Saleda Lodge suits a group that wants the place to itself: friends, or a family across two or three generations, who intend to spend the evenings together and have the day’s sightings argued over across a pool table. It is a whole house in the Lipadi Private Game & Wilderness Reserve, with five king bedrooms, and the way it works is the way a good house party works.
Updated 02-Dec-2022
How does a whole-house safari work?
Differently from a lodge, in one important respect: there is nobody else. At a conventional camp you share the deck, the dinner table and the vehicle with whoever else booked that week, and the pleasure of the trip depends partly on luck. In a house, you bring your own company. The five bedrooms are yours, the open-plan kitchen, dining and living area is yours, and the staircase up to the lounge and pool table leads only to people you chose.
The page describes that central unit as where a stay here actually happens, and that is the right way to think about it. The bedrooms are for sleeping and for the outdoor shower. The house is for everything else.
What does the house give you?
| The house | What the page says |
|---|---|
| Bedrooms | Five, king-sized, each en suite, each with a private outdoor shower |
| The heart | Open-plan kitchen, dining and living area |
| Upstairs | A staircase to a lounge and a pool table |
| Outside | Thatch, a plunge pool, a bar built around the trees, an open-air lounge looking to the pool and river |
| The ending | Sundowner, then stargazing |
The outdoor showers deserve a sentence. Five bedrooms, each with its own, means nobody is queuing and everybody starts the day under open sky, which the page rightly calls one of the small pleasures of the bush that nobody adequately prepares you for. It changes your relationship with the morning. It also changes the breakfast conversation, since everyone has had the same small adventure before coffee.
Who should book one?
Friends who travel as a pack. Five bedrooms, five couples is the obvious arithmetic, but it is not the only one. A group of friends who have done a lodge together and spent the trip wishing the other guests would go to bed is the natural Saleda booking.
Families across generations. Grandparents in one room, parents in another, the rest shared out, and a house in which the small ones can be loud at breakfast without an apology to the honeymooners at the next table. The pool table is, in our experience, the most reliable instrument ever devised for keeping teenagers and grandfathers in the same room.
Anyone for whom the evening is the point. The page is explicit about the ending: a sundowner, then stargazing with someone you like, under a sky with considerably more in it than the one at home. The lodge suggests this itself. We would not argue, and we would add that stargazing is much improved by having people to argue with about which one is Jupiter.
Who does it suit less?
A couple travelling alone, unless they are very fond of each other and the pool table. A house built for a group is a quiet place for two, and the whole-house economics assume you have filled it.
Anyone who wants the lodge to run the evening. At Saleda the evening is yours to run. The page shows a bar built around the trees, which is an invitation rather than a service.
And the reserve?
Lipadi Private Game & Wilderness Reserve is the setting, and the page shows what you may expect of it: a male lion at the waterhole, a sundowner from the deck, and the vehicle heading home at dusk. We are not going to inventory the reserve’s wildlife beyond that, because the page does not, and a lion at the waterhole is quite enough to be going on with.
Is this your sort of place?
If your best holidays have been the ones where everyone was under one roof, Saleda Lodge is the safari version. It sits on our Botswana pages with the rest of the country’s lodges, and if you are counting heads and wondering whether five bedrooms is the right number, tell us on the enquiry form and we will help with the arithmetic.
