Nduara Loliondo
Loliondo, Tanzania
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NDUARA LOLIONDO -
LOLIONDO, TANZANIA
Loliondo has never simply been about 'just more Serengeti', so we wanted our camp here to be a tented camp with a difference; one that reflected the space and freedom that, to us, define the area. The lounge and dining tents are in fact our own design of Yurt, reflecting the nomadic culture, and allowing us to make the most of the panoramic views that are typical here.
And like the Maasai, Nduara Loliondo is nomadic; every 6 months, the camp is packed up and moved. In Ololosokwan, where you'll find the camp between June and November, the tents sit high on a ridge with commanding views over a broad acacia-lined valley. In the mornings and evenings the sights and sounds of Maasai life permeate the air as cattle move too and from a local manyatta.
In Piyaya, to the South, where the camp moves between December and May, the scenery changes dramatically and the yurts sit beneath vast skies on the edge of wide and endless plains. The main mess and dining areas, beside a mature spreading acacia tree, look out over a small vlei.
Nduara is somewhere you can be highly active. With walks lead by local Maasai morani, picnics, game drives and night drives, all planned with your guide to allow you to take things at your own pace. If you feel like it you can be busy all day.
But after a few days charging around in the Serengeti most of our guests take the opportunity to really kick back here. Nduara lends itself to lazy mornings, relaxed lunches, or time just sitting and reading.
And after a while, the rhythm of life, the comings and goings of cattle, the meal times becomes deeply seductive and you begin to remember how it feels not to do anything.
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The camp consists of six large Meru style safari tents, each with it's own en-suite bathroom attached to the back of the main sleeping area - with traditional safari bucket showers and eco flush toilets. Large lounge and dining Yurts (our own unique design) give the camp a special character, styled as they are with colourful textiles, warm sheepskin and leathers.
The sleeping tents are the more traditional Meru-style tents, furnished in the bright textiles and warm textures of sheepskin and leather. En-suite bathrooms with eco-flush toilets and bucket showers ensure that you can be comfortable while still feeling just a little bit intrepid.
Activities
In Loliondo, because we're outside of the boundaries of the National Park, we have all the freedom to walk, game drive on and off road, have picnic lunches out in the bush, stay out for sundowners on rocks with beautiful views and we can do all this anywhere and in any direction we like.
Game drives in 4WD vehicles with your own private guide, walking safaris, night game drives, great game viewing and birding. Encounter the Maasai who have pursued their nomadic lifestyle adjacent to the greatest wildlife phenomenon on the continent.
Loliondo
On a map it’s easy to misunderstand Loliondo, but take a look from the air - where boundaries evaporate - and you'll see it in the context of the larger ecosystem of which it’s a part. Get on the ground and the sense of space takes your breath away – this is a land of distant and alluring horizons.
To the east, Loliondo runs into the wild extremities of the Great Rift Valley above Lake Natron, to the south it borders the volcanic hills of Ngorongoro, to the north it borders Kenya’s Loita Hills, and to the west it blends with the Serengeti National Park.
But nowhere will you – or the wildlife that migrates through this area - find anything that resembles a man-made boundary.
And it was this elemental feeling of space and freedom - the sense of “the way that things used to be” - that so captured Mark Houldsworth’s imagination when he first travelled through this part of Maasailand in the late 80s.
20 years later it's the very same things that keep us here today. This is somewhere with a palpable sense of freedom from rules. You can leave the car behind and scramble up a rocky kopje, walk along soaring ridges with your Maasai guide or - if you feel like it - lie on your back in the middle of a valley 20 miles wide listening to the sounds of the migration all around you. And you probably won’t see another soul.
And to us, the saving grace and the reason it isn’t over-run with minibuses, is its seasonality and a dogged unpredictability that means that it’ll never appeal to those people who are simply here to tick off the next animal.
This is truly a land of nomads where humans and wildlife must always have an eye on the horizon, ready to move with the seasons.
Loliondo is a sensational place, it’s scenically magnificent with its wide rolling valleys and whale-backed mountain ranges; at times it can overwhelm with its combination of magnificent wildlife followed by rarified emptiness. But more than anything, it’s a place to take in slowly, to let the mixture of Maasai culture, rugged wilderness and wildlife slowly soak in.
The Maasai
We are one of a very small number of companies to have formed a partnership with the Maasai in Loliondo and to be given permission to set up our camp here.
We've been working with them now for more than 20 years, so while we still find each other fascinating, we also know each other quite well by now.
The time we spend with the Maasai is very much about getting a view of everyday Maasai life; we don't ask for anything to be laid on for our guests and our guests don't expect this.
What this gives, is an opportunity for questions (as many answered as asked) and a chance to get the smallest glimpse of what nomadic life this wild part of Africa really entails.
Take a walk with one of our Maasai guides or spend time at one of the manyattas and the thing that becomes apparent is the degree to which every facet of their lives bears the imprint of the environment in which they live.
Manyattas are constructed using the raw materials available, cow dung and thorn bushes to keep predators away from the cattle within (still a very real risk). Morani decorate themselves using cow fat and ochre dug from the ground.
And the red shukas stand out vividly against the colours of the landscape, the perfect clothing in which to remain visible in a vast landscape.
A chance to get the smallest glimpse of what nomadic life this wild part of Africa really entails.
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