A white rhino calf walks towards the camera through green grass, its mother close behind, with wooded hills soft in the background

South Africa  ·  KwaZulu-Natal

Mavela Game Lodge

A safari-style tented bush lodge in the Big 5 Manyoni Private Game Reserve, where the walls are soft but everything else is looked after.

Mavela Game Lodge sits in the Manyoni Private Game Reserve near Mkuze, in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, and it is a tented lodge, which is a phrase worth pausing on. Canvas has a way of making people picture hardship. Mavela is the other kind of canvas: a safari-style tented bush lodge run on an all-inclusive basis, where the walls are soft but everything else is looked after.

The advantage of canvas is proximity. There is very little between you and the Big 5 reserve outside, and at night the bush does not lower its voice on your account. That is the point. Mavela is built around intimate encounters with African wildlife, and intimacy is much easier to arrange when the wall is a piece of fabric rather than a metre of brick.

A canvas tent seen from its deck, glass doors slid open onto twin beds, a timber headboard and a woven pendant lamp hanging from the apex
Canvas, with the doors open
There is very little between you and the Big 5 reserve outside, and at night the bush does not lower its voice on your account.

Manyoni is a serious Big 5 reserve, and Mavela draws both local travellers and visitors from further afield, which tells you something. South Africans do not give up a weekend for somewhere unless it earns it.

All-inclusive, under canvas, in Big 5 country: three good phrases, one good lodge.

01

The tent

Two rope-woven armchairs and a low black table holding a bottle of white wine on a private deck, looking out over rolling bush under a blue sky
The deck, and the view it was built for
Inside the tent: a wide bed against a pale timber wall, a brass reading lamp, and a linen sofa by the curtained windows
Inside, under canvas
Two copper rain showers running against a dry-stone wall in an open-air bathroom, a latte-pole screen and a white towel to one side
The outdoor shower

02

Out in the reserve

Three guides with packs and a rifle stand in tall, silvery grass on a walking safari, looking up towards the treeline
On foot, in the long grass
Guests in canvas chairs ringed around a blazing fire pit at night, a hurricane lantern glowing on the boards in front
Fireside

Mavela Game Lodge

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