5 Great Tanzanian Game Lodges
Everett PotterContributor
Exploring the world for 3 decades and counting
Mwiba Lodge
MWIBA LODGE
How do you define a great safari? It should be an experience that’s life-changing. Two of the most critical factors of any African safari are the game viewing and the lodges. On a perfect safari, they should compliment each other.
I spent a couple of weeks on safari in Tanzania not long ago. I stayed at luxury lodges, mobile camps and rustic camps. What they had in common was that they were all strategically located to maximize wildlife viewing. After a couple of weeks of happily rattling around in a Land Cruiser looking at wildebeests, lions and elephants, here’s a short list of my favorite lodges:
View of Kilimanjaro from Hatari Lodge
HATARI LODGE
The great view of snowcapped Mt Kilimanjaro, some 50 miles distant, would alone make it worth staying here. But Marlies and Jörg Gabriel offer a charming and comfortable guest experience as well, and Marlies took me on a brief game drive in adjacent Arusha National Park, introducing me to warthogs, giraffe, Cape buffalo and hippos. This lodge was the backdrop for the John Wayne movie Hatari and Wayne’s co star Hardy Kruger later bought it and kept it as his farm. Set at the foot of Mt Meru, it’s not far from Arusha and the international airport, and therefore ideal for a first or last night in Tanzania. I stayed here on my first night, arriving in the dark and awakened the next morning to view a landscape where the trees seemed to be bobbing up and down. It turned out to be dozens of giraffe having breakfast in the trees, moving as if in slow motion. I can think of no better way to be welcomed to Africa.
Mwiba Lodge
MWIBA LODGE
The newest property of Legendary Lodges, Mwiba feels like an Aman resort but one that’s even more exclusive, with just 10 luxury tent suites. However, these “tents” are to tents what Aston Martin’s are to automobiles: luxury lairs well separated from each other, with a soaking tub, indoor and outdoor shower, a deck cantilevered over a rushing river, and air conditioning that, in green fashion, envelopes just the king size bed alone. Situated cliffside on an enormous private game concession with a private airstrip, it’s the latest property from Dan Friedkin, whose Friedkin Conservation Fund preserves large swaths of Tanzania. The nature of a private concession, by the way, is that you can go off road, by day or even on night safaris with a bright spotlight, and encounter no one else. Our night drive yielded a dozen bush babies in the trees, a curious hyena, a chameleon and fun if fruitless search for a prowling leopard.
Alex Walker’s Serian Camp
ALEX WALKER'S SERIAN CAMP
Alex Walker is a charming and safari-savvy Tanzanian and his mobile camp in the south Serengeti, which is eventually packed up and moved to follow the Great Migration north, is a proper Out of Africa experience. Guest tents are enormous, with ensuite baths. The lodge tent has carpets, comfortable couches, a massive coffee table piled high with books and a drinks table ready to welcome you. Alex has access to local Masaai bushmen and they took us on a three hour game walk. It finished with one of them showing his skill with a homemade bow and arrow, piercing a three inch acacia tree from 90 feet with the first shot.
Wayo Green Camp
ROADTRIP TANZANIA
Our most rustic accommodation, it consisted of five tents on a wide sandy river bed. Enclosures behind each tent offered rustic private latrines and buckets showers. Why go this rustic? Because Wayo is set in Lake Manyara National Park, on a sandy watercourse and next to a cascading waterfall and the jungle clad walls of an escarpment. We climbed up the rocks alongside the waterfall, careful not to disturb the resident hippo in the pool below, and sipped a Kilimanjaro beer (slogan: “If you can’t climb it, drink it”) while a troop of baboons looked down on us from the trees above. In time, we dined at a table under the stars and found enormous hippo footprints in the sand the following morning.
Lamai Serengeti
LAMAI SERENGETI
This is Swiss Family Robinson redefined. Each private lodge is a one bedroom hut with a twig roof. Inside is Scandinavian-designed rusticity and simplicity. A floor-to-ceiling wall of screens makes you feel like you are indeed outside, with view over to the hills of Kenya. If the night is cool, as it was during my stay, a hot water bottle will be awaiting in your bed. The lounge, with its fireplace and multiple sitting areas, is ideal for socializing, and I managed quite a bit of that in a short visit.
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I have been traveling the world and writing about it for a living for more than three decades, starting with a story for The Washington Post about the sleeping giant that was China in 1984. I have been a travel columnist for The New York Times Syndicate, USA Today, SmartMoney, Luxury Spa Finder and Ski as well as a longtime contributor to Outside, National Geographic Traveler, Travel + Leisure and ForbesLife. I’m the editor of Everett Potter’s Travel Report and lecture as an expert for National Geographic Expeditions in Switzerland and Italy. My work is inspired by the intersection of unique experiences and luxury hotels, ski slopes and trout streams, with a solid grasp of tech and aviation.
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