The quiet that finds you

We have read this review more times than we can admit to. Read the full review here.

As we come up on fifty years, we asked whether she would talk to us so that we, and you, might better understand what it is to be a guest who has become family. She agreed, and gave us her time and rather more of herself.

Here is her account.

Susan came to us for the first time when her brother sent her. It was a gift for her and her youngest daughter, a girl who loved animals and who is now, twelve years on, a qualified veterinarian working in the United Kingdom.

The camp was the old Tanda Tula Safari Camp then. Tented, rustic, a long way from home. On her return, people asked how Africa had been, and the only word she could find was 'life-changing'. She could not explain it any further, and she could not stop thinking about it.

It took four years to get back. Susan has a group of girlfriends she travels with. They go to France, they eat well, that is the arrangement of some decades' standing. She spent those four years talking them into the bush instead, and they came in 2018. Campfire dinners were communal in those days, one long table, everyone at it. She still misses them.

Since 2018 she has not missed a year, and some years she has returned three times.

Susan's life, by any measure, is demanding. She lives in a city, holds a senior role in a high-pressure profession, and has raised three children on her own. She describes herself as type A by circumstance rather than by temperament, someone who was never really given the option of being otherwise. She still brings her laptop when she comes to us, because rest is not something her year makes much room for.

Many of the people we welcome arrive carrying something similar.

But what Susan explained is that roughly five months after she leaves, she begins to feel a physical ache to return. Not a wish, not a plan. An ache. It's then that she looks at her calendar the way others look at a horizon.

Susan does not travel alone, as a rule. Paris is the exception she allows herself, because Paris is Paris and she has been going for years. And then there is here. She told us she cannot think of another place on earth where she would be comfortable arriving by herself, and she has long since stopped looking for one.

She is, when she comes to us, a woman on her own, eight thousand miles from home. She has never once felt it.

Susan has driven with Chad for years. Most of her sixteen stays, he has been the one in the seat in front of her, and there is a long-running joke between them about the gin and tonic she takes at sundowners, the only gin and tonic she drinks anywhere in the world, and she has never yet finished one.

On this last trip, since Chad was off, she went out with Stephen. Stephen came to us as a tracker and is now a guide.

Of our guides and trackers as a whole, Susan has written that they possess a rare gift: that they read the bush like a living text, and share that intimacy generously. It is the reason, she says, that sixteen stays have never once repeated themselves. She always learns something new. She always sees something new.

Safaris with Stephen were no exception. The drives were different, yet the same.

Susan was careful to add that she is not breaking up with Chad.

We would rather have that sentence than any compliment about the rooms. A camp carried by one person is a personality. What Susan found is that the thing she comes for is held by all of us, and holds without any one of us.

Twelve years is long enough to watch people grow.

When Susan first met Innocent he was almost too shy to speak to her. He teases her across the room now, and the guests who meet him today know him for his wonderful nature and his captivating smile. He's always had a lovely smile.

It is a small thing to notice and not a small thing to have happened. Innocent was not trained into confidence, and nobody set out to produce this. He was simply given room, and time, and the sense that he was valued exactly as he was. Confidence is what tends to grow in those conditions. He arrived at it in his own way, at his own pace, in front of guests rather than away from them, because there was no version of him that anyone had asked him to perform.

This is what putting people first has always meant here – the belief that a person given space will become more than the role they were hired into.

Ask Susan what she loves, and she does not describe the camp.

Of the place itself, she has written only this: that there is no noise here that does not belong. Everything else she reaches for is smaller than that, and closer.

She describes the sound of her cappuccino already being made before she has stood up from the lunch table, because they know. She describes the poncho she asked for once on a cold morning, and which was folded and waiting for her every morning afterwards without her having to ask again. She describes the mosquito hat Chad bought for her, because she was coming in summer and he knew she would want one.

And she describes standing in the airport at Hoedspruit at the end of a trip, when Don and Nina spotted her across the terminal and came over to say goodbye. She thought, with something close to surprise: I guess they do know who I am.

Her older daughter has been four times. Her youngest, three. Her son, once. He runs a landscaping company in Connecticut and can never get away in the months she likes best. One year they came together over Christmas and New Year, the only week the four of them could find between them, and she braced herself for the heat and then found it did not matter much.

Susan told us that in the weeks before a trip, when she thinks about coming, she tears up. She was tearing up as she said it, at her desk, in the middle of the workday, eight thousand miles away. She apologised for it, saying she could not wait to be back among her people.

She is back at the end of October, and she is bringing her young veterinarian as it's her turn.

There are people who have been coming to Tanda Tula for longer than Susan has. There are families whose grandchildren now sit in the seats their grandparents sat in. As we come up on fifty years, we find this is the part we are least able to take credit for and most grateful for: that a camp built in the Timbavati in 1976, and opened to its first guests in 1977, turned out to be a way of gathering people, and of giving them back to themselves.

Thank you, Susan. For twelve years the words failed you, and then they didn't. You came to us on a gift. You have just given us one back.

Susan did not know it, but Chad wanted to add something of his own.

And there is a photograph. Sixteen visits, twelve years, and the only picture that exists in Chad's collection of Susan and him together, taken in a hospital foyer in Hoedspruit, where she went to find him after her stay. It speaks volumes about the depth of a friendship they both hold dear.

Disclaimer: Chad has made a full recovery, and is back in his guiding seat!