Travel reviews by The Pririt Batis from Kent

"Welcoming, friendly and efficient. A very good place for a first-night stop in Windhoek.

We had a standard room, which means a room opening onto the terrace used for all meals. This relative lack of privacy did not matter much during the daytime, but the noise from the remaining (jolly!) diners was irritating when trying to get to sleep. Next time we will want a room away from the dining patio.

The room was clean, well-equipped and comfortable - do not be put off by the grey concrete bath, the grey concrete walls and floor - it is much more tasteful than it sounds!"

"This was the least satisfactory place we stayed.

The Plateau Lodge is in a glorious situation, but you are very much on your own. There are limited facilities on the Plateau, and no staff or managers around to answer questions or solve problems. Our sense of being ignored was accentuated by being told that all we needed to know was set out in the Waterberg Wilderness Lodge booklet, which was available only in German and which even the helpful receptionist could not read. Our Game Drive was also in German.

We were irritated to find that the cost of the afternoon game drive had gone up by 40% from the price quoted on their website for late 2008. [In contrast, we did not find any other lodge charging different prices for extra meals or extra activities from those shown on its website.]

We were reasonably happy there because it gave us our first encounter with the landscape and with wildlife - but I would not stay there again, and would not recommend a friend to do so."

"We were made to feel very welcome here - not just by receptionists and management, but by all staff we met. The whole experience was sharp contrast with Waterberg Plateau Lodge.

We chose Mushara as a base for visiting Eastern Etosha, and for this it was excellently placed.

Rooms were well-equipped and very spacious - not luxurious but clean, comfortable and equipped with everything you could reasonably ask for - backed by the very positive attitude of staff, and good communal facilities (pool, sitting areas).

We would unhesitatingly stay there again, and would recommend it to even fussy friends."

"We stayed in a Bush Chalet and were very pleasantly surprised. Reception staff were warm and helpful, our chalet was very clean, well-equipped and spacious. The camp was all far better equipped, cleaner, friendlier and bettter organised than we had expected. Food (dinner and breakfast) was more ordinary (had the feel of mass catering, with food prepared some time in advance of it being put out), but perfectly acceptable, expecially for somewhere in that location.

Wonderful to be staying so close to the waterhole, and to the rest of Etosha.

Unlike some earlier guests, we found no problem with noise and numbers of other people - in fact the presence of other visitors who were as interested as were were in the game tended to add to game watching at the waterhole occasion rather than to spoil it.

We would firmly recommend Okaukuejo."

"An excellent value stay. A warm welcome from our hosts, and friendly service and help throughout or stay both from our hosts and from staff.

A delightful site, with gardens, plenty of places to sit, including an upstairs louge with a view - and animals (elephants while we were there) wandering through the compound as you sleep.

The refurbished chalets are very comfortable - well-equipped & tastefully decorated. The one shortcoming is the limitation on electricity, with no supply to the chalets after 10pm. This has limited impact (we were asleep by 10pm anyway), but it does mean that air conditioning and fridges are not possible - but even these shortcomings do not matter too much when there is a good breeze in the evening.

Excellent game drive, with plenty to see, and enjoyable time in the two waterhole hides.

Super food. and a warm welcome (throughout our stay) from hosts and staff alike. Strongly recommended."

"Friendly welcome, and friendly service throughout our stay.

Our chalet was very spacious and enjoyable, though the bucket in the shower puzzled us for some time until we realised that it was to collect the drips! We especially enjoyed the alignment of the chalets which meant that no chalet was overlooked by another. For such a well-equipped chalet, it was strange to find we had no shelves or drawers in which to store our belongings. The canvas walls made the chalet colder at night than we had expected.

One unexpected feature was the climb up to the main building - every journey to any other part of the site meant climbing the hill, which could be a trial when the heat is on (40 degrees centigrade on the day we arrived) or if you had contracted a cough (as we both did) on arriving in Namibia.

Our game drive to see the desert elephants was a delight - excellent guide, excellent elephants, stunning landscape.

We greatly enjoyed our stay here, and would unhesitatingly recommend it to others - but we would have liked more clarity as to what is and what is not included in the prices - for instance our room booklet implied that house wine was included in the price - but we found it was not; lunch was included in the game drive price, but we did not know this and had not therefore planned to take lunch; after arrival, we found that the elephant game drive was available in the afternoon as well as in the morning, something not apparent from the website and therefore ignored in our planning. None of these was crucial for us, but we were left with a lingering uncertainty about what else we had missed. We feel that better and clearer information is needed - in advance of booking."

"Again, very friendly and helpful staff, both on arrival and throughout our visit.

We stayed in a stone-built building, not one of the chalets shown on the website. Our "chalet" had excellent facilities, but it heated up quickly in the sun and housekeeping staff seemed to feel a need to close all the windows, so each time we returned to the "chalet" we weere met with oven-like heat.

The food was more than acceptable, but dinner menus were a little pretentious and both dinners we had were unsatisfying (for instance, small portions of vegetables that were little more than decorative; too-fancy deserts (such as mille feuille that had gone soggy); we preferred the more straightforward food offered at our earlier stops.

We enjoyed all three game drives - one to look for cheetah, one for hyena, one for leopard, and our guide was excellent. Neither the website nor any other information available to us had really told us what these activities were. It would have been helpful to have had more information before booking - we knew that we would be offerd something to do with cheetahs, and a chance to look for leopard, but we had no indication that each of these would be in the context of a (very helpful and interesting) wider look at game in the area; and we did not know that the cheetah event would in fact be a visit to several different compounds giving us an enjoyable chance to see a number of animals in different situations.

We certainly enjoyed our visit to Okonjima, but it was much the most expensive of our visits."