The Greater Kruger has no shortage of tented camps, but very few of them look like this.
Masiya's Camp is Liz Biden's first tented property in twenty-five years of building The Royal Portfolio. TIME magazine agreed, naming it one of the World's Greatest Places for 2026.
The camp opened in June 2025 with six suites, a shared concession with Royal Malewane, and the kind of design ambition that makes other tented camps look like they're still thinking it over.
The lounge that makes you realise this is not a normal tented camp.
Six tented suites in the Thornybush Private Nature Reserve, each one roughly 230 square metres. For context: that's larger than most central London flats.
Retractable glass walls open the bedroom directly to the bush. A private heated plunge pool sits on a wooden deck. Indoor and outdoor shower (we recommend the outdoor one at sunrise, when the air is still cool enough to make it feel like a reward). A covered sala for those afternoons when the only reasonable plan is doing nothing at all.
The design draws on rose-pink tones, African art from Tafadzwa Tega and Nontsikelelo Veleko, and vintage furniture set against clean contemporary lines. Canvas, yes. Modest, no.
Worth saying that the suites are set far enough apart that guests can't see their neighbours, hear their conversations, or accidentally wave at them from the plunge pool. Privacy in a tented camp. We didn't expect to be impressed by that, but we were.
The camp is named after Wilson Masiya, who became one of the most respected trackers in the Greater Kruger. He turned up at Royal Malewane in 1999, a refugee who had crossed the border from Mozambique with not much more than a sharp eye and a knowledge of the bush. He guided there until his death in 2015. The tracking culture that defines Royal Malewane today is largely his legacy.
The guiding at Royal Malewane has always been the point. Everything else, the rooms, the design, the plunge pools, exists because the guiding came first. Masiya's story is woven into the concession itself.
The guiding team and their Land Cruiser outside the main lodge. Twenty-five years of tracking knowledge on this concession, and counting.
Guests at Masiya's Camp share the same private concession as the rest of the Royal Malewane collection: Big Five country, unfenced and bordering Kruger National Park. Twice-daily game drives. Guided bush walks. Photographic safaris for anyone who considers a 600mm lens carry-on luggage.
The guiding team is shared across the Royal Malewane property, and it ranks among the strongest in the Greater Kruger. We're talking a guiding infrastructure that has had a quarter-century to mature. The trackers working this concession have decades of combined experience reading the Thornybush wilderness, and Masiya's guests get the full benefit of that.
If guests like a proper spa between game drives, they have access to the Royal Waters Spa at the main lodge. That said, given the size of the suites, a plunge pool and an afternoon on the deck does the job just as well.
A leopard on the Thornybush concession, entirely unbothered.
Masiya's is the newest addition to a Royal Malewane collection that now stretches across four lodges and three private villas, 24 suites in total on a single private concession. Farmstead is the family-friendly one with a farmhouse feel. Waterside sits overlooking a waterhole and does the steady, reliable work. Malewane Lodge is the flagship, freshly refurbished and the one that put the property on the map. And then there's Masiya's: the most spacious per suite, the most private, and the only one under canvas.
The main tent from the outside. Terracotta canvas on steel, open-fronted, with the lounge spilling out toward the bush.
Guests can fly into Hoedspruit Eastgate Airport on Airlink, with direct flights from Johannesburg and Cape Town. From there, it's a 40-minute road transfer. Charter flights can land at the property's private airstrip.
Most guests combine Masiya's with two or three nights in Cape Town or the nearby Cape Winelands, whether they start with the safari or save it for last.
Masiya's Camp is for couples or small groups who want a Greater Kruger safari with the space and privacy of a villa, the design ambition of a boutique hotel, and a guiding team built over more than two decades in the bush. For guests who want canvas without compromise, this is the one to book.
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