Hippo Hollow Country Estate



About
Hippo Hollow Country Estate is an excellent choice for travellers visiting Hazyview, offering a romantic environment alongside many helpful amenities designed to enhance your stay.
As your “home away from home,” the hotel rooms offer air conditioning, and getting online is easy, with free internet access available.
Guests have access to a concierge, sun umbrellas, and beach chairs while staying at Hippo Hollow Country Estate Hotel. In addition, Hippo Hollow Country Estate Hotel offers a pool and a lounge, which will help make your Hazyview trip additionally gratifying. And, as an added convenience, there is free parking available to guests.
If you like sushi restaurants, Hippo Hollow is conveniently located near Kuka Restaurant and Cocktail Lounge.
Plus, during your trip, don't forget to check out a historic site, such as Shangana Cultural Village.
Enjoy your stay in Hazyview!
Location
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The location by the river Sabie and 'very impressive (if you are lucky you can see the hippos in the river). The complex has many accommodations divided between the long part of the complex and various rooms facing the river. It has nice spacious rooms with well-stocked bathrooms but the colonial-style decor and old-fashioned bathroom tiles can make those who pay much attention to these things turn up their noses (I care less about them). The restaurant (until 9.30pm) offers good menu choices for dinner, the food is great but the service is slow. The breakfast is amazing. Abundant, well cared for, varied in menu proposals (no buffet). The missing part is the technological one with low telephone coverage, free wifi but practically available only in the common parts and possibility of power outages.
Parking for free.
Breakfast from 8.00 to 10.00
Check in 14.00-19.30
Check out until 10 a.m.
This is a vast estate and yet all feels very private. The staff are superb, with a great restautant serving a wide array of dishes and on 2 of the nights having themes, one of which was a South African braai night (BBQ). PLus there is the added attraction of the river where hippos and crocodile do tend to come out at nightfall, and there is an elephant sanctuary next door adding to the wildlife mix.
The lodges themselves are well appointed, in a traditional style. The stone floored shower in particular caught my eye.
A superb place to stay, highlly reccomended



The hotel is in a nice setting but as others have said, there’s nothing to do and the restaurant / food isn’t great.
3 minutes up the road are some restaurants / shops and 10 minutes up the road is a large mall, but we were told it wasn’t safe to walk there and quoted between RS1500-3000 / £50-£80 for a taxi / transfer for 3-10 minutes drive!
There is no cheap taxi company so to get to any excursion activity doubled the price and made it too expensive. We did do one excursion which was white water rafting and quad biking, that was great but cost double for the transfer.
The hotel prices for excursions were triple the price of the local company and tourist office, so we booked everything with the local company up the road instead.
There is no shop on site for snacks or drinks and the hotel will not do room service or let you take pizzas from the restaurant to your room. We weren’t sure why? We ended up taking the risk and walking to the local shops and mall and buying snacks for our kids during the stay.
When we arrived at the hotel we immediately upgraded to a river lodge so we had a view of the elephants and river and that was very nice, but the hotel tried to charge us a ridiculous price to do this for 4 nights, luckily a lovely member of staff managed to reduce this for us. The hippo’s grazed below our balcony each night and we saw a family of otters too.
For the whole stay there was a screeching device in the top of our lodge roof which meant we didn’t sleep well. Apparently it was a bat deterrent. We reported it to reception who didn’t do anything and this made the stay quite unrestful.
If you do stay here, stay in a river lodge and have your own transport, otherwise give it a miss.
The staff are trying their best to manage and keep clients happy. Always friendly and helpful even though the problems are beyond their control. Restaurant is great and facilities are well kept except the rooms.
There is a safe and the cabin door locked easily.
We arrived around 4pm. We had been advised about 2 nice restaurants nearby and assumed we could take a taxi or Uber. When we asked about walking over and Ubering back, the Intake person looked totally alarmed and said, "No! No, you can't
do that! It's not safe." We were stunned by the reaction. He then said there are no Ubers or taxis in Hazyview. The only option would be him trying to find someone to drive us over, wait while we had dinner, then drive us back. We estimated it would be about $40-50 USd and not worth it. The only option was their buffet. It was ok but not fabulous. Breakfast buffet was the same. We had 2 breakfasts and the one dinner.
We also had load shedding for 2 1/2 hours from 9pm-11:30pm. That was fine with us as we went to sleep and had a long good night in their comfy beds.
A highlight was seeing elephants being exercised as they "walked to work" at Elephant Whispers nearby across the Sabie River. There was a clear view of the river from the beautiful open air restaurant. We saw this two days in a row!
Hippo Hollow is beautifully decorated and landscaped and is quiet and civilized. We really appreciated that. But, you need your own transport or you are a prisoner there.



