The Most Romantic Picnic in the Sabi Sand

The most romantic lunch you'll ever eat might just be under a tree in the Sabi Sand.

You've probably been planning this for a while. Most stays at Chitwa Chitwa are booked close to a year out, and people arrive knowing exactly what they've come to mark. A honeymoon. An anniversary. A trip the two of you have been talking about since your twenties. A proposal that's been sitting in a jacket pocket for months.

So the question was never whether to do something. It was more along the lines of “what and where?”

You don't have to build a production. Some of the best moments here cost nothing more than a word to the right person.

Tell your guide it's her birthday and the whole camp knows by dinner. The team sings, the other guests may join in, and you'll be surprised how much that lands when you're a long way from home. Ask for a bottle waiting in the suite when you come off the afternoon drive. Ask for coffee on your own deck at first light instead of at the fire with everyone else, and watch together as the dam wakes up.

Small things travel a long way out here, mostly because somebody actually carries them out.

If you want the afternoon itself to be the thing you both remember, there are a few directions to take it.

Take a private vehicle, so every drive is the two of you and the guide whom you’ll soon call “friend.”. Ask about sundowners up on the rocks, which is where many fond memories have been lived before. Stay three nights and you will experience the pizza truck on the airstrip and eat under the African sky with billions of visible stars.

Or take the tree.

Most picnics fail for boring reasons, so it's worth knowing what to ask for.

Shade first. A view with no shade is a forty-minute lunch. You want a canopy wide enough to cool the ground underneath it, which is why ours tend to happen beneath some of the oldest and biggest trees in the Sabi Sand.

Then timing. Mornings are usually spoken for and so are late afternoons. Of course, this is only the case if you want that thrilling game drive. You are always welcome to skip a drive to prioritise a special moment. However, the middle of the day is usually the perfect time to skip lunch at the lodge in favour of a picnic in the bush.

Then the food, which is the genuinely hard part. It has to travel, sit in the heat, and still taste like it was made minutes ago.

And then safety, which nobody thinks to ask about until they're sitting on the ground. You're in a Big Five reserve. Someone needs to be watching while you're not.

Of course, we have it all covered.

You don't see any of this happen.

While you're somewhere north of the dam with a leopard in a tree, the kitchen is building your lunch. Everything comes in fresh for it and it's put together by hand that morning. Just like sundowner spots and unique safari drives, our options are diverse and ever-changing. So, we will not be committing to the promise of a set menu. What we can confirm is that it will be fresh, delicious and tailored to your taste.

The afternoon these photographs were taken, it was ciabatta wrapped in paper and tied with twine. Salads sealed into clip-top jars so they'd still snap. Warm pastry parcels under poppy seeds. Chicken with lemon. A bowl of ruby-red fruit, and small squares of dessert with blueberries on top.

Then the trays get lined with Chitwa Chitwa paper. The field bar gets packed with ice. Salt and pepper cellars, each with its own little spoon. A hot towel rolled on a silver tray. Blankets, cushions, and two directors' chairs with a small table, in case you'd rather sit across from one another with a glass in your hand.

All of it drives out to the tree and gets laid down in the shade before your arrival.

And there it is. The blanket over the sand. The cushions at one end. The bottle already sweating in a brass bucket with a sprig of green tucked into the ice.

Your host drops you, tells you where he'll be, and leaves the two of you to it.

This is a Big Five reserve. Your guide stays close the whole time, near enough to keep watch, far enough that you stop thinking about him. Nobody hands you a basket and drives away.

This is the part worth the year of planning.

The food is superb, and it would be superb anywhere. What you can't get anywhere else is what happens when you lift your eyes off the plate.

Birds working through the branches above your heads. The sun high and hard, and the two of you sitting deep in shade with a breeze coming through it. An entire private reserve going about its business in every direction, wholly indifferent to the fact that you're there enjoying the bush picnic of a lifetime.

You eat slowly, because there's nowhere to be. You pour a second glass. One of you tells a story the other hasn't heard in years, and neither of you looks at a phone for a couple of hours.

That's all it is. Food made by hand that morning, a very old tree, and the person you most wanted to be sitting under it with.

Tell us what you're marking, and we'll take care of the rest.

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