When we start a conversation with guests planning their first East African safari, one of the first forks in the road is accommodation. Do you want to base yourself at a permanent tented camp — a proper piece of built architecture, rooted in one spot, with plunge pools and electricity and a gin in your hand at four in the afternoon — or do you want the older, wilder, more improvised experience of a mobile camp, where the tents are canvas and the shower is hot bucket water and the place you slept last night is, tonight, two hundred miles behind you?
The honest answer, I tell guests, is: it depends on the shape of the trip you want. Not on your budget. Both can be very comfortable. Both can be very beautiful. Both can be done badly and both can be done well. Let me try to say what each is really for.
What a lodge or permanent tented camp is for
A permanent camp — and I am including our own Seringet Mara Camp in this — has the advantage of being designed, over time, for the piece of land it sits on. The tents have been positioned to catch the morning light off the plain. The mess has been rotated a quarter-turn to face the river. The rugs and lamps have been chosen by somebody who has lived in the camp for a season and knows what a guest tent feels like on a very wet Tuesday night. All the small decisions have been thought about not once but dozens of times, year on year.
A permanent camp also offers more amenities, usually. A plunge pool, if you want one. Electricity for charging. Wi-Fi for guests who need to stay lightly in touch. A spa tent. A gift shop (we don't have one at Seringet, but many do). The detail around food and wine can be richer because the cellar is permanent. The vehicle fleet is there and maintained on site. The staff are generally a larger team.
What you sacrifice is flexibility. You have to come to the camp; the camp cannot come to you. And there are parts of East Africa you cannot reach by permanent lodge — the empty bits of the north, the private valleys of the Mathews, the back country of the Chyulus — because nobody built a lodge there, and hopefully nobody ever will.
What a mobile camp is for
A mobile camp answers the opposite question. You come to it, yes — but the camp has already come to exactly the bit of country you most wanted. It can go where permanent camps cannot go. It can follow the migration. It can pitch for three nights in a river bend and then strike and move, and three days later the only sign you were ever there is a faint ring of stones.
A mobile camp is not a downgrade from a lodge. It is a different thing, and in the hands of a good operator it is often the more memorable.
What a mobile camp gives you that a lodge cannot is a feeling of being in the country rather than on top of it. The canvas is thinner. You hear more. You smell more. The routines of camp life — the head guide going through the plans at breakfast, the cook's fire, the staff greeting each other at first light — feel closer to hand. There is a relationship with the place which develops over three or four days that you do not quite get at a lodge.
You also sacrifice some conveniences. Hot water is on demand, but requires a minute of warning. Charging is solar and sometimes slow. The Wi-Fi is as good as the nearest hill. The bathroom is proper but not marble. If these are dealbreakers, stay at a lodge.
The combination is often best
For most first-time guests we plan a trip that starts with a few nights at a permanent camp — to get your safari legs, to learn how the days work, to decompress from the flight — and then moves out to a mobile camp for the deeper, quieter, stranger second half. The contrast between the two is, we think, what makes the trip. You come home with two different kinds of memory.
On the shorter side, a very happy seven-night trip is three nights at Seringet Mara Camp and four nights at our Mobile Camp in Samburu. On the longer side, two weeks, you can add a third leg — gorillas in Uganda or Rwanda, a few beach nights on the Kenyan coast, or a return to the Mara to end on a high.
A word on price
A mobile camp often costs more per night than a lodge, which surprises people. The reason is straightforward: a mobile camp is built and staffed for one party. A lodge amortises staff and infrastructure across many. So the lodge is the more efficient product. But the mobile camp, in the right piece of country, is the more extraordinary one, and it is by some distance the experience our repeat guests come back for.
If you would like to talk through what the right combination might be for your particular trip, write to us. Nigel or I will reply, and we'll sketch a draft.
Lolo · Head Guide
Lolo is Head Guide at Nigel Archer Safaris, leading safaris across East Africa and setting the standard for the wider guiding team.