Kenya: Where to Stay: Setting: Cottars 1920s Camp

Cottars 1920s Camp

Like other colonial-style lodges, Cottars 1920s Camp, as the name implies, is a safari lodge that recaptures the glamour and romance of an earlier era of African exploration. Its six white canvas tents contain antique rugs and furniture, large canopied beds, silver chandeliers and old-fashioned bathtubs. Other elegant touches include private butlers and dressing rooms as well as a reading tent for bookish adventurers. Cottars, unlike many other camps though, has a deep history in the bush (also as the name implies). Its owner Calvin Cottar, who opened the camp in 1996, is a fourth-generation Kenyan whose great-great grandfather founded the continent’s first safari outfitter, Cottars Safari Service, in 1919 (in what was then British East Africa). Over the next eighty years, the Cottars literally dedicated their lives to exploration in the Mara—a family chronology lists which members died from rhino tramplings and black water fever. Today, Cottars Safari Service is consistently ranked as one of Africa’s top outfitters while the lodge is the only permissible operator on a 22,000-acre private land concession. So while some areas of Kenya seem to contain more tour buses than lions, Cottars has a remoteness that would still inspire Hemingway and Blixen. Book well in advance. From $710/person/night.

Families or those desiring a bit more privacy should consider Little Cottars Camp, a collection of four secluded tents, located a short distance from the main six units. Each brings the villa concept into tented form and has two bedrooms, a large bathroom and a common sitting area. Call for rates.