Place to stay · Grootfontein
Seidarap Guest House
A small guesthouse with ten en-suite double rooms on the C42 just outside Grootfontein, a practical overnight stop between Etosha, Waterberg and the north-east.
Seidarap is a guesthouse about 4 km outside Grootfontein on the C42, the road to Tsumeb. Read the name backwards and you get the German word Paradies. It is the sort of place people book for one night on a long drive, sitting where the routes to Etosha, the Waterberg Plateau, Ovamboland and the Zambezi Region (the old Caprivi Strip) all pull apart.
What to expect
There are ten double rooms, each with its own bathroom with shower, toilet and hot water. Rooms are bed and breakfast, and an evening meal can be arranged, so you do not have to drive back into town after dark. Children are welcome, with their own rates.
Practical details
- On the C42 between Grootfontein and Tsumeb, about 4 km from Grootfontein.
- Phone +264 67 242 817, email info@seidarap.com.
- Postal address P.O. Box 88, Grootfontein.
Good to know
The website is part finished, with some placeholder text left on it, so phone or email to book rather than relying on the online form. Grootfontein itself is worth a stop for the museum in the old German fort, and the Hoba meteorite is roughly 24 km west of town.
Last updated 7 October 2026. Sources: Seidarap Guesthouse, Seidarap Guesthouse (German pages), Wikipedia, Grootfontein.
A grandfather's garden and a jackfruit tree at 1,441 metres
Somewhere in the garden at Seidarap there is a jackfruit tree, and the couple who built the guesthouse reckoned it was the only one in Namibia. Nobody has counted, so take that as a gardener’s boast. It is still an odd thing to find here. Jackfruit comes from the wet forests of southern India, carries the heaviest fruit of any tree (up to 50 kg each) and sulks after a few dry months. Grootfontein sits at 1,441 metres and gets next to no rain from June to August.
The grandfather who spelt Paradise backwards
The garden is older than the guesthouse by two generations. Stephan Lukaschik’s grandfather laid it out and gave the plot its backwards name. The palms, oranges, lemons and avocados that the old write-ups list are his garden grown up, and there are mangoes too. Stephan had spent years as a tour guide, his wife Silvia came from the Allgäu in southern Germany, and the two of them turned the grandfather’s old house into a guesthouse with their own labour. It was new in April 2007, when a traveller asking about it on a German-language Namibia forum had found it mentioned in one place only.
The town’s rain helps. Grootfontein averages 557 mm a year, which is generous by Namibian standards, and in the 2010/11 season it got 956 mm. It can also fail badly: 2018/19 brought 230 mm, and a jackfruit tree does not sit out a year like that unwatered.
Six rooms, then ten, then thirteen
The early write-ups give it six double rooms. One German operator added an entrance hall he called imposing and a library for anyone curious about the colonial years the house still has a whiff of. The guesthouse’s older website says ten rooms. The newer one says thirteen and names Saskia Harteveld as manager, and neither mentions the Lukaschiks. Some rooms are upstairs, and the balcony looks out to the Otavi Mountains, the spot the old listings recommend for a drink at the end of the day. The pool was described in those days as naturally treated.
That same operator mentions “lots of great birds” in the garden and leaves it there. Fruit trees and water in dry bush will pull birds in, but I have found no list, so do not book it as a birding stop. The bird people come to this district for is the black-faced babbler, covered on the Grootfontein page.
What the 4x4 crowd use it for
Seidarap was signed up to the Omuramba Meander, a route put together by the social enterprise Open Africa to tie small businesses in Otjiwarongo, Otavi, Tsumeb, Grootfontein and Tsumkwe into one trip. An omuramba is a riverbed that stays dry until a big rain.
Traveller accounts are thin. The one I can point to is a Windhoek regular on the 4x4 Community forum in 2025, who told a couple driving back from the Zambezi Region to skip the usual camp on the B8 and sleep in Grootfontein instead, naming Seidarap as one of two places he would pick. That is one man’s view. It does fit what the house offers now: a bed, a light dinner if you order ahead and fruit trees to walk under on the long haul between the Kavango and Windhoek.
