Thirteen years ago, we fell in love. It was a very strange feeling because it was totally unprompted and quite unexpected. A battlefield is not normally the sort of place one associates with affairs of the heart. However, the battle sites of Isandlwana and Rorke’s Drift in KwaZulu Natal must have inspired some primal emotions that led to conduct quite markedly in contrast to our normal, rational behaviour.

After a long dinner accompanied by several glasses of superb South African Cabernet up in Northern Natal, the site of British triumph and Zulu tragedy, we started chatting to a chap from quite a different part of South Africa – the Great Karoo. Magical tales were woven about the millions of springbok which once roamed this area, the “Vanished Kings”, the Cape lion who majestically strode the Plains of Camdeboo, the rhino, the cheetah, the explorers, the characters of yesteryear and the haunting beauty of the semi-desert land.

Overwhelmed and humbled by the magnificence of it all, we went away totally and completely smitten by the Great Karoo.

Monkey Valley became the first farm that formed the nucleus of Samara Private Game Reserve and twelve years ago we happily became its owner. The dream continued – amass enough land to have a self-sustaining eco-system that would carry game, the herds of antelope that used to inhabit this area, and the predators to keep the balance that helps maintain these fragile eco-systems.

70 000 acres and twelve years later, Samara’s dream was born, pursued, and today continues to evolve in the Eastern Cape’s Great Karoo. The land was allowed to rest for many years and has now recovered from the effects of generations of agricultural exploitation. The haunting beauty of the landscape that first inspired Samara’s campaign of rejuvenation has been allowed to return.

Samara, land of serenity, has as its aim the realisation of the land’s potential, not only as an area of outstanding natural beauty and diversity, but also as home to an ambitious programme of game reintroduction. Herds of springbok, black wildebeest, zebra, oryx, eland and blesbok, amongst others, “pronk” and run again on the Plains of Camdeboo. Rhino and giraffe now meander across the veld. Nearly one hundred and twenty five years after it was last seen, the cheetah reigns again.