Blog - Page 2

We were not surprised when we were told that Top Billing had decided to use the luxurious Chobe Water Villas as their anchor location for an entire episode of the popular program.

Chobe Water Villas appoints new management

The bush telegraph has confirmed that Peter Heckmair has been appointed as General Manager, whilst Birgit Heckmair has been appointed as Assistant General Manager for Chobe Water Villas, with effect from 01 March 2019.

Both are extremely passionate about tourism and love Africa and all it has to offer.

A star is born in Chobe

Any baby that is born, human or animal, is a miracle and celebrated, but not all are so lucky as to witness this little miracle taking place. Not so for our Australian guests that were on a sunset cruise in the Chobe National Park on 2 October this year.

The guests were fondly looking at a 2 week old baby elephant when all of a sudden there was a lot of confusion. At first giggles, then amazement as the guests thought that they had spotted a very frisky and well endowed male elephant. Wink wink,,,say no more!

But alas, they were terribly wrong....

Chobe Water Villas is located in the far north eastern corner of Namibia’s on the banks of the Chobe River. The area around the lodge is prone to yearly flooding and hence infrastructure like roads and power lines to the lodge are non-existent. To provide our esteemed guests with a luxury experience deep in the bush, an uninterrupted electricity supply to operate Chobe Water Villas is a definite requirement. This has been supplied since opening in 2016 by means of a small solar plant and a diesel generator. The solar plant was not efficient enough and required the generator to run almost 24 hours per day and running up a huge fuel bill at the end of every month.

With the O&L value “Naturally today for tomorrow” in mind and also our vision to reduce our carbon footprint by 20% in 2019 - we had to critically re-assess the situation we found ourselves in. O&L Leisure’s value is to host all our guests in a true Namibian style with warmth and sincerity, whilst offering a genuine sense-of-place experience. This can only be achieved if one has the right tools – and stable electricity supply is a basic must-have. Something clearly had to be done and hence it was decided to partner up with O&L Energy to invest in a state of the art solar farm and storage system which would help us in our endeavor to achieve all these goals.