South Africa is, on balance, a water scare country. If you’ve flown over the country’s vast interior, you may have spotted swathes of the flat, arid, and mostly desolate Karoo. You’ll likely also have heard about the Southern Cape’s ongoing recent wrestle with drought.
But fly to Cheetah Plains, especially after a summer of good rainfall, and you’ll likely see the opposite – dense, lush bushveld, perennial rivers, and even at camp, a beautiful lawn, burgeoning endemic gardens, and perhaps the best swimming pools in the Sabi Sand.
Comparatively speaking, Cheetah Plains isn’t located in one of South Africa’s truly arid regions. Although the Greater Kruger National Park region does experience occasional and often devastating droughts, it is technically subtropical. But even with several perennial rivers and many near-permanent water bodies, and between 450 to 600 mm (18 to 24 inches) of rain per year, Cheetah Plains take its water very seriously.
This is because, like all other natural resources, we view water as inherently precious.
Water scarcity is something many communities around South Africa grapple with, and it’s not lost on us that water is a critical component of what we do. At your villa, swimming pools, large showers, and deep baths are ongoing visitor favourites. In the hot summers, hydration is also key. But even when you leave camp, the rivers, lakes, and dams are responsible for attracting and keeping the vast and diverse wildlife in the region, and are the very reason the Sabi Sand exists as it does.
For this reason, and our consideration for the environment, water stewardship was a primary
consideration when we built Cheetah Plains as an ecologically sensitive property – and it
remains one to this day. Guests may not at first notice the changes we make to preserve our water but is a fascinating element of any stay here.
Deep boreholes
The water you’ll find in your taps and see in the waterholes in front of your villa during a stay at Cheetah Plains has followed an intriguing journey. All of the camp’s water comes from four boreholes that we sunk between 2017 and 2018, pumped to the surface using solar power from as deep as 73 metres, or 240 feet.
Combined, these four boreholes can pump over 10,000 litres of water per hour – that’s an entire Olympic-sized swimming pool in 250 hours or around four regular-size pools per day.
The water we pump from the depths of the Sabi Sand ends up in one of a few places.
Some of it is in the pans surrounding Cheetah Plains, which animals, including hippos, depend on. We also use some of it alongside filtered grey water to irrigate our gardens. The rest of the water we pump heads to the lodge, where it’s filtered and stored for various day-to-day uses.
Filtering and reverse osmosis
All water in the lodge passes through a state-of-the-art filtering device that evaluates its properties and removes elements like salt and limescale. And all drinking water undergoes a reverse osmosis process that ensures it’s of the highest quality and tastes great.
As a guest of Cheetah Plains, you’ll encounter this reverse-osmosis water in refilled and sealed glass water bottles in each villa. And to conserve water and reduce plastic use, we also offer our guests reusable water bottles, perfect for game drives, that we fill with chilled filtered water.
Both bottles use water from our trusted hydration solution partner, Topia, which ensures purified water has a tested pH level of 9.5 and tastes superb.
Water conservation
Central to all of this is our unrelenting focus on water conservation.
Once our tanks hit capacity – which can happen after an extended period of sunny weather to power our pumps – we’ll switch off the boreholes to avoid any wastage.
With 12 water metres on site, we can control our water usage down to the last litre, every day, to ensure that we’re not using more than we really need. This also means we’ll know immediately if there are any leaks that need our urgent attention.
Although we’re beautifully isolated in the vast wilderness of the Sabi Sand Nature Reserve and not located along a flowing river, we also recognise that we’re part of a greater community, both upstream and downstream of the lodge and reserve.
While we ensure our guests have the utmost comfort and access to all the water they’ll want and need, we are also sensitive to the role that we play alongside all stakeholders who depend on this valuable resource inside and outside this natural attraction.
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