DISCOVER
BY RYAN ENSLIN – @ MY _ LIME _ BOOTS
IN A WORLD OF RUSHED SCHEDULES AND SCATTERED LIVES, TRUE LUXURY IS UNHURRIED TIME TOGETHER – UNPLUGGED, UNPRESSURED, AND SHARED ACROSS GENERATIONS. AT BABIRWA GOLF AND BUSH LODGE IN THE QUIET FOLDS OF THE WATERBERG, CONNECTION IS RESTORED AS DEEPLY AS REST.
Inter-generational travel is no longer an afterthought. Increasingly, it’ s the antidote to lives lived in parallel. Parents and grown children, grandparents and teenagers, even families joined through friendship, they seek places where conversation can stretch unhurriedly, where a morning’ s coffee might become a story, and where memory is made in the same breath as rest.
For groups of friends, the impulse is similar but charged with nostalgia. To travel together as adults is to recover the ease of earlier versions of ourselves. The long talks, the late laughter and the comfort of people who know your history. The destination matters, but only insofar as it creates conditions for reconnection.
In that sense, Babirwa is less a lodge than a setting, a landscape calibrated to restore the art of shared time.
DESIGNED FOR TOGETHERNESS Just three units, each softened into the bush, shape Babirwa’ s accommodation. Six bedrooms in total, but what they contain cannot be tallied so easily: space, hush and a gentle invitation to slow down. The design is unfussy, confident in its restraint. Wide verandahs, deep chairs, textures that belong to the earth they rise from.
This spareness becomes its own kind of generosity. In families, it lets each generation find rhythm without friction. An early riser watching the mist lift from the bush while another sleeps in, a child cycling ahead on a dirt track, grandparents lingering over a second pot of tea. For friends, it’ s the room between conversations that makes them richer.
By late afternoon, the bush changes tone. Shadows lengthen, conversation softens and the day bends toward that ritual shared by generations of travellers: sundowners in the wild. No soundtrack needed. Just a quiet pour, the low hum of cicadas, and the feeling that everything unnecessary has been set down.
MEALS BECOME MEMORY Around the fire, food becomes memory’ s vessel. At Babirwa, that continuity rests in the capable hands of Chef Lizzy Taolela, whose eight years in the kitchen have distilled something essential: the idea that food can gather people even before it’ s served.
66 | SUMMER 2025 / 26 • rovesa. co. za