1. Anderssons at Ongava
"If a lion roars in the night you’ll feel it in your bones,” says Etienne Fourie, camp manager at Anderssons at Ongava, a luxury safari lodge in a remote corner of northern Namibia.
He’s not joking. Anderssons, which opened in April, is made up of eight plush huts that curl into the surrounding scrub around a central waterhole, leaving black and white rhinos, elephants, whole herds of antelope and Africa’s famous big cats free to pad in and out of the camp in search of water, sometimes mere metres from guests’ beds.
Everything at Anderssons is focused on conserving these animals, which roam Ongava's 300-square-kilometre reserve. A new model of safari camp, Anderssons encompasses not just luxury lodgings but also the Ongava Research Centre (ORC), a state-of-the-art laboratory that’s home to a team of researchers. Here, scientists work on everything from mapping the territories of the park’s elusive leopards to vast projects that will analyse the health of the whole ecosystem. There’s also space for visiting academics—soon after opening, the ORC hosted a group of hyena experts from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.
Anyone staying at any of Ongava's four lodges can visit the ORC’s interactive visitor centre, which gives a comprehensive introduction to local flora and fauna, but Anderssons guests are offered a more hands-on, in-depth experience. ORC team members give regular talks at Anderssons on their latest findings, and they’re developing a system that allows visitors to submit photos and observations from game drives directly to the research team, turning safari-goers into citizen scientists.