Geza Ulole
JF-Expert Member
- Oct 31, 2009
- 59,185
- 79,368
- Thread starter
- #821
A ‘redefined’ safari experience at The Highlands in Tanzania
Nigel Tisdall
The pioneering camp suggests that it is time to move on from traditional tents to bulbous domes
Inside one of the domes of The Highlands camp in Tanzania
It’s not every day you get a whopping 6km-wide volcanic crater to yourself. Well, almost — I’m being escorted by an armed ranger (in case we encounter buffalo) and two twenty-something Masai guides who eruditely point out the purple-flowering Gutenbergia cordifolia and help me sort my red-billed teal from my Cape teal.
Ringed with steep, 500m-tall forested walls, Empakaai crater is an immense, deserted egg-cup in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area in northern Tanzania. Its centrepiece is a lake the colour of mchicha (local spinach) soup, across which flamingos prance in a shimmering tide of pink. It is a spectacle that offers — to borrow one of the opening lines of the 1985 movie Out of Africa, which still conditions many a visitor’s vision of the east African safari — “a glimpse of the world through God’s eyes”.
While the much larger and better-known Ngorongoro crater, 25km to the south-west, receives 50,000 visitors a month, Empakaai gets a mere 60. As destinations, the two craters are complementary. The first is a famous World Heritage Site with more than 25,000 large animals conveniently parcelled up in a natural safari park set inside a colossal caldera, where clouds dance along the rim like a mighty white feather boa. The second is a place to go hiking, to break free from the endless sitting in game-drive vehicles with camera a-ready, and instead go feet-first into a bright universe of birds, flowers and paw-prints in the mud that can be just as rewarding as ticking off the Big Five (lion, elephant, buffalo, leopard and rhino — an annoying legacy from the days of big-game hunting) that so obsesses the first-time safari-goer.
Trips to both these craters, along with an ascent of the smaller Olmoti crater, which boasts a picturesque waterfall, form the core experiences in a visit to The Highlands, a pioneering high-altitude camp that opened last month with a self-declared mission to “redefine the Ngorongoro experience”. A three-hour drive north of Lake Manyara airstrip, it has been created by the Arusha-based safari specialist Asilia, who clearly enjoy establishing camps in boundary-pushing locations across Kenya and Tanzania. These include Namiri Plains in the eastern Serengeti and Rubondo Island on Lake Victoria, while next year will see the high-end Jabali Ridge open in the little-visited Ruaha National Park in the south of the country.
An aerial view of the Olmoti crater
Set on the flank of the Olmoti crater at 2,660m (200m higher than the Ngorongoro crater rim and 300m higher than Europe’s highest ski resort), The Highlands certainly redefines the lungs. Walking uphill to breakfast in the rarefied air leaves me gasping, and with a daily temperature ranging from 4C at night to 26C in the afternoon, the phrase “climate change” takes on a new meaning. The reward for facing all of this, plus the gruelling, bruising, hour-long off-road 4x4 drive it takes to get here (improvements are promised), is to find yourself in a remote and enchanting landscape far away from the tourist hullabaloo. The grassy, treeless plains flanking Olmoti crater are indeed reminiscent of the Scottish Highlands (albeit enhanced with sunshine and zebras), and if you add in the thickets of thistles and tartan-like patterns of the Masai’s shukas (blankets), there seems every justification for the camp’s Old Moti bar to stock a splendid choice of 22 whiskies. Fancy a wee dram of 25 year-old Bunnahabhain after a hard day watching jackals hunt, hippos yawn and lions copulate? You bet . . .
With nine bulbous geodesic domes spread around a hillside that catches both sunrise and sunset, The Highlands makes a bold suggestion that perhaps it’s time to move on from the traditional tented safari camp. Manufactured in Oregon and successfully deployed in numerous hotels from the Swiss Alps to Chilean Patagonia, they look like something from a wacky New Age community but are, in fact, sturdy and comfortable, and particularly popular with families (three units have a mezzanine level, plus there’s a big and little dome combination sleeping four). You can lie in your king-size bed looking at the stars and there’s a wood-burning stove, en suite facilities with a double shower, and a panoramic wooden deck. But no electric sockets, only USB power-points.
