A Safari Camp in the Heart of Olifants West
Sausage Tree Safari Camp sits within Olifants West Nature Reserve, a private wilderness that forms part of the Greater Kruger ecosystem. There are no fences between this reserve and Kruger National Park itself — the animals move as they always have, across an open system that stretches far beyond any boundary you can see from the deck.
For guests, that means two things: the game viewing is genuine, not staged, and the reserve is quiet. Olifants West is a private traversing area, so you share the roads with a handful of vehicles rather than the queues you’ll find at a sighting inside the national park.
Where Olifants West sits in the Greater Kruger
Olifants West Nature Reserve is one of the sub-reserves that together make up the broader Balule Nature Reserve, which is itself a member of the Associated Private Nature Reserves grouping inside the Greater Kruger National Park — the unfenced conservation area that surrounds and connects to Kruger proper. Animals traverse freely between all of it.
This matters because it is the difference between a fenced game farm and a true open system. The Big 5 — lion, leopard, elephant, buffalo, rhino — are not contained here; they pass through as part of a population that ranges across the whole Greater Kruger. The reserve covers around 7,500 hectares of land on its northern side; from camp, you traverse around 4,000 hectares of private wilderness.
Why a private reserve beats the national park
Inside Kruger National Park, you stay on tarred roads, you cannot go off-road to a sighting, and a leopard in a tree can draw twenty vehicles. In Olifants West:
- Off-road traversing — guides can leave the road to follow a sighting, within the reserve’s conservation rules
- Few vehicles — a private reserve means a fraction of the traffic
- Night drives and bush walks — activities the national park does not permit for day visitors
- The same wildlife — because it is the same unfenced ecosystem
The wildlife
Olifants West is Big 5 country. Beyond the headline species, the reserve supports the full Greater Kruger cast — giraffe, zebra, hippo, hyena, wild dog, and a bird list that runs past 220 species. The camp has its own resident characters too, including Ezulwini, an elephant the team has come to know over years of sightings.
Sausage Tree’s place in the reserve
Sausage Tree is deliberately small — five tented suites in two tiers, family-owned and run since 2012 by the Carne and van der Ploeg families. James & Sonja Carne and Deon & Tamara van der Ploeg host personally, between them in English, French, and Dutch. That scale is the point: a handful of guests means the camp moves at your pace, the guiding is personal, and the reserve around you stays as quiet as it should be.
Getting here
Sausage Tree is at 25 Cambridge, Olifants West Nature Reserve, near Hoedspruit in Limpopo.
- By air: nearest airport is Hoedspruit (Eastgate, HDS), a short road transfer from the reserve gate. Direct flights connect from Johannesburg and seasonal flights from Cape Town.
- By road from Johannesburg: about a 5.5-hour drive via the N4 and R40 through the Lowveld — a scenic route past the Panorama region if you have time to stop.
Every booking with Sausage Tree contributes R50 to Daktari Bush School and Wildlife Orphanage.