Long Lee Manor

Long Lee Manor was built in 1910 as a homestead in farming country along the Bushman's River, and it has outlived the farming. Shamwari took its first guests in 1992 on farmland it had restored to bush, and as it bought more, it turned the old homesteads into lodges. This one keeps the dress of an Edwardian country house: white walls and white columns, and verandas tiled in black and white. Stained glass windows flank the sitting-room fireplace, and in one bedroom a four-poster faces glass doors open to the grassland. The rim-flow pool and the boma both look over a round waterhole with an island of bush in the middle, and past it the plains run out to wooded hills, about as far as an Edwardian lawn has ever been asked to go.

Recommended for a first safari taken in the style of a country house, and for families: the reserve is free of malaria, and the Family Suite has two bedrooms and a heated plunge pool of its own, for up to four adults and two children aged six to eleven. Game drives go out at dawn and dusk, and the rate covers them and the meals. Between them, a guide leads walks on foot across grassland shared with white rhino, and visits can be made to the Born Free Foundation's big cat sanctuary and Shamwari's Wildlife Rehabilitation Centre, both on the reserve; stay three nights or more and there is a boat trip on the Bushman's River too. Gqeberha's airport is about an hour by road, and the manor has a helicopter landing of its own, an approach nobody building a homestead in 1910 had in mind.