Another view of one of the camp’s domes
Interiors are by the Cape Town design team Artichoke, a flurry of faux-fur throws, hide rugs, chunky wooden stools and industrial-style lamps that feels decidedly Nordic. Heading to my dome-sweet-dome after dinner (meals are, at present, a weak spot) I half-expect to step out into drifts of snow with the aurora borealis overhead. Instead I find the Southern Cross and Masai watchmen with solar torches offering yet more anti-buffalo protection.
It is these brightly robed semi-nomads, still so close to their traditions, who occupy one’s thoughts when you stay here. One reason is the large black-and-white portraits of local tribesmen and women that decorate The Highlands, which were commissioned from the South African photographic artist Graham Springer. The facial expressions of his sitters say it all: while some offer beaming smiles, others look puzzled or wary, as you might well be when a strange camp full of foreign ways gets beamed down on to your barren, mist-roofed plains.
Driving to and from our crater excursions in Land Cruisers regretfully billowing storms of dust, we look out at a lifestyle that seems little changed in a century. The stockaded villages, the child shepherds, the young girls adorned with ornate beaded jewellery carrying huge bundles of firewood, the homemade beehives hanging in the acacia trees. Our days are bookended with the tinkling sound of great herds of cattle, sheep and goats on the move — some say “Ngorongoro” is an onomatopoeic Masai word describing the ringing of cowbells.
©Nigel Tisdall
A ranger inside the Empakaai crater
About 42,000 Masai live in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area and they are still permitted to graze livestock on the floor of the Ngorongoro crater, despite it being a treasure trove of wildlife. Safari purists tend to be disdainful of the game-viewing experience here, and it can get congested — at one point I count 18 vehicles crowding around a pair of lions. Amusingly, while some passengers fret that they’ll be eaten alive by the king of the jungle, what the guides fear most is a lion that decides to go to sleep under your vehicle — in which case you could be stuck for hours.
Such scenes are not so dreadful once you realise we are just one more creature out hunting in this enormous 260 sq km amphitheatre, and there is plenty to gawp at. The menacing hyena, the zebra stallions fighting, the fish eagle with a lizard in its claws, the distant black rhino, the ostrich squatting in the road, the woefully naked Thomson’s gazelles with their tails flicking like high-speed windscreen wipers.
One advantage of staying at The Highlands is that in the morning you can enter the Ngorongoro crater via the Lemala entrance (effectively the back door) rather than the much busier Lodoare Gate, with its unseemly mass of vehicles stopping to do paperwork, and opportunistic baboons making food raids. This gives us a sense of the crater’s timelessness before the crowds build up, while for lunch Asilia pulls a masterstroke by pre-booking one of several “special picnic sites” set aside for private dining — much better than using the main public one, which can have more than 50 vehicles parked together.
Sitting under the yellow fever trees with a glass of Stellenbosch Sauvignon Blanc, as a smiling chef cooks up some spicy chicken, I feel as relaxed as the five-strong pride of lions reclining on some nearby rocks.
Details
Nigel Tisdall was a guest of Kenya Airways, and The Highlands. Kenya Airways fly from London Heathrow to Kilimanjaro via Nairobi, from £590 return; Coastal Aviation has connections to Lake Manyara. From now until the end of October, The Highlands costs $895 per person per night including full-board with drinks and activities; low-season rates drop to $430
The five-star trailer tent
The Roving Bushtops camp, in its mobile form
Deep inside the game-filled plains of the central Serengeti, Roving Bushtops is an innovative new mobile camp that features “the most luxurious safari tent in the world”, writes Nigel Tisdall. Two years in the making, with serene interiors by the Swiss architect Andrin Schweizer, it is a marvel of foldaway engineering that ingeniously packs all the pampering delights of a five-star hotel suite — including a king-size bed with linen sheets and a double hot tub — into a food-truck-like trailer. Hitched up to a 4x4 game-viewing vehicle, this can be driven into the bush in search of adventure while providing all the high-class comforts the well-booted safari-goer likes to enjoy.
Created by Andy and Claudia Stuart, who successfully developed the concept of “wild luxury” with two fixed Bushtops camps in the Mara and northern Serengeti, this freewheeling version came about because the Serengeti National Park offers few permanent sites for investment. There are a variety of “special campsites”, though, that tour operators can book — Roving Bushtops currently has six tents set up on one near Makoma, a 40-minute drive west of Seronera airstrip.
