It was Ernest Hemingway who lured Dan Olofsson to Africa. “I read all his books,” says the Swedish technology entrepreneur who heads the consultancy Sigma, and they lodged in his imagination.
So when he and his wife, Christin, decided in the early 2000s to build a winter home someplace warmer than their native Scandinavia, they considered the Caribbean, but eventually set their sights farther south. “There’s fantastic wildlife and nature in South Africa,” says Olofsson, 65.
Their plans grew to include a guest lodge at what is now the well-regarded Thanda Safari Private Game Reserve. which opened in 2004. (Thanda is Zulu for love.) Soon after, the Olofssons set out to acquire a private island counterpart to their safari lodge and settled on one in the Shungi Mbili Island Marine Reserve in southern Tanzania. After years of negotiation and sustainability-minded construction, it was rechristened Thanda Island and welcomed its first paying guests in August.
The property, which has five bedrooms and rents in its entirety for $10,000 a night (for up to ten people), is roughly 20 acres ringed by coral reefs in protected waters that teem with sea life, including whale sharks, dolphins and five species of turtles. The closest inhabited land is Mafia Island, home to more spectacular marine life, trustworthy dive centres and traditional villages. Thanda Island’s hospitality director, Antigone Meda, likens it to Zanzibar 30 years ago—and while Zanzibar now has 200-room hotels, Mafia has about 200 rooms. (Thanda guests who don’t helicopter in from Dar es Salaam fly to Mafia, where Thanda staff ferry them over in a sleek mahogany boat.)
(This story appears in the 09 December, 2016 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)