Travel reviews by Ms DM & MR VO from Belgium

"We stayed only one night arriving after our night flight (without much energy left...), and we went out for dinner so we can't comment on activities and dinner. But we did have a very good service, Rolf did his best to be as helpful as possible.

We followed his advice to go to Weinberg's restaurant and dinner was excellent."

"A very nice thing about the place is that you can do several walks on your own, or with a good guide of the camp (if available). With a local guide you usually learn and see a lot more even in a short time.

The night of our stay Marianne had to spend some time helping another guest who had broken her wrist. Because of that she felt she hadn't been a good host for the other people and as an apology she offered our wine for free, a gesture she didn't need to do but was of course very nice.

We heard Rob and Marianne are selling the place so there will be new management in the near future."

"The place is nicely located and nothing wrong with the accomodation.

But we felt the activities are very expensive though, and what made it worse was the management couldn't explain why (we didn't think most of it was for the guide and it couldn't have been the transport cost or entrance fees, we checked the cost of the latter one...).

We asked two members of the management, once when confirming to go on the trip and in the end when paying. In general the quality of information by the management was not as good as in many other lodges.

Fortunately we did have an excellent guide on our trip to the dunes (Petrus), which is why I wouldn't rate service as "poor""

"Lots of information about things to do here (= around Swakopmund, the activities are not actually run by Sam), and an extensive breakfast with a lot of choice.

The famous dog has died recently but there's a new young one."

"We had only one night here but we were lucky enough to have the desert elephants in the neighbourhood.

The place is wonderfully located and they've thought of everything to help you make the most of it. We felt spoiled! We did sleep part of the night outside., even with fresh winter temperatures it was much worth trying out."

"It was wonderful to have so much dedicated and enthusiastic staff around, not only the guide or one of the management but everyone!

Not only the lodge itself is professionally run but also the wildlife viewing: it's clear they did some thinking about the way they organise the rhino walks and very reassuring they think not only of the guests but also of the wildlife. The most special of course is the chance to meest the rhinos in the wild.

A little bit of a pity that the time in the vehicle was very long compared to the time out, but I guess there's not much to do about that.

One negative thing is the red house wine is unfortunately rather bad."

"One can't compare the service of this kind of a place to the more personal situation of a lodge or B&B.

This is more "mass catering" for lots of people passing by every day. But the reason you're here is to view Etosha, and you can do a lot of it by yourself, driving around are just staying at the drinking pool."

"Namutoni feels less crowded than Okaukuejo and is very original for a "public" rest camp. We also found the rooms were very large and luxurious for what you would expect from this kind of camp.

The drinking pool seems to attract less animals all of the time (certainly compared to Okaukuejo's) but there are great other pools in the area. The night drive was excellent."

"We can't comment on the activities but the stay in the honeymoon suite on the river was lovely, as we could just watch river birds from the "deck". Having breakfast served outside our room gave also a luxurious and spoiled feeling.

Apparently the lodge had suffered from heavy floodings of the river earlier in the year, and they were still recovering from it (swimming pool wasn't fixed yet)."

"Ndhovu was a great experience. The place by the river is just wonderful, and you can enjoy lots of sounds throughout the night.

We stayed in the tent floating on the river and the first morning there was a family of otters right next to us. The evening boat trip accompanied by Horst was superb. Eating all together (the funny members of staff included - there were few other guests when we were there) at breakfast and dinner was very nice and family-like."

"Too bad we couldn't join a walk, which would have been a nice change instead of driving, but apparently it was too wet around. Morning boat trip and afternoon drive were very good and guides were well informed.

In spite of the location and size the place feels run rather like a hotel rather than a lodge."

"Great place and a nice range of activities. We appreciated they cleaned our hired car and gave us an extra attention in our room for our honeymoon.

I couldn't help the feeling that we "connected" less to the managers and many other guests, perhaps their concern was more on spoiling and luxurious feel than on experiencing nature. The guide for the morning walk was the best! Also the night drive was very nice."

"Really great crew on the boat. Actually it would have been nice if they could join the guests more often, but probably that was too difficult to combine with all the work on the boat.

The boat covered a smaller distance than I had expected but I don't think it mattered much. The shorter tours on the smaller boats are the best - we had Cletius as a "personal guide", he was very helpful, listened to what we were interested in and was too modest about his own knowledge."

"We enjoyed the possibility to visit the Victoria Falls more than once and whenever we liked from our hotel. The only other activity we did was visiting a village in the area, which was very interesting as well as confronting.

The swimming pool was also very nice and surprisingly not crowded; a pity the water was shallow at most places.

Lots of choice at breakfast, but a pity some of the bakery wasn't well done (it was as if they didn't know exactly how to prepare the food that was probably deep frozen). Different choices of restaurant."