The profusion of wildlife at this seemingly random location soon becomes apparent — on the transfer to the camp alone I see lion, giraffe, elephant, zebra, warthog and gazelle galore. Subsequent game drives reveal cheetah, leopard, ostrich, baboons, a puff adder, numerous birds of prey and an orgy of 100-plus hippos wallowing in a pool at Retina. From November to April the camp is near enough to intercept the colossal migration of wildebeest, zebra and supporting wildlife that swirls around the Serengeti, and the Stuarts are currently looking for a site in Ndutu, in the south, so guests can behold the wildebeest calving season from January to March.
An unpacked Roving Bushtops camp
While the en suite, solar-powered tents are extremely well-appointed with a butler, minibar, hairdryer, monogrammed robes and Bulgari toiletries, their style feels far from overblown, thanks to Schweizer’s deft use of restful hues and plain surfaces. Furnishings come from across the globe including South Korean lamps, Turkish carpets, Belgian woodwork and Kenyan desks. Raised 70cm above the ground, the tent floors feature a broad exterior terrace on two sides (perfect for yoga with a view of impala), while a plethora of zips and flaps keep you snug and safe at night despite the hyena screams and the sawing cough of leopard.
Meals are served in a separate mess tent featuring a wine wall and chic, white-clothed tables. Breakfast brings sparkling wine and superb starlings; dinner could be lobster tail or a spicy Swahili dish prepared by the excellent chef Christopher Massabo. Every tent comes with its own private, open-sided vehicle and safari guide, so game drives can last as long as you wish, with hot-water bottles provided at dawn and a complimentary massage on return. At Roving Bushtops you feel blissfully out of the lodge and under canvas, yet want for nothing. It’s the safari unplugged, but totally switched on.
Nigel Tisdall was a guest of Roving Bushtops, which costs from $960 per person per night including full-board with drinks, private game drives and airstrip transfers. Carrier offers tailor-made packages from £4,435 per person, including one night in Arusha, three at Roving Bushtops, return flight from London, domestic flights and transfers
Photograph: Nigel Tisdall
A ‘redefined’ safari experience at The Highlands in Tanzania - FT.com
Nigel Tisdall
The pioneering camp suggests that it is time to move on from traditional tents to bulbous domes
Inside one of the domes of The Highlands camp in Tanzania
It’s not every day you get a whopping 6km-wide volcanic crater to yourself. Well, almost — I’m being escorted by an armed ranger (in case we encounter buffalo) and two twenty-something Masai guides who eruditely point out the purple-flowering Gutenbergia cordifolia and help me sort my red-billed teal from my Cape teal.
Ringed with steep, 500m-tall forested walls, Empakaai crater is an immense, deserted egg-cup in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area in northern Tanzania. Its centrepiece is a lake the colour of mchicha (local spinach) soup, across which flamingos prance in a shimmering tide of pink. It is a spectacle that offers — to borrow one of the opening lines of the 1985 movie Out of Africa, which still conditions many a visitor’s vision of the east African safari — “a glimpse of the world through God’s eyes”.
While the much larger and better-known Ngorongoro crater, 25km to the south-west, receives 50,000 visitors a month, Empakaai gets a mere 60. As destinations, the two craters are complementary. The first is a famous World Heritage Site with more than 25,000 large animals conveniently parcelled up in a natural safari park set inside a colossal caldera, where clouds dance along the rim like a mighty white feather boa. The second is a place to go hiking, to break free from the endless sitting in game-drive vehicles with camera a-ready, and instead go feet-first into a bright universe of birds, flowers and paw-prints in the mud that can be just as rewarding as ticking off the Big Five (lion, elephant, buffalo, leopard and rhino — an annoying legacy from the days of big-game hunting) that so obsesses the first-time safari-goer.
Trips to both these craters, along with an ascent of the smaller Olmoti crater, which boasts a picturesque waterfall, form the core experiences in a visit to The Highlands, a pioneering high-altitude camp that opened last month with a self-declared mission to “redefine the Ngorongoro experience”. A three-hour drive north of Lake Manyara airstrip, it has been created by the Arusha-based safari specialist Asilia, who clearly enjoy establishing camps in boundary-pushing locations across Kenya and Tanzania. These include Namiri Plains in the eastern Serengeti and Rubondo Island on Lake Victoria, while next year will see the high-end Jabali Ridge open in the little-visited Ruaha National Park in the south of the country.
