A guest complained last season that we didn’t have a butler.
We don’t. We have Sifeliphelo. She was making beds before I was born. She fought in the bush war. She carried rocket launchers.
The guest didn’t ask. He wanted a butler.
That’s when I stopped using the word luxury.
I grew up watching my father invent the safari circuit. Touch the Wild. He started in 1981 at Makalolo Pan, southern Hwange. One tent. One Land Rover. The tent was for guests. My parents slept under the Land Rover.
The kit was embarrassing. Ricoffy instant coffee, which is to coffee what mud is to soup. A canvas-bag shower with strong opinions about gravity. A loo that was a hole. Warm gin when the ice ran out, which was always.
Guests flew 30 hours from Sydney and didn’t notice. They came for the lion call at two hundred metres in the dark.
Somebody decided luxury was installable. Copper baths in canvas tents. The same Maasai blanket on the wall in countries the Maasai have never set foot in. Almost nothing is bush anymore. It’s content. Influencer with 10 grand of kit, faking emotion at a sighting they’re not watching because they’re checking the framing. You have to be rich to see Africa now.
My father taught me what bluster looks like when I was six. I was on the luggage rack of a Land Rover at Kanondo Pan, just the two of us, when a bull elephant in musth came charging out of the acacia grove. Ears back, trunk up. Dad rolled forward. The bull came on. Dad stopped. The bull stopped. Dad reversed. The bull stepped back. Dad rolled forward again. So did the bull.
The whole thing was a mirror. The bull only knew how to charge when somebody was retreating.
The most luxurious moment of my life happened on foot in the Matobo at dawn. Our head guide stopped walking and lifted a hand. The granite was still cold from the night. The valley was silent. It felt like a long time. Then a leopard came up the rocks ahead of us, didn’t see us and was gone.
He’d read her tracks 40 minutes earlier and walked us into her path without saying a word. Telling us would have ruined it.
You cannot install that.
Real luxury is a chef producing three good meals when the truck is two days late. A generator man rebuilding a 30-year-old Lister diesel in the dark. A manager who notices you’ve gone quiet at dinner and brings last night’s wine without asking. A tracker who’s known these hills longer than the lodge has existed. A bedmaker who fought a war.
My father knew this in 1981 with a tub of Ricoffy and a Land Rover for a roof. He died in August.
The funeral was full of guides and trackers and old men. They had known the elephants by name. Van Gogh who had one ear. Skew Tusk. Stompy.
Half the industry has forgotten.
There’s a market for the helicopter, the copper bath, the influencer. Good luck to them.
Luxury got hijacked around 2008. I’d like it back.
I’ve got Sifeliphelo. That’ll do.
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