Feline Fields Lodge, exclusively yours

Your home from home in the heart of the Kalahari

There is a particular kind of magic that descends on a group of people the moment they realise that a place is genuinely, completely theirs. No strangers at the next table, no negotiating over activity times and no lowering your voice at dinner because someone else's holiday is happening nearby. Just your people, your pace and one of the most beautiful properties in the Kalahari arranged entirely around you. This is what the Feline Fields Exclusive Retreat feels like from the moment you arrive...

It's a feeling that's surprisingly rare in safari travel, where even the most luxurious camps tend to operate around a shared rhythm of shared mealtimes, shared vehicles and shared sighting radio chatter. There's nothing wrong with that, and for some travellers it's part of the appeal. 

But for a family reunion, a milestone birthday gathering, a wedding party or a group of old friends who haven't been in the same place at the same time in years, the dynamic changes completely when the property is yours alone. Feline Fields Lodge becomes, for the duration of your stay, something closer to a private home than a lodge, a home from home in the Kalahari, with a waterhole out front and a sky full of stars overhead.

Your own rhythm, your own rules

The practical difference is immediate and profound. Breakfast happens when your group is ready for it, not when the kitchen schedule demands. If the children want to sleep in after a late night around the fire, the morning drive departs when they're aboard, not before. 

If three generations of the same family want to spend an afternoon at the pool while two of the more energetic members go out on a game drive, both things happen simultaneously without any logistical compromise. 

The guides, the kitchen, the housekeeping team and the management of Feline Fields Lodge are all orientated entirely toward your group, and the difference that makes to the texture of a stay is considerable.

Mealtimes, in particular, take on a different character. Dinner around a long table under the Kalahari sky, with the waterhole lit softly in the distance and the sounds of the night coming in from every direction, is a very different experience when everyone at the table knows each other. The conversation flows differently somehow, with the laughter louder and the connections deeper.

Three generations, one Kalahari

Feline Fields Lodge lends itself particularly well to multi-generational travel, and the Exclusive Retreat format amplifies this quality considerably. The accommodation spread across Pool Suites, Bush Suites and the Family Villa means that different configurations of the group can be housed in different degrees of space and privacy, with the grandparents in a Pool Suite close to the main area, the young families in the Family Villa with their own pool, and the adventurous cousins in the Bush Suites as close to the sounds of the night as possible.

The activities work across the generations too. The Ju/'hoansi San experience is one of those rare encounters that lands differently at every age. Children are captivated by the tracking demonstrations and the plant knowledge, absorbing it with the unselfconscious openness that adults have usually lost. Older guests tend to find it quietly philosophical, a reminder of how much human knowledge can be held in a landscape when you know how to read it. 

Then there's our ongoing conservation efforts and the reintroduction of four young giraffe, currently in a large boma being carefully prepared for release into the open Kalahari system around Feline Fields. For a group with younger guests in particular, following their story and understanding the conservation work behind it adds a layer of meaning to the stay that goes well beyond the conventional safari experience. 

Game drives at dusk produce the collective held breath of a vehicle full of people who all care about each other watching something extraordinary happen in front of them. And a sleepout under the Kalahari sky, for those who choose it, is the kind of experience that becomes the story everyone tells when they get home.

A place that holds a group together

There's something about a shared physical space that does the work of holding a group together in a way that no amount of careful planning quite replicates. Feline Fields Lodge, with its open communal areas, its fire pit, its waterhole and its deep Kalahari quiet, is a place that naturally draws people together and then gives them the space to be apart when they need it. 

The team at Feline Fields Lodge are, it should be said, exceptionally good at reading a group. They know when to be present and when to disappear, when a table needs another bottle and when it needs to be left alone, when the children need something to do and when they're perfectly happy doing nothing. This is hospitality of the kind that can't be scripted, and it makes a very real difference to the experience of an exclusive-use stay.

The Kalahari, entirely yours

The landscape itself is unchanged by the exclusivity of the arrangement. The Kalahari doesn't perform differently for a private group. The leopard at the waterhole arrives on its own schedule, the honey badger is indifferent to the occasion, and the stars are the same extraordinary stars they've always been. But there's something about experiencing all of it together, as a group that chose to be here, that gives every encounter a different weight. 

A shared sighting becomes more than a sighting and a memory that belongs to all of you simultaneously, fixed in the same moment, in the same place, under the same sky. And that, when you think about it, is what a gathering is really for.