A mobile safari is, in my view, the most honest way to travel in East Africa. Not the only way — I love our permanent camp at Seringet, and there are permanent lodges in this country that would hold their own anywhere in the world — but the mobile camp is the oldest form of the thing. It is where this idea of safari began. And if you build it properly it still feels, every night, a small miracle: that a dozen canvas walls and a long table and a cook and two Maasai guards and a fire have been set up in this particular bend of the river for you, and that in three nights it will all come down, and nobody will know it was ever here.
The question I get asked most about planning a mobile safari is: how far do we go, and how often do we move? There is a temptation, with a mobile camp, to keep moving — five camps in ten nights, one new country for every night of the trip. I gently steer against this. A mobile camp takes a day to pitch properly, a day to pack up properly, and is most beautiful when it has had three or four nights to settle in. The fire has scorch marks of its own by then. The guides have worked out where the elephant come down to drink. The mess has its own cook's corner. Move less, stay longer. You will remember it better.
Begin with the country, not the camp
The right planning question is not "which camps do we combine?" but "which piece of country do we want to live in?" That is a different question. Samburu is not Laikipia. The Mathews Range is not the Mara. The Chyulus are not Amboseli. We have pitched the mobile camp in every one of those places and each of them rewards a different kind of day. Samburu rewards photographers because of the river, the light and the specialist species — reticulated giraffe, gerenuk, Grevy's zebra, Somali ostrich. The Mathews rewards walkers. The Chyulus reward guests who have already done a safari or two and now want something quieter, more elemental. The Mara private conservancies reward almost everybody, which is why we so often end trips there.
A mobile camp is most beautiful when it has had three or four nights to settle in. Move less, stay longer. You will remember it better.
The rhythm of a good day
The best mobile-camp days tend to follow a shape I could draw with my eyes shut. You wake to a knock and a soft voice with coffee, the canvas faintly lit by a paraffin lamp outside. You dress in layers because it is cold at five in the morning in this country, and you are out at first light because the only currency that matters in East Africa is light, and the first hour of it is worth all of the rest. A drive, a walk, a long stop on a ridge. Breakfast in the grass, wherever the morning has taken you, properly laid — linen, silver, hot food from an insulated box, tea, and the kind of silence you have not heard since the last time you were here.
Back to camp for the middle of the day. Lunch on the mess verandah, open on three sides. A book, a nap, a shower. A hot bucket shower in a mobile camp is, strangely, one of the best showers you will ever take: the water is exactly the temperature you ordered it, and it arrives at the exact moment you walk over to the wash-tent. The head guide will find you at about four o'clock. The afternoon is built around what was spoken of at lunch. If there was a leopard in the sausage trees at the back of camp, we go and look. If the morning's cheetah is still on her kill, we return. Sundowners are set up somewhere with a horizon.
Dinner is the set piece. Fire, bar, long table, candles, a slow-cooked shoulder of lamb from a boma two valleys over, some impossibly dressed salad that our cook will refuse to explain the dressing of, a pudding somebody will request again the next night, and one bottle too many of South African red. It is the reason our repeat guests are repeat guests.
Private means private
There is one piece of mobile-camp philosophy I will always defend. A mobile camp is for one party at a time. Yours. Nobody else's. Not yours plus strangers, not yours with a couple who happen to be on the same dates, not yours with a private guide but a shared mess. Yours.
This matters because the whole point of the thing — the reason it costs what it costs, the reason it is worth it — is that the staff have you to themselves. Our cook is cooking for you. Our head guide is planning your days. The bar knows what you drink. The bed has been made the way it was made yesterday, and the way it will be made tomorrow. A mobile camp with shared guests is, however nicely done, a hotel. A mobile camp with exclusive use is a different class of thing altogether.
How many nights?
If you are doing a first mobile safari, I would argue for seven. Three in one location, four in another, with a flight between. If you have been before and want to go further, ten to fourteen. Our longest mobile safari recently was twenty-one nights; it finished at the coast on a dhow with my son as crew, which is a story for another post.
If this is your first safari full stop, I would not send you on a mobile straight in. I would argue — as I often do — for a few nights at Seringet first, to get your safari legs, to learn how to use your binoculars properly, and then for the mobile. That way, when the mobile camp arrives, you are ready for it. And you will be ready.
Nigel Archer · Founder
Nigel has been guiding private safaris in East Africa since the early 1990s. He founded Nigel Archer Safaris in 1999.