Nature Hotels

A hotel can put a forest outside every window and still be a city hotel with trees. The difference is who keeps the timetable. In Nature Hotels it is kept by something that is not on the staff rota, and the hotel's work is to have guests in the right seat when it arrives, then to keep out of its way.

In South Africa's Madikwe reserve the elephants decide. Rockfig Lodge keeps an underground hide beside its waterhole, where guests wait at ground level for the zebra and elephants to come to drink. On the Osa Peninsula of Costa Rica the howler monkeys set the hour, heard from the semi-open bathrooms of Southern Drake Lodge, four suites built by an owner who arrived at Drake Bay with two bags of tools. At Zanzi Resort, on the west coast of Zanzibar, the bush babies come out in the garden at dusk, and some evenings there are dolphins off the jetty. In Paro's Neyphu Valley, Bhutan Spirit Sanctuary hands the timetable to an older authority, a doctor of traditional Bhutanese medicine who writes each guest's plan on arrival. The Crocodile Hunter Lodge is the one purists will query, a set of cabins at Australia Zoo, and the one we would defend first. They are built from the timber of a grandstand Steve Irwin put up with his own hands, and the koalas, which sleep up to twenty hours a day, tend to wake by the pool between three and four.

Allow more nights than seem necessary, since apart from the koalas nothing here keeps appointments. Members book every one at rates held inside the club, which makes the extra night easier to justify. At Río Hermoso, seven rooms on a private riverbank in Patagonia's Lanín National Park, there are no televisions, by design. In spring the trout run upstream to spawn and jump the shallows below the veranda in plain sight.