Hilltop haven offers a singularly nourishing escape from the humdrum

The transfer to Mantis Hiddn in Addo, in the verdant emerald hills east of Gqeberha, is its own introductory adventure. Leaving the city’s crumbling ocean frontage and heading into the countryside where the farms and reserves close in on the road, there is time to stop in at the popular Nanaga Farm Stall where the tourist prices don’t necessarily discourage browsing and the pies and lattes are justifiably hyped.

Then it’s into the beginning of the wilderness, with the turn-off to Addo Elephant National Park coming up soon, before you head into the Eastern Cape Karoo Heartland. The tar road has the national park on both sides, parallel to a railway that still carries trains ferrying fruit into the interior. As traffic starts to drop off, wildlife sightings through the fences become a feature – a lone nyala bull; a fair-sized elephant herd; a forest buzzard – all before leaving the tar. The next section, before the 4×4 vehicle starts earning its stripes, traverses huge orange plantations and passes a police training academy built in a setting that most hoteliers would maim friends for before heading up, up and further up to the top of a heather- and fynbos-cloaked hill where, just below the main lodge, 12 villas are set out along a ridge like a string of architect-approved pearls.

The main building has the impact and authority of a historic five-star hotel, with gorgeous furnishings, a bar, lounge and dining area indoors and a pool and boma outside; the latter two appearing to extend into space thanks to the drop-off of the slope.

Golden silence

When the first staff member greets you with “I’m one of the butlers here”, the in-house standard is set. And when you arrive at your villa and see the view between the discreet privacy screens that form the boundaries of your new private kingdom on either side of the patio, a similarly high bar is set for what is outside the walls.

In general, the villas showcase an eye for and excellence in design, simultaneously offering wonderful, spacious luxury and a floorplan template that, just slightly tweaked and with the frills removed, could be a brilliant model for low-cost housing.

In the villa, as you arrive, there is a set-up involving a large copper bowl, towels and lotions. Therapist BonGa kneels and washes your feet – an ancient, deeply meaningful ritual in many cultures and one that many always-rushing contemporary city folks have forgotten how to appreciate. As a means of being made to feel welcome and as an introduction to Hiddn’s wellness agenda, it’s a gentle, evocative treat.

And then, once you’re alone in your room for the first time, the overwhelming impression is that it’s QUIET, in capital letters – unlike anything it’s possible to experience in a city.

Delight in the detail

Walking up towards the lodge in the dying light, all the wood finishes glow golden. Barman and mixologist Hudson is supremely capable of creating something fresh and exciting around your favourite ingredient. That’s a skill that comes in handy immediately, as the surrounding hills mean that the sunset takes place in phases, blocked by peaks and revealed by valleys, so you may need more than one sundowner… After that, another indulgence: meals here are all fine dining affairs – artisanal bread, an amuse-bouche, a starter, sorbet, a main and dessert – without there ever being a sense of there being too much food. And then to bed, where darkness is equally delicious – thick, enveloping and calming.

Morning sees the slow advance of unfiltered, unpolluted light with a warm wind and a sense of the implacable but benign vastness of the landscape, with birds flying well below your patio but still 60 or 70m above the valley floor.

A continental breakfast can be a thing, it turns out, including a petite beetroot muffin and shocking pink dragon fruit, among other tasty things. This is fuel for a hike that starts in the fynbos belt near the top of the hill, with 100 details to immediately take in, if you’re in the mood to take a slow stroll. There are tiny vermillion flowers, the egg sac of a praying mantis, ants that move faster than you can think, gorgeous lichen patterns and beetles, er, propagating their species.

Happily, there’s a descent into shade as the sun rises, with new details: blankets of moss, orchids, wild asparagus and old man’s beard on the tree branches and fungi and ferns on the forest floor. Further down the slope, the first of the area’s majestic yellowwoods appear, enjoyed as much by striking Knysna turacos as by appreciative walkers. It all feels like a dense, peaceful garden and there’s a multi-tiered cave that might have been the manor house for the first locals. Opposite that, a spectacular red-pink cliff borders the river, leading up to the thin thread of a waterfall, doing its eternal work of hollowing out the hill below, century by century.

Reaching relaxation

So, now you’ve had a walk. In luxury resort terms, that’s heavy-duty effort, so you’ve earned a massage. BonGa returns and almost immediately proves himself a gifted therapist and grounded presence – imagine Yoda if he was elegant, eloquent… and taller. When he’s completed his comprehensive treatment, he asks when check-out will be because he’s picked up something that needs further attention – which lands as kindness and interest rather than the sort of news that makes characters in TV shows grimace and look into the camera.

Processing that sort of comment, you become aware of a rich hospitality organism at work. As the staff here interact with you and learn more about you, they refine the programme that likely best suits you and your needs which, in an all-inclusive context, feels like a rare privilege.

In this instance, it turns out that my skin is dry, which means an exfoliation routine that feels like being basted and wrapped for a slow-cooking experiment (in a good way) before showering it all off while watching a tiny scorpion coming out of a nook somewhere to see if all those droplets meant rain before leaving when it turns out not to be that sort of shower.

There’s more interaction with nature the following day with a drive to the bottom of the valley (including pauses for a baby bushbuck and a huge leopard tortoise) for sundowners, a final treatment – this one involving soothing sound bowls and the resonance and vibrations they transmit – and a swim in the crisp coolness of a sheltered, blue-green pool, all beneath the branches of a 660-year-old yellowwood tree.

All of this (plus a choice of gins) adds up to a totally relaxed frame of mind – and body – during which it’s possible to muse on how different the offering at Hiddn is to any number of other similarly luxurious destinations… and just how enticing that makes it.

Text and photography | Bruce Dennill

For more information or to book a stay, go to hiddninaddo.com.