Almost every week in Saturday Star Travel, we receive complaints from visitors to government-run provincial and national parks. Lovely places, bad maintenance and indifferent service are common refrains in these letters.
With that in mind, I was curious to see how a government-private sector partnership at De Hoop is working.
Cape Nature Conservation is in a partnership with the De Hoop Collection whereby the government maintains the conservation side of the operation and the private partners run the accommodation and guided tours.
The De Hoop Collection is owned by Madikwe Investments, a group which runs a number of properties in that reserve in the North West province and which has a reputation for excellence.
De Hoop’s assistant general manager, Sebastien Jones, shows me around the different types of accommodation with hard-to-conceal pride. We look into one of the fully equipped self-catering cottages at the main base at Opstal. I ask Sebastian if this has been newly renovated, because it is clearly new. No, he says, it was three years ago we did this. But the kitchen is spotless, I say. Don’t your visitors ever cook in here? He laughs. “When people leave, we clean thoroughly and the housekeeping manager then checks… and it is part of my job description to check her…”
You won’t find in these accommodation units – as you do in some national and provincial parks – light bulbs that do not work, taps which leak, microwave ovens which short out.
In addition, under the careful eye of the De Hoop collection, the furnishing and decorating is light years away from the Department of Public Works handbook. The motif is elegant, with echoes of the safari experience the company does so well in Madikwe. In all the accommodation units, you feel as though you are in an upmarket hotel rather than a parks board bungalow.
That applies whether you are in the most basic rondawels, which sleep two people and have communal facilities (but are perched over the beautiful vlei) or in the elegant old colonial “manor houses”.
In the Opstal Manor House, you get full board (dinner, bed and breakfast) tariff which is reasonable (meals are in the adjacent Fig Tree restaurant, which is run by a chef, rather than a cook) and you get to stay in Cape classic farmhouse style. On the other side of the vlei in an area known as Melkkamer, after the fact it was a dairy in the years gone by, you can step back into a different era.
We stayed in the Melkkamer Manor House, a wonderful huge old farmhouse built in the late 1800s with the proceeds of the ostrich feather gold rush. The De Hoop Collection has restored the building to magnificence. There are four bedrooms, each with en-suite bathroom, accommodating eight people in colonial splendour, with a huge kitchen (it is a self-catering destination in most cases) and large lounge and dining room, with the appropriate high-class cutlery and crockery.
Melkkamer’s Manor House is the base for a fascinating three-day trail – and participants have their meals cooked there by the Collection’s experienced chefs.
Also at Melkkamer are two additional cottages, also self-catering and providing something unique in the SA tourism business.
Apart from the unique nature of the accommodation (and there really is nothing else quite like it in the state sector in the tourism business), it is the service which sets De Hoop apart from some of the other government-run enterprises.
It’s not cheap, but then you pay for quality – that was my initial thought.
However, when I checked the latest rates on the SANParks website, I found De Hoop is not that expensive by comparison, especially when you consider what you get.
l Brendan Seery was a guest of the De Hoop Collection
l Contact: For details of tours, accommodation and tariffs, see www.dehoopcollection.co.za or phone 0861 DE HOOP (33 4667) or 021 422 4522. email [email protected]