Tented Safari in Masai Mara

As much as I like traveling and having adventures, I don’t really enjoy camping. I don’t really know the reason, but one reason maybe is that I was never a girl scout who went camping with group of friends as kids. My only camping experience was when I was a student and went somewhere on a tea plantation with other fellow university students for an overnight camping. Did I enjoy it? I think yes, a little bit, and it was mainly because of the friendships with the rest of the gang. However, I never enjoyed the details; i.e., going to the loo early in the chilly morning, and the mud and everything else on the ground as it was with the nature.

Now, some 30 to 40 years later, I still don’t like camping; I prefer to do up market holidays compared to erecting my tent at the end of each day. However, my trip to Kenya for my Photography Safari Holiday, forced me to stay in a tented facility as it was part of the package, called the “Entim Camp in Masai Mara”.

As we all knew, going for a photography safari was never going to be cheap, but it included full board accommodation at the best location to see the wildebeest crossing. Unfortunately because it’s location was so prime and it’s in the middle of the National Park, a full 4 or 5 star hotel are not allowed, thus the option was staying in a tented camp. This is under my normal standards of traveling, I hate camping; but what the heck, I’ll give it a try anyway.

I imagined that our tent would be dirty, and muddy and not to mention the daily routine ceremony of going to the bathroom etc. To my surprise, Entim Camp offered much much more .

Main tent serving as the hotel lobby, reception and lounge

As we continued in to the ‘hotel lobby’, the feeling was it was very cozy; yes, a bit small, but yet, every thing was there, the reception was a bit informal, but yet, we still got our welcome drinks, seating on a very comfortable seats, as you know it, and immediately we saw the bar…

The informal reception area including the lounge and seating area

The ‘hotel’s lounge’ and the ‘bar’ at the end of the room….

The Bar

I was not after the booze, but I think this is a cute yet brilliant solution to feel cozy without being too fancy for a bar in a tent.

Now what about the room where we were to stay? As this was a private compound, the sleeping tent was not much, only a total of 8 of them; each consisting of 4m x by 6m tent, including it’s own ‘bathroom facilities”.

Our ‘bungalow’ in the Masai Mara Triangle

This may look like an unwelcoming tent, as it’s very close together with the other tents; well that’s the idea as this is the ‘room’ and it is supposed to be secure as we don’t want any unwelcome animals inside our bedroom, and that could be anything from a snake to mosquitos or even larger. However, once inside, it was like a luxury tent from the colonial era; it reminded me a lot of the movie Out of Africa, well not exactly, but we can pretend.

Bedroom inside the very roomy tent

Attached bathroom with a sitting loo, instead of squatting (Asian type) loo

If you see the picture above, even though we lived in a tent, everything was finished, meaning we didn’t walk about on muddy surfaces inside our room, everything was clean and dry.