Kruger Shalati - The Train on the Bridge

From 1923 the Round in Nine trains took tourists nine days from Johannesburg through the Lowveld, and James Stevenson-Hamilton, the warden, stopped them for the night at Sabi Bridge, so that the park would be seen and not slept through. Rail traffic ended in 1973. Since December 2020 there has been a train on the bridge again, and this one has no plans to leave. HK Studio fitted out its carriages as 24 suites, walled in glass inside the steel trusses of the 1910 bridge, so the bed looks down the Sabie with a rust-red girder slanting across the view. The bath stands behind a woven screen, and even the basins get a window onto the bushveld. A deck juts out from the train over one of the piers, with a round pool at carriage height and the river below, where hippo and elephant pass on their own timetable.

Recommended for couples, and for families with children of six or more. The train takes nobody under twelve, so younger children sleep on the bank in the Bridge House Suites, where the Family Suite adds a room of canopied bunk beds. The day is framed by two game drives, at dawn and dusk, in open vehicles with a guide and a tracker, and meals and house wines are in the rate. Dinner is beside the train at Trackside Dining, built from reclaimed railway materials, where Vusi Mbatha cooks a seasonal South African menu, and the drinks move to the fire after dark. Four hundred metres away, at the old Kruger Station, the Round 9 Bar also serves day visitors to the park, who, unlike the train, have to go home.