South Africa: Sleep Under Stars at Addo TiPi Bush Camp

🏕️ Sleep Under Stars at Addo TiPi Bush Camp

We would have loved nothing more than to have spent an extra day or two lounging about in Knysna, one of the genuine gems along South Africa’s legendary Garden Route. Knysna is an extraordinary place — it sits astride a vast, shimmering lagoon that opens to the sea through two enormous sandstone cliffs known as the Heads, and the whole setup is as dramatic as anything you’ll find along this coast. The town itself has a proper history going back to 1804, when a rather colourful chap called George Rex — widely rumoured at the time to be an illegitimate son of King George III, though that was probably wishful thinking — bought up the land around the lagoon and began developing it. By 1825 it had been declared a village, taking its name from the original Khoikhoi word meaning “place of wood,” which gives you a fair idea of what the area looked like then. Dense, ancient forest as far as the eye could see. Today those forests are protected, the oysters are famous, and the lagoon is gorgeous. We could have happily stayed another night, but the bed and breakfast was fully booked for the following evening, so after a decent bite to eat, we packed up the bags and pointed the car eastward.

🗺️ Hitting the Road — 330 Kilometres to Go

It was going to be quite a long drive, around 330 kilometres in total, and since we were self-catering for the next couple of nights, we’d also need to stop somewhere sensible and pick up provisions. A self-catering tipi in the bush is all very romantic until you realise there’s nothing in the fridge and the nearest shop is 28 kilometres away. We had half-considered stopping at Plettenberg Bay, another well-known spot on the Garden Route that has been attracting visitors since Portuguese explorers were dropping anchor in its waters back in the 15th and 16th centuries. The Dutch later named it after Joachim van Plettenberg, the Cape Governor who visited in 1778. These days it’s a rather upmarket resort town beloved by the South African equivalent of the Hamptons crowd. But when we rolled through, it didn’t feel particularly compelling, so we carried on.

The scenery along the N2 highway was, frankly, stunning. Thick indigenous forest pressed in on either side of the road, interspersed with deep river gorges that dropped away dramatically to your left or right, and every so often there were glimpses of the Indian Ocean far below — long empty bays with proper Atlantic-grade waves crashing in. This is one of those drives that reminds you why people spend thousands of pounds flying halfway round the world to get here. After a couple of hours at the wheel, we pulled into the small village of Storm River, tucked inside the Tsitsikamma region. This whole area has a fascinating backstory: for thousands of years before European settlement, San hunter-gatherers and elephant herds shared these forests, and the elephants migrated seasonally through the gorges. The village itself only took shape in the 1880s after the celebrated road and pass builder Thomas Bain — one of South Africa’s great Victorian-era engineers — surveyed the area in 1879 and completed a pass through the river gorge by 1884, with convict labour doing most of the heavy work. We sat ourselves down at a table on the village veranda and had two bowls of very good, hot soup, which was exactly what was needed.

🏙️ Through Gqeberha — a City of Many Names

Mid-afternoon we arrived in Gqeberha, which most people of a certain age still know as Port Elizabeth. It’s a large, sprawling industrial city sitting on Algoa Bay on the southeastern coast of South Africa, roughly halfway along the southern cape. The city was originally founded in 1820 as a British settler town, built around Fort Frederick — itself constructed in 1799 — and named Port Elizabeth by the acting governor Sir Rufane Donkin in memory of his late wife, Lady Elizabeth. It became incorporated as a town in 1861 and gained city status in 1913. For much of the 20th century it was the automotive capital of South Africa, and it remains one of the country’s busiest manufacturing centres. In 2021, as part of South Africa’s ongoing process of restoring indigenous place names, it was officially renamed Gqeberha — a Xhosa name derived from the Xhosa name for the Baakens River that runs through it. It’s pronounced roughly “kh-EH-beh-rha” and most locals will politely correct you if you get it badly wrong, which we did, more than once.

We had already made one abortive attempt to stock up with provisions, pulling off the highway earlier at Humansdorp only to be confronted with enormous queues snaking out of the supermarket car park. It turned out this was the Saturday following the last Friday of the month — payday — so the entire town was doing the same shop at the same time. We decided very quickly that this was not our battle and drove on. So the thought of trying another supermarket in a large city was not filling either of us with enthusiasm. However, we needed petrol, so we swung into a big service station on the highway and were pleasantly surprised — it had excellent mini-markets inside, and even better, a farm store bakery attached to it, where we picked up some freshly baked goods and a beautiful, thick-crusted loaf of bread. Result. We were finally provisioned and ready for the next couple of nights under canvas. Well, canvas-ish. Canvas in the shape of a tipi.

🔑 Finding the Camp — Gates, Padlocks and First Impressions

We were staying at Tipi Bush Camp, which sits on a private reserve directly adjoining the famous Addo Elephant National Park. Addo has quite a remarkable conservation story behind it. By the early 1900s, decades of unregulated hunting had reduced the Eastern Cape elephant population to a handful of terrified animals hiding in the dense valley bush. Between 1919 and 1920, a professional hunter by the name of Major P. J. Pretorius was actually commissioned — at the request of local farmers who had understandably grown tired of elephants helping themselves to their crops — to shoot the herd. He reduced the population from around 130 animals to just 16 individuals in a single year. The park was proclaimed in 1931 specifically to save these last survivors from complete extinction, and today it is home to over 600 elephants. A genuinely extraordinary recovery story.

The road from Gqeberha took us through the small town of Paterson, about 80 kilometres from the city, which sits in the Sundays River Valley. We’ll be diplomatic and say it wasn’t exactly a bustling metropolis — it had the rather forlorn look of a place where things had been better at some point in the past and hadn’t quite recovered. From there we turned onto a smaller road that was in the middle of what appeared to be extensive roadworks, a situation which showed no signs of being resolved anytime soon. Eventually, we came to some rather impressive lodge gates, complete with serious-looking stonework pillars. Slightly less impressive: the gates were completely unmanned, a padlock and chain had been looped around them to look as if they were locked, and we had to get out of the car, work out that the whole thing was actually open, and let ourselves in. Not quite the five-star arrival experience, but we’re not complaining. The road then took us roughly a kilometre through thick Eastern Cape valley bush before we arrived at the tipis themselves, where the owner, Rob Tapson, came out to greet us properly.

Now, the camp is advertised as “luxury,” and we’ll be gentle here. The tipi was spacious — genuinely spacious, all 6.3 metres in diameter of it, built in the traditional American Plains Indian style — and there was a double bed, a sofa bed, a kitchen with a gas cooker and gas fridge, a dining table, and a braai area outside with a proper cast-iron fire pit setup. Hot water and lighting ran off solar, so no grid electricity whatsoever. The bed was, shall we say, rather firm. The headboard fell off when Karen leant against it, which gave us both a fright. The sofa bed was not what you’d call comfortable. The ablutions block was a short walk away. All of which is to say it was pleasantly rustic rather than genuinely luxurious, but we’re seasoned enough travellers not to lose any sleep over it. The nicest thing, actually, was that we had the place entirely to ourselves — no one in the other two tipis — and the setting, tucked into the bush with absolute silence all around us, was quite something.