The Eastern Cape has seen centuries of loss, but standing at Founders Lodge, surrounded by wildlife and stories of recovery, it became clear that decline is not the only possible ending.
Eastern Cape, South Africa (22 February 2026) – Founders Lodge: Where hope grows. That’s the title I chose while I was driving in a game vehicle, surrounded by wildlife. But also hope. Hope was all around me.
I was invited to Founders Lodge by Mantis (or Founders as I now call it), a luxury boutique safari lodge set on its own private land in the Eastern Cape, with traversing rights on Shamwari Game Reserve, and yes, it had all the bells and whistles, thoughtful spaces, generous comfort, food served in the most breathtaking locations and sunsets that made my shoulders drop, my breath slow down and my jaw unclench. The lodge even has a luxury train carriage where you can sleep… but Founders is so much more than just indulgence alone.
Founders is a living story of restoration, adaptability and very real good news that deserves to be shared.
Founders Lodge was once the home of conservationist Adrian Gardiner, and over breakfast one morning, I had the chance to sit with him and listen. This man makes you lean in. His stories shift perspective. He makes you believe that we can take something broken and not only fix it, but build it into something that thrives. Adrian was a successful businessman (and still is) in Port Elizabeth who, in 1990, bought a 1,200-hectare farm as a family weekend escape. Curiosity changed everything. As he researched the land’s history, he discovered that the Eastern Cape had once been one of the richest wildlife regions in Africa in terms of biodiversity. The Big Five were first encountered here. What followed centuries of farming, hunting and drought was a landscape stripped of vegetation and wildlife. That realisation sparked something. No, it lit a fire inside of him, and what began as a personal project became a mission to restore what had been lost and prove that conservation could work for nature and people alike.
“I found my passion”, he tells me.
After years of running various businesses, Adrian decided to put all his effort into an uncharted world for him. Bringing back wildlife to an area where there was none.
“It wasn’t easy. And the outcome was never guaranteed. But I knew that this was something I wanted to try to do,” Adrian explained.
What Adrian and his team took on here was enormous. You don’t undo almost 300 years of damage with good intentions and a few years of effort. And many people believed it could not be done at all. But Adrian had that fire in him. He knew this project would need people willing to think in decades, not seasons, and every single person had to invest in something they might never fully see completed. The work began at ground level, literally rebuilding life from the soil up, before animals could ever return. Negotiations began, fences were removed, the land was restored, and, slowly, it began to respond.
Being in the reserve, you’re constantly aware of what was lost, what was found and what has been clawed back.
We have a rule at Good Things Guy to not write about rhinos while giving away their locations but I simply cannot leave them out of this story. There were so many of them. I have been lucky enough to travel to many lodges around our beautiful country and I have never seen that many rhinos in one location. In South Africa, where poaching has devastated populations over the past two decades and where we have mourned animal after animal lost to greed, this felt almost unreal. Yet here, and across many parts of the Eastern Cape, the story has shifted. The guides tell me they handle poaching differently.
“It is stopped before it starts. The focus has changed. The people doing the tracking are now tracking those who threaten wildlife. We know where the poachers are before they even do,” our guide explains.
Tracking poachers before they can even know what direction they are facing.
This is the place where hope grows.
Of course, the land is alive with far more than rhinos. Elephants move through valleys that were once bare. Lions rest where cattle once grazed. Giraffe, buffalo, zebra and antelope form part of a balanced system that is finding its rhythm again. There is something deeply grounding about watching animals behave as they are meant to, unhurried and unthreatened, while knowing how close we came to losing this entirely.
The lodge was full, a mix of South Africans and international guests, many of whom had never been to our country before. On one game drive, we had a couple from the UK sitting with us in the vehicle. We came across a lion kill. The female lay sleeping under a bush to the left, the male mirrored her on the right, and between them four small lion cubs were eating, playing, tumbling over one another, completely unaware of how rare and precious that moment was.
The woman sitting next to me suddenly began to cry. Seeing her tears made me well up.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything so raw and so beautiful. I’ve travelled a lot, but this… this makes you feel so small. I didn’t realise places like this still existed.”
It was her first visit to South Africa, and in that moment, I could see how deeply it had already settled into her heart. They had chosen this lodge as it was “close” to Cape Town, where they had spent the previous week. And it is a malaria-free area.
There’s something incredibly powerful about seeing our country through the eyes of someone experiencing it for the first time. As South Africans, we live with these landscapes, these stories and this beauty so close to us that it can sometimes fade into the background of daily life, if we’re lucky enough to visit lodges. But watching a visitor be moved to tears by a moment that feels almost ordinary to us brings it all back into focus. Moments like that shift perspective. They remind us that the work being done here matters far beyond our borders. That every animal protected, every hectare restored, every community that shows up when it counts, is shaping how the world sees South Africa. Not through headlines or stereotypes, but through lived, emotional experiences that stay with people long after they’ve gone home.
