Africa Wild

New 4-star cottages planned for Mountain Zebra National Park

Cape Town - The Mountain Zebra National Park outside Cradock will be expanding their accommodation offering due to high demand, adding eight new accommodation units in the park.

Fayroush Ludick for the MZNP says it is "The combination of a high occupancy rate and the desire to offer guests more accommodation options to choose from" that spurred on the expansion, which is set to be completed in March 2017.

Six one-bedroom (two-sleeper) cottages and two more luxurious “rock chalets” are being built in the rest camp in the park just outside Cradock.

The six new units are aimed at two people sharing or a couple, for whom a family unit is too big. Each unit will comprise of one bedroom, kitchen, lounge with fireplace and a bathroom with shower.

One of the one-bedroom cottages will be built to cater for guests with mobility impairment, in line with SANParks’ Universal Access in Tourism policy.

The two “rock chalets” will be built at a higher elevation than the rest of the units and clad with rock so as to blend into their natural surroundings. These units will be built to cater for the four-star market and will offer two bedrooms, both en-suite (bath and shower), kitchen, lounge with fireplace, as well as an outside deck with built-in braai and outside showers.

The new units will complement the 20 two-bedroom (four-sleeper) family cottages, as well as the camping site, already on offer in the rest camp.





The work is being carried out by Tewo Construction & Civil Contractors from East London, which started work on site on Monday,25 April. Their work will also include the upgrade of the rest camp’s ageing bulk services (water, electricity and sewerage) in order to cater for the additional units.

Earlier this month, the Department of Environmental Affairs officially instated the Mountain Zebra-Camdeboo Protected Environment (MZCPE) located between Camdeboo and Mountain Zebra National Parks in the Eastern Cape.

This means that the area between the two national parks, mainly farmland consisting of grassland, will be protected.

The DEA said the vision for the future is ultimately to link Camdeboo National Park at Graaff-Reinet with the Mountain Zebra National Park at Cradock - thereby creating a single conservation area over 120km in length and including up to 520 000 hectares of land under conservation.

Looks almost fancy

Very fancy

So, it will be even worse than I had imagined.

These two rock chalets which will allow the 4-star toffs to look down on everyone else will probably be located adjacent to the Black Eagle Trail.

Anyway, I stand by everything I wrote at the beginning of this thread, only now even more so.

Constructions like that do not belong in a nature park

We were thinking of taking a trip to MZNP in July, but we might have to re-think those plans. The idea of noise isn't appealing at all - it's the peace of the place which makes it so attractive

Why don't treat yourselves to the Mountain Cottages, PJL. Out of the camp, still fenced in but on your own.

Mel wrote:Why don't treat yourselves to the Mountain Cottages, PJL. Out of the camp, still fenced in but on your own.

Are they fenced Mel? If so that might be an idea