An aerial view of the Olmoti crater
Set on the flank of the Olmoti crater at 2,660m (200m higher than the Ngorongoro crater rim and 300m higher than Europe’s highest ski resort), The Highlands certainly redefines the lungs. Walking uphill to breakfast in the rarefied air leaves me gasping, and with a daily temperature ranging from 4C at night to 26C in the afternoon, the phrase “climate change” takes on a new meaning. The reward for facing all of this, plus the gruelling, bruising, hour-long off-road 4x4 drive it takes to get here (improvements are promised), is to find yourself in a remote and enchanting landscape far away from the tourist hullabaloo. The grassy, treeless plains flanking Olmoti crater are indeed reminiscent of the Scottish Highlands (albeit enhanced with sunshine and zebras), and if you add in the thickets of thistles and tartan-like patterns of the Masai’s shukas (blankets), there seems every justification for the camp’s Old Moti bar to stock a splendid choice of 22 whiskies. Fancy a wee dram of 25 year-old Bunnahabhain after a hard day watching jackals hunt, hippos yawn and lions copulate? You bet . . .
With nine bulbous geodesic domes spread around a hillside that catches both sunrise and sunset, The Highlands makes a bold suggestion that perhaps it’s time to move on from the traditional tented safari camp. Manufactured in Oregon and successfully deployed in numerous hotels from the Swiss Alps to Chilean Patagonia, they look like something from a wacky New Age community but are, in fact, sturdy and comfortable, and particularly popular with families (three units have a mezzanine level, plus there’s a big and little dome combination sleeping four). You can lie in your king-size bed looking at the stars and there’s a wood-burning stove, en suite facilities with a double shower, and a panoramic wooden deck. But no electric sockets, only USB power-points.
Another view of one of the camp’s domes
Interiors are by the Cape Town design team Artichoke, a flurry of faux-fur throws, hide rugs, chunky wooden stools and industrial-style lamps that feels decidedly Nordic. Heading to my dome-sweet-dome after dinner (meals are, at present, a weak spot) I half-expect to step out into drifts of snow with the aurora borealis overhead. Instead I find the Southern Cross and Masai watchmen with solar torches offering yet more anti-buffalo protection.
It is these brightly robed semi-nomads, still so close to their traditions, who occupy one’s thoughts when you stay here. One reason is the large black-and-white portraits of local tribesmen and women that decorate The Highlands, which were commissioned from the South African photographic artist Graham Springer. The facial expressions of his sitters say it all: while some offer beaming smiles, others look puzzled or wary, as you might well be when a strange camp full of foreign ways gets beamed down on to your barren, mist-roofed plains.
Driving to and from our crater excursions in Land Cruisers regretfully billowing storms of dust, we look out at a lifestyle that seems little changed in a century. The stockaded villages, the child shepherds, the young girls adorned with ornate beaded jewellery carrying huge bundles of firewood, the homemade beehives hanging in the acacia trees. Our days are bookended with the tinkling sound of great herds of cattle, sheep and goats on the move — some say “Ngorongoro” is an onomatopoeic Masai word describing the ringing of cowbells.
A ranger inside the Empakaai crater
About 42,000 Masai live in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area and they are still permitted to graze livestock on the floor of the Ngorongoro crater, despite it being a treasure trove of wildlife. Safari purists tend to be disdainful of the game-viewing experience here, and it can get congested — at one point I count 18 vehicles crowding around a pair of lions. Amusingly, while some passengers fret that they’ll be eaten alive by the king of the jungle, what the guides fear most is a lion that decides to go to sleep under your vehicle — in which case you could be stuck for hours.
Such scenes are not so dreadful once you realise we are just one more creature out hunting in this enormous 260 sq km amphitheatre, and there is plenty to gawp at. The menacing hyena, the zebra stallions fighting, the fish eagle with a lizard in its claws, the distant black rhino, the ostrich squatting in the road, the woefully naked Thomson’s gazelles with their tails flicking like high-speed windscreen wipers.
