Timeless Timbavati

“The place where something sacred came down to Earth from the Heavens.”
This. This singular, unparalleled description belongs to a location utterly unique in all the world.
The Timeless Timbavati. Spellbinding, resolute, and undaunted by the travails of time.

In the heart of Africa’s bushveld lies a land raw, rugged, and so extraordinarily beautiful that it fair begs one to recognize its palpable sanctity. A slice of antiquity insistent that you not only recognize, but deeply sense why those who named it did so as evidence that heaven itself had blessed it. A place where elephants still share the land with their timeless tread. Where the basso profundo roars of lions echo throughout the nighttime skies. Indeed, these lands hold something unseen anywhere on the globe. For in touching Earth, Heaven laid it’s hand upon a pride of lions who call this spellbinding tract of land home. Only here, underneath the endless chapel of the star-dappled sky, roam the white lions.

The Timbavati; Heaven’s gift to Earth, Earth’s challenge to man.

Today, a 124,000-acre reserve, the Timbavati is home to some of Africa’s most spectacular wildlife, including the vaunted Big Five, and delivers nothing less than one of the most profound safari experiences on Earth. Period.

Spending time in this incredible wilderness, whether watching the elephants go about their day as they have for generations, or spending time with the king of beasts as another golden African sunset bathes the horizon, allows one to easily to forget and perhaps ignore the tumultuous past of this sublime piece of wild Africa. For, the Timbavati has had occasion to know man. Man, whose embrace often leaves the deepest scars of all.

There was a time when the Timbavati stood, precariously, on the narrow ledge of folklore, almost relegated to the tales of travelers once past. The truth, raw with honesty, is that there are no pristine locations on our planet. No place that has been fortunate enough to escape man’s ruthless, exploitative clutches, not even the Timbavati. The first European explorers to the Timbavati area were quick to realize the incredible bounty of the region and used it for hunting; they hunted not for mere sustenance but also to mercilessly reaffirm the fallacy of man’s superiority, by killing many of the Timbavati’s iconic species, leaving a land devoid of life, devoid of its magic. Sentient beings like lions, elephants, rhinos and leopards, were mercilessly slaughtered in lands they’d roamed before man measured time. Cultivated, as fallen fruit, by insatiable, glutinous trophy hunters whose destruction knew a terrible hunger. After the hunters moved on, the farmers laid claim to the land, recognizing the bounty in its diverse flora, they used the this lush piece of bushveld as grazing land for their cattle… No land, not even the Timbavati could withstand the effects resultant from man’s onslaught of this planet. As such, years of ruthless hunting, and unrestricted use of its resources took its toll on the Timbavati, and it showed; the wildlife began to leave, and even the land itself began to suffer. This once beautiful, scared piece of Africa was being bludgeoned into an arid land, devoid of everything it once was. A dust-coated, blood-speckled remnant of the touch of heaven. The Timbavati was a land… altered.

The land of the white lion was almost lost… almost.

Like many of our planet’s great wilderness, the Timbavati, fearlessly exposes humanity’s ruthless shortcomings, but it also stands as our lighthouse, it  personifies the great things man is capable when we see the err in our ways, when we choose to heal our planet, not just because we can, but because we must. Our planet does not need us to thrive, it can do that all by itself, but it does need us to repent, and repent we must… How do we repent? By helping it heal from the wounds we have inflicted. 

This Sacred place would have been lost to us forever were it not for the intervention of some compassionate landowners with incredible foresight. Early in the1930’s, landowners and farmers in the area lamented about a pristine wilderness that was being torn apart at their very own hands. They bear witness first-hand the toll that man had taken on the land and they decided to do something about… they decided to help the Timbavati heal. History will leave nameless those that once ravaged this spellbinding land, for we will choose to remember those that healed those wounds, and allowed this great wilderness to restore itself to the shining light its once was. Their ethos was simple, but sound… allow the land time to heal. And thus, as the land healed, the great beings that once roamed the dusty horizons of the magical Timbavati, returned home to the beloved land of their ancestors. 

Today, the Timbavati forms part of the greater Kruger ecosystem, and is one of Africa’s most prolific wildernesses. The abundant wildlife, and incredible biodiversity of the Timbavati paints a picture of an Africa from a bygone era. It tells the story of Africa as it was, before we were… ruggedly pristine, flawless beautiful; wild and untouched. Days spent in the Timbavati are as surreal as they are timeless, from its golden grasses to its mopane forests, the Timbavati evokes a sense of belonging, a feeling of a child coming home. It a place devoid of off the white noise we have so feverishly filled our lives with, and because of this it gives your soul the respite it needs to heal, to find what it most yearns… emancipations from the shackles of the modern world. 

While serving as home to our planets’ iconic Big Five, the Timbavati is so much more. It’s a place where your days appear to melt, one into the other, as it exposes the fallacy of constructed time. Days spent wandering through is vast golden palette serve as the lighting to life’s sculpture, dutifully removing the inessential trappings that we have burdened ourselves with. Leaving only that beautiful nucleus which defines the light in us all. 

There is, however, a catch. Once you allow your soul the opportunity to connect with this sacred piece of Africa, she becomes a part of you, forever calling to you, tormenting you, leaving you feeling a void… until you return to her once more.

They say that God visits everywhere, but lives in Africa, and when you spend time soaking in the dusty horizons of the Timbavati, it’s a conceit very easy to believe. My time in this mesmerizing reserve was different to many of the other Safaris I do. See, the truth is that the Safari landscape has changed in some parts of Africa, there are the times when it almost seems cultivated, but not the Timbavati, no, here it remains as visceral as ever. It almost serves as a time capsule of sorts. It is vast, wild and unpredictable, and because the wildlife sightings are not always given, you have to work hard to expose her intimate moments, those magical moments that spellbind you and become part of you forever. Even just spending time around camp you are quickly reminded that you are exposed to the beautiful, visceral nature of this incredible wilderness, and you welcome it, in fact you almost begin to crave it. From the nyala and bushbuck that frequent the camp looking to feed in relative cover, to the tracks left by leopard and hyena outside your tent from the night before, it is as wild as it gets, and it simply captivates you. Perhaps it is this wildness, this unpredictability that is part of the Timbavati’s allure, her charm, the very thing that we need. 

As I sit here on the wooden deck of our camp overlooking a dried riverbed, under the light of the full moon, I am kept company by the distant roars of two male lions. They call back and forth, asserting their arrival. It now dawns on me that I could be anywhere in the world but I am here, audience to a chorus of kings, and I am reminded of why I love Africa. I welcome the reminder, that not unlike those kings calling out, I am of this land and it is of me… and I am filled with pride. This is my home, oh how fortunate I am. The Timbavati does this to you, it holds on to you forever, becomes part of everything that you are, it is Africa at its most spectacular, at its most delicate, at its most intoxicating. 

This is the Timbavati.
And here there be lions.
White ghosts.
The fingertips of Heaven.
And in Heaven they roar...