This is where hope grows.
At one point, while sitting at breakfast, I said to Adrian that I couldn’t quite get my head around the scale of what had been achieved here. That it felt almost impossible when you consider where the land started.
He took a sip of his coffee and very profoundly said, “At the beginning, I didn’t think about what it would look like one day. I just knew that leaving it as it was wasn’t an option.”
Then he added, “If you’re willing to commit to the long road, the land will meet you there.”
Founders wasn’t built on optimism. It was built on persistence and passion.
But my journey didn’t end at Founders Lodge. I also visited Nyosi Wildlife Reserve, just outside Port Elizabeth, another of Adrian’s projects and a place that challenges everything you think you know about conservation. Nyosi is a first-of-its-kind peri-urban reserve, nestled between two cities, where wildlife roams freely while human life continues just beyond the boundary. It is surreal to sit on a hill, watching animals move through the landscape, while a city hums in the distance. But it also feels right. Animals were here first. They deserve space, even when that space exists side by side with people.
What makes Nyosi work isn’t just vision or planning. It’s people. The surrounding community understands what this land represents and what it has taken to restore it. They don’t see it as separate from themselves. They see it as something worth protecting.
Just a couple of weeks before my visit, a devastating fire broke out many kilometres away and spread fast, fuelled by dry land and wind. The Eastern Cape has been in a drought for more than a decade. Fires here are not just dangerous; they are relentless. Large parts of Nyosi were scorched. You can still see the marks on the land, blackened earth and trees standing as reminders of how close it came to being lost again. The fire burned for two days.
But that’s not the story that matters.
When the flames reached the reserve, the community arrived. Forty bakkies strong. Ordinary men and women who dropped what they were doing and showed up. For 48 hours, they fought the fire together, creating firebreaks, protecting animals and refusing to let years of restoration be undone in a single weekend. There was no fanfare and no expectation of recognition… just a shared understanding that this land mattered and it needed them.
Our guide tears up a little as he explains how much the community cares about this project.
“This reserve isn’t something that exists apart from the community,” he tells us. “It’s part of their lives. So when the fire started, they showed up the same way you would for family.”
This is where hope grows.
Nyosi is also where cheetahs are being reintroduced. We tracked a cheetah for almost an hour, who has called Nyosi home for 2 years now and has raised 4 cubs in that time. It’s impossible not to feel the weight of what that means. Cheetahs are listed as Vulnerable, facing a very real risk of extinction, with fewer than 7,000 left in the wild. They’ve disappeared from roughly 90% of their historic range, pushed out by habitat loss, human conflict, dwindling prey, and genetic challenges that make survival even harder. For a species built for speed, their future has been painfully fragile. But Nyosi is changing that narrative. This project isn’t about placing cheetahs into a fenced space and hoping for the best. It’s about giving them room to do what they do naturally, space to hunt, to move, and exist without constant pressure or interference. The reserve has been carefully prepared, prey populations restored, landscapes opened up and monitored, and long-term thinking put ahead of short-term results.
You need to put Nyosi on your list of places to visit. Even just for a day.
After visiting Nyosi, we made our way back to Founders for our final evening. There was no formal dining room set up for us to eat. Instead, there was a fire, a long table, a braai and people. South Africans and visitors from around the world sat side by side, passing plates, swapping stories, talking about the Eastern Cape and trying, in our own ways, to articulate what we had experienced over the past few days. Conversations drifted from wildlife to community, from restoration to responsibility and from disbelief to gratitude.
Sitting there, under an open sky, it became clear that Founders isn’t special because it is luxurious, or remote, or beautiful, although it is all of those things. It is special because it represents what is possible when people care deeply enough to stay involved. When they choose the long road. When they decide that land, animals and communities are worth protecting together.
This isn’t just a lodge. It isn’t just a reserve. It’s a reminder. A reminder that hope doesn’t arrive by accident. It is built, defended, shared and sustained by people who refuse to accept loss as the only outcome. And if you ever find yourself in the Eastern Cape, whether for a day or a week, make the effort to visit places like Founders and Nyosi. Not just to see the wildlife but to witness what happens when humans choose to do better.
Standing there, surrounded by stories of recovery and connection, you realise something incredibly powerful.
This is where hope grows.
Sources: Trip to Founders Lodge and Nyosi Wildlife Reserve | Interviews with Adrian Gardiner and various guides
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