Everyone likes a good story. Y?know, the sort where good triumphs over evil, the ugly duckling gets the princess (call it fairytale license) or simply a tale of good coming from bad.

Well, in a very lateral and environmental sense this is pretty much the story of Madikwe Game Reserve in the Northwest province; seventy odd thousand hectares of former farmland, once grazed to literal death by cattle and now home to a world of southern African wildlife, both the Big and Little Five. And, of course, the largely luxurious lodges that play host to the mostly foreign visitors on safari in this chunk of Africa.

The maturing wilderness
As a job-creation exercise in itself Madikwe is an extremely good news story, the reserve having been created in the early nineties by the then visionary Bophutatswana Parks Board as an economic initiative, a means of providing employment and entrepreneurial opportunities for the surrounding rural communities.

I feel a kind of kinship with the reserve, largely because as a fresh young radio journalist I covered the launch of the reserve and witnessed the subsequent release of the imported cheetah, lion and wild dog populations. Since that momentous occasion ? involving the largest ever translocation of wildlife, over eight thousand head of game ? I have spent much time within its boundaries, staying in all manner of rather special places in a variety of different environments.

So my recent visit to The Bush House was indeed welcome. A simple and understated, extremely comfortable base from which to have another peek into the maturing piece of wilderness that is Madikwe.

The Bush House
The lodge?s Joburg office said the drive to the lodge would take three-and-a-half hours. Fat chance, I said, lodges invariably blurring the time it takes to reach them by hardly ever factoring in the slight technicality that is the speed limit. But truth they spoke, and if we hadn?t got caught in Friday rush hour traffic on Joburg?s Beyers Naude Drive the drive-time would?ve been spot on.

The lodge is in a handy position, not five minutes from the Wonderboom Gate (just beyond the Abjaterskop entrance to the reserve), sitting quite secluded behind a hill.

Formerly a farmhouse, with a bit of work here and there, The Bush House has been converted into a lodge, but not in the million-dollar fashion that has become almost commonplace in South Africa?s game reserves. The lounge-cum-bar-cum-reading area is rather swish, the bedrooms are very habitable, the bathrooms very large ? showers built to be played in ? and the large garden with tea tables and swimming pool inviting in the extreme, particularly in mid-summer heat. Nice and simple.

My personal yardstick of the 'liveability' of a bedroom is whether or not I would be able to spend a day in the bedroom if the weather is miserable and the company of the other guests objectionable. Well, while the weather threatened it never quite rained, and the other guests at the lodge just so happened to be quite nice (on the face of it anyway, for who knows what they might get up to back home), so the room-test didn?t materialise. However if it had, I believe I speak for my partner in saying we would have been content to stay put in our room.

Ancient artefacts
Having been settled for tens of thousands of years, the history of the Madikwe region has long been of interest to archaeologists and paleaontologists, while students of conservation, ecology and history find this to be a landscape rich in texture.

Stone and Iron Age artefacts compete with wildlife for attention on a canvas painted in the 1830s and 40s with the sweat, fever and faith of missionaries, chiefs and hunter-traders; Mzilikazi, David Livingstone and William Cornwallis-Harris among them.

Click through to Page Two for more on the history of Madikwe...