Experience the Splendour of South Africa at Samara Karoo Reserve

Explore Samara Karoo Reserve, a dramatic swathe of South Africa that’s been hiding in plain sight.

Two journeys unfold simultaneously on my sojourn in the Great Karoo. The first is the road trip I’m taking from the Eastern Cape city of Gqeberha (Port Elizabeth) into a plateau basin so vast it sprawls across about one-third of South Africa. The second is symbolic, a return to the long-gone past when my family camped here beside a lonely road on the drive from Cape Town to our home city, Johannesburg. Back then, this steppe straddling four provinces was a mere thoroughfare for holidaymakers en route to Cape Town, the Winelands and the Garden Route. Other cars would periodically appear on the horizon, hasten across the moonscape and disappear beyond the earth’s hazy curvature.

Driving through the mountains of Samara Karoo Reserve in South Africa

I’ve passed through the Karoo many times since then but today this semi-desert – which lies adjacent to the Klein Karoo (“Little Karoo”) in the south-west and whose name means “land of thirst” in the San language – is my final destination. And what do I discover? A quiet achiever hiding in plain sight. There are luxury lodges tucked into the fossilised, scrub-stubbled bedrock; festivals and artisan markets unfurling in outposts crammed with Cape Dutch architecture; and wildlife wiped out in earlier centuries now roaming the Sneeuberge (Snow Mountains) and wildflower-speckled plains between the bluffs.

“I feel like we’re the forgotten cousins of conservation,” says Sarah Tomkins, co-founder with her husband, Mark, of Samara Karoo Reserve, 2.5 hours drive north of Port Elizabeth. “Everybody talks about Mozambique and the Okavango Delta and the forests [but] what about the semi-arid regions of the planet? People look at these as though they’re nothing, when actually they provide enormous biodiversity.”

Trekking across Samara Karoo Reserve in South Africa

Five of South Africa’s nine biomes cloak this primordial terrain, which was once the site of an immense springbok migration. For the past 27 years, the Tomkins family has worked to restore the ecosystem on the 11 former farms that comprise their 27,000-hectare reserve. After removing fences and allowing the land to rest for almost a decade, they reintroduced the Big Five – and Sibella, the first female cheetah to inhabit this wilderness in 130 years. During the winter months, her progeny race through snowdrifts on the hunt, while Cape Mountain zebras, once critically endangered, take refuge on the frigid mountainsides.

When I visit in autumn on a six-night, self-drive Discover the Karoo trip with The Africa Safari Co., summer’s swelter has waned and those cheetahs slouch in the golden grasses of “South Africa’s Serengeti”, eyeing herds of springbok. The past has given way to a promising future: together with SANParks, neighbouring Mount Camdeboo Private Game Reserve and other private landowners, Samara hopes to establish a wildlife corridor connecting the tracts of conserved land.

Cheetah cubs lounging in Samara Karoo Reserve in South Africa

Samara’s off-grid Karoo Lodge and The Manor, along with the tented Plains Camp, are sumptuous refuges for species of the human kind. Baboons skulk around my bolthole – one of eight standalone cottages and two homestead suites sleeping up to 24 guests – on Karoo Lodge’s perimeter. From here the crusted earth unrolls in a tableau of unforeseen colour: streaked red by sweet rooigras (red grass), silvered with ankerkaroo (African sheepbush), turned purple by the setting sun and blanched with pools of moonlight. This singular landscape is echoed in the food served in the central homestead and around a bonfire in the boma. Afternoon tea is cake flavoured with spekboom (bacon tree), the succulent favoured by reintroduced elephants; dinner recalls childhood meals of pap en sous (maize porridge and tomato relish), fire-seared boerewors and famous Karoo lamb, “spiced from the inside with [their staple sustenance] ankerkaroo, which smells like rosemary”, says guide Ivan Buregoo.

The basin falls away as we ascend the Camdeboo range through thickets of wild olive and cabbage trees. Along the way we pass giraffes, elephants and sabre-horned gemsbok that “look like they have swords on their heads”, according to Buregoo. Above us, those Cape Mountain zebras have reclaimed their rarefied territory. “See their stripes?” he says. “They’re painted on, like calligraphy.” Far below, Karoo Lodge has dissolved in the landscape. But within this great amphitheatre, memories old and new are baked into the earth.