Our room was nice, with a huge shower, a safe, lots of space, a little patio that was not far from the small swimming pool. The bed was comfortable, everything worked, and the whole complex was very well cared for.
The lobby area was open, and that's where you could access wifi; it's available in the restaurant/bar area too.
All of the food were had at the restaurant was buffet style and there was good variety and it was pretty high quality. One night we had braai and it was excellent. The bar was small but pretty well stocked and there were barstools for that good ol' experience. Breakfasts were good, with hot and cold items available
The only animals we saw on there property were giant yellow and black caterpillars (and I do mean GIANT), a peahen, and elephants in the distance - oh, and birds.
One night while there, we paid extra to see a dance show where the dancers dressed like warriors stomped to drums. It was a very energetic and athletic show. They picked a couple of audience members to join them and dance; that was entertaining.
The main pool was really nice and pretty big. The smaller pool was not cleaned nearly as often but was still pretty nice.
I liked Hippo Hollow and would recommend it.
buffet dinner at 8: they made us sit at an unset table (not even wiped) for 30 minutes, we asked for drinks and cutlery at least 4 times. the food, in addition to being mediocre, was cold/lukewarm and most of it was finished (we specify: buffet hours are 6.30pm-10pm, but the kitchen closes at 9pm). dirty dishes at both breakfast and dinner.
the worst was for the rooms, both with little more than sufficient cleaning. in particular one of the two had sheets and pillows full of stains and/or hair; the reception's solution was to change our room, but the problem was not completely resolved as the conditions of the new room were almost the same. to conclude there are the towels that stink and in the room there is a high-pitched pounding sound (probably some cable making contact or the smoke sensor) which caused a headache for everyone as it was present in all three rooms

Hippo hollow is a really unique, and in many ways magical place to stay. The river runs right through the property and eating dinner and breakfast in front of it is wonderful. But I think the quality of accommodation is disappointing– the rooms are a little tired, although they are meant to have a rustic feel I think this strays into them not being particularly well maintained and the design and quality of the rooms in the hotel part varies enormously. Initially I was given a dark and dingy room on the ground floor in front of the swimming pool which had no privacy at all. And No working safe, no working ceiling fan and no working TV. The rooms are clean but are obviously never checked for maintenance issues between guests. The room also had a really funny smell and the towels smelt musty and damp. Eventually I was moved to an upstairs room because they could not sort out the TV issue, which was much better, and begs the question, why didn’t they just allocate me that empty room in the first place,I ate dinner one night downstairs in the restaurant - service was typically slow, as is the case across all of South Africa and my halloumi salad wasn’t very nice and did not arrive the same time as my soup which is what I asked for.
The staff here are very helpful, appealing, accommodating cheerful, as is the case across or South Africa. The resort is described as a luxury country estate. I don’t think it could be described as luxury at all but it is unique and that makes it charming
"Book a table by the window in the restaurant. Amazing view of Hippos and Elephants."Read full review
"Make provision for dinner if you do not want to eat at the Restaurant. No facilities to make your own dinner (eg. braai, microwave etc.)"Read full review
"The pool and it’s area is beautiful however it’s spring and the pool is not heated!"Read full review
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