Classic style in the Maasai Mara
Vintage luxury at its best. The award-winning Cottar’s 1920s Camp is situated in the 7608-acre private Olderkesi Conservancy bordering the famous ‘seventh’ natural wonder of the world, the Maasai Mara in Kenya and the Tanzania Serengeti game reserve. Owned and managed by the oldest established and continuing safari family in Africa it extends an era of luxury and quality and returns to the original spirit and essence of ‘safari’.
The Cottar family have been providing safaris for more than 100 years and focuses on providing an authentic and individualized safari experience and supporting an ongoing legacy of wilderness, wildlife, comfort and security and honouring a balance between conservation, prosperous commerce, community and culture.
The 1920s Camp provides the romance of safari under cream canvas tents, the style of the bygone era of the twenties, while at the same time supplying the amenities required by today’s modern world travellers and professional guides whose qualifications are some of the highest in Africa.
Accommodation
The camp has eleven cream-canvas tents in a 1920s style. There are five luxury double tents, four family-sized tents with an open-play layout, and two tents for honeymooners. The entire camp is situated to ensure that tents are private and quiet whether for honeymooners or families with young children.
Camp Communal Areas
The camp has two main mess tent areas for fine dining, drinking, reading and relaxing, and an amazing pool and spa where guests can relax after a game drive. Guests can also enjoy a traditional canvas safari bath, a genuinely unique way of bathing specifically set up on the tent’s verandah, with views out over the plains. The location of the camp provides easy access for day and night wildlife drives in the Maasai Mara National Reserve and the Olderkesi Conservancy, wildlife walks, and cultural interactions with the Maasai community.
Cottar's Activities
The Cottar family provide genuinely stunning wildlife and wilderness experiences, engaging in the original spirit and essence of ‘safari’: an abundance of wildlife, a guarantee of privacy, and the highest standards of professional guiding, in a luxurious and authentic safari environment.
Cottar’s activities are tailored to give you the most authentic African safari experiences with a guiding style that is different from other safari operators. Emphasising the quality not the quantity of the wilderness and wildlife, the emotional intelligence of the guide to become your friend in a short time, and to have guests appreciate and join the pace of the wilderness.
The camp also strive to maintain a balance between a prosperous business and sustainable conservation, social entrepreneurship, and community development and all activities are centred around this.
Activities
- Balloon Ride over the Maasai Mara
- Coffee Tasting Experience
- Cottar’s famous traditional canvas bush bath
- Wildlife Drives
- Wilderness run/walk with a Maasai Warrior
- Maasai Warrior singing and dancing
- Pool time
- Photoshoot on Safari Experience
- Spa treatments
- Stargazing Experience
- Swimming and or fishing at the waterfall
Activities that engage the local community and environment
- A conservation helicopter flight with the Mara Elephant Project (MEP) over the Maasai Mara
- Beading with Mamma Naishuru Batian
- Carbon footprint, recycle and upcycle talk and experience
- Foraging and medicinal walk
- Immersive Raptor Experience with Kenya Birds of Prey Trust (KBOPT)
- Maasai warrior school
- Medicinal and foraging walk
- Mara cheetah educational experience
- One hour learning with female conservation rangers
- Reforestation seedball dispersal activity
- Visit our local Maasai village
- Scenic Helicopter Flight over the Maasai Mara
- Kids Entomology Safari
Map and travel information
Email us
Visit
Monday – Friday: 9am – 5:30pm
Saturday: 10am – 4:00pm
1 Market Place Mews, Gardiner Place,
Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, RG9 2AH