The selling of land for holiday homes on a portion of the ground would capitalise the majority of the development of the game reserve.”

She adds that while a bush estate was not unique to South Africa, it was a new concept for the Western Cape.

“We were inspired by living in the Kalahari Desert and wanted to provide that experience to others, not only as visitors on safari, but as residents, too.”