One advantage of staying at The Highlands is that in the morning you can enter the Ngorongoro crater via the Lemala entrance (effectively the back door) rather than the much busier Lodoare Gate, with its unseemly mass of vehicles stopping to do paperwork, and opportunistic baboons making food raids. This gives us a sense of the crater’s timelessness before the crowds build up, while for lunch Asilia pulls a masterstroke by pre-booking one of several “special picnic sites” set aside for private dining — much better than using the main public one, which can have more than 50 vehicles parked together.
Sitting under the yellow fever trees with a glass of Stellenbosch Sauvignon Blanc, as a smiling chef cooks up some spicy chicken, I feel as relaxed as the five-strong pride of lions reclining on some nearby rocks.
Details
Nigel Tisdall was a guest of Kenya Airways, and The Highlands. Kenya Airways fly from London Heathrow to Kilimanjaro via Nairobi, from £590 return; Coastal Aviation has connections to Lake Manyara. From now until the end of October, The Highlands costs $895 per person per night including full-board with drinks and activities; low-season rates drop to $430
The five-star trailer tent
The Roving Bushtops camp, in its mobile form
Deep inside the game-filled plains of the central Serengeti, Roving Bushtops is an innovative new mobile camp that features “the most luxurious safari tent in the world”, writes Nigel Tisdall. Two years in the making, with serene interiors by the Swiss architect Andrin Schweizer, it is a marvel of foldaway engineering that ingeniously packs all the pampering delights of a five-star hotel suite — including a king-size bed with linen sheets and a double hot tub — into a food-truck-like trailer. Hitched up to a 4x4 game-viewing vehicle, this can be driven into the bush in search of adventure while providing all the high-class comforts the well-booted safari-goer likes to enjoy.
Created by Andy and Claudia Stuart, who successfully developed the concept of “wild luxury” with two fixed Bushtops camps in the Mara and northern Serengeti, this freewheeling version came about because the Serengeti National Park offers few permanent sites for investment. There are a variety of “special campsites”, though, that tour operators can book — Roving Bushtops currently has six tents set up on one near Makoma, a 40-minute drive west of Seronera airstrip.
The profusion of wildlife at this seemingly random location soon becomes apparent — on the transfer to the camp alone I see lion, giraffe, elephant, zebra, warthog and gazelle galore. Subsequent game drives reveal cheetah, leopard, ostrich, baboons, a puff adder, numerous birds of prey and an orgy of 100-plus hippos wallowing in a pool at Retina. From November to April the camp is near enough to intercept the colossal migration of wildebeest, zebra and supporting wildlife that swirls around the Serengeti, and the Stuarts are currently looking for a site in Ndutu, in the south, so guests can behold the wildebeest calving season from January to March.
An unpacked Roving Bushtops camp
While the en suite, solar-powered tents are extremely well-appointed with a butler, minibar, hairdryer, monogrammed robes and Bulgari toiletries, their style feels far from overblown, thanks to Schweizer’s deft use of restful hues and plain surfaces. Furnishings come from across the globe including South Korean lamps, Turkish carpets, Belgian woodwork and Kenyan desks. Raised 70cm above the ground, the tent floors feature a broad exterior terrace on two sides (perfect for yoga with a view of impala), while a plethora of zips and flaps keep you snug and safe at night despite the hyena screams and the sawing cough of leopard.
Meals are served in a separate mess tent featuring a wine wall and chic, white-clothed tables. Breakfast brings sparkling wine and superb starlings; dinner could be lobster tail or a spicy Swahili dish prepared by the excellent chef Christopher Massabo. Every tent comes with its own private, open-sided vehicle and safari guide, so game drives can last as long as you wish, with hot-water bottles provided at dawn and a complimentary massage on return. At Roving Bushtops you feel blissfully out of the lodge and under canvas, yet want for nothing. It’s the safari unplugged, but totally switched on.
Nigel Tisdall was a guest of Roving Bushtops, which costs from $960 per person per night including full-board with drinks, private game drives and airstrip transfers. Carrier offers tailor-made packages from £4,435 per person, including one night in Arusha, three at Roving Bushtops, return flight from London, domestic flights and transfers
Photograph: Nigel Tisdall
A ‘redefined’ safari experience at The Highlands in Tanzania - FT.com
