Place to stay · Matlapana
Grays Eden Sanctuary
Owner-run boutique hotel of five villas and seven cottages above the Thamalakane River in Matlapaneng, opened in 2024, with a spa, a cliff-side pool and a wine cave.
Grays Eden is a small owner-run hotel on a high bank of the Thamalakane River in Matlapaneng, Maun. It opened in the first quarter of 2024 and has only 12 units: five thatched villas and seven smaller cottages. It is built for a soft day or two at either end of a safari.
What to expect
The villas are 81 square metres, with an extra-king four-poster, a roll-top bath, a walk-in shower, an open fireplace and a big covered veranda. Three of them face the river and two sit behind. Three can be made up as twins. The cottages are 56 square metres with king beds and a smaller veranda, four on the river and three in the garden. Every room has a mosquito net, ceiling fan, fridge and wifi, and Expert Africa adds air conditioning.
The look is whitewash, pale wood and wicker, not the usual safari canvas. Hippos and crocodiles live in the river below, and elephants sometimes come down to drink.
A 12 metre pool is cut into the cliff face. The spa has two treatment rooms. The restaurant, The Eden Kitchen, changes its menu often, and a wine cave dug into the same cliff is used for tastings and private dinners.
Practical details
- Breakfast 7.30am to 10am, lunch midday to 2pm, dinner 6pm to 8pm. Meals can be served in the room.
- About 20 minutes by road from Maun International Airport, according to Expert Africa.
- Bookings are by enquiry form or email. The hotel’s site lists no phone number.
- Staff can book visits to the Elephant Havens rehabilitation project nearby, helicopter flights and a guided tour of Maun’s markets and crafts.
Good to know
Children of any age are accepted and a cot or bedroll can be added to a room, but Expert Africa notes the pool is unfenced. It also recommends malaria protection here, so use the nets.
Last updated 12 October 2026. Sources: Grays Eden, Grays Eden, contact, Expert Africa, Grays Eden.
A white cliff, a rain tree and Harry Selby's old firm
The company that sells rooms at Grays Eden goes back to the best-known hunter Maun ever had. Two professionals, Donald Ker and Syd Downey, started Ker & Downey in Kenya in 1945. Harry Selby, who had worked for them since 1949, was made a director in 1962, and a year later he moved his family to Maun to run the firm’s new Botswana side. It built Khwai River Lodge, which the company still calls the country’s first lodge for photographers instead of hunters. Selby resigned as a director in 1993 and the local arm became Ker & Downey Botswana. Since 2009 it has belonged to Chobe Holdings.
Grays Eden is the odd one out among its eight properties. Six are in the delta and one is on the edge of the Central Kalahari. This is the only one in town, and its own site calls it owner-run, while Ker & Downey lists it as one of its camps and Expert Africa calls it a sister property to Shinde, Okuti and Kanana. None of them says who the Gray in the name is.
The river under the cliff runs along a fault
The wine cave is dug into a pale bank that Expert Africa describes as a white cliff. The Thamalakane below it is not an ordinary river. It follows a fault that began to open about two million years ago, an outlying crack of the rifting that is pulling East Africa apart. The Okavango fans out behind that fault and the Thamalakane runs along the line of it, with no proper source and no proper mouth.
Two trees worth a second look
Ker & Downey names the trees that shade the lawn: leadwoods and rain trees. Leadwood timber is heavier than water, so it sinks, and termites leave it alone. One tree has been radiocarbon dated to about 1,070 years. The ash makes a whitewash for hut walls and, mixed with water, a toothpaste.
The rain tree really does drip. Spittle bugs feed on its sap, keep the sugars and salts and pass out almost pure water, enough to leave wet patches underneath in the dry season.
What the one-night guests say
Eight of the nine reports filed with Expert Africa are for a single night on the way in or out of the delta, and one couple wrote that they had wanted to stay longer. Two separate travellers, in May and June 2026, were puzzled by the same thing: the fireplaces built into the rooms cannot be lit. One couple in August 2025 wrote that a member of staff offered to walk them out to look at hippos, which fits the hotel’s line that hippos and crocodiles live in the river below. Elephants, the hotel says, stop to drink only occasionally.
Orphans named after the villages where they were found
The hotel books visits to Elephant Havens, which is further than you might think: more than 40 km north-east of Maun. Boago Poloko, known as Bee, was an elephant handler at Abu Camp who had helped save an orphan called Naledi. In 2017 he started the orphanage with a Texan couple, Debra Stevens and Scott Jackson. The first calf came in on 23 December 2018, days after the permit. They named her MmaMotse. By the orphanage’s own account she broke out of her corral on the first night.
It lists 36 orphans now, and several carry the name of the place they were found. The mother of Chanoga was shot in the leg by a farmer guarding his crop in October 2023, and the wildlife department had her put down. Matsaudi was being chased by villagers and dogs in August 2025 after her mother was killed in another clash over crops.