Lake Natron Wilderness Mobile
Location - Explores the Northern Rift Valley
Accommodation - private mobile tented camp for up to 8 guests
Experience - Remote & sometimes harsh wilderness experience, not about game viewing
Price Guide - $575 - 730 pppn
This little camp, private, simple in design and unassuming quite simply offers one of the richest safari experiences available. There are few props here; no spas, TVs or archery on offer, and the camp relies on those illusive, but definitive ingredients; superb service and guiding, total privacy and most importantly front row seats at a private wilderness experience startlingly at odds with anything you'll experience in the course of your daily life. Read more?
The Wilderness Mobile is probably the best way to access what still remains one of the most remote wilderness areas in Tanzania. It's without a doubt the most unrestrictive way to experience the beauty of this part of the country. Lake Natron is the most northerly Rift Valley Lake in Tanzania and probably one of the least visited.
Using a mobile camp, it's possible to explore this area in combination with Serengeti National Park, Loliondo and the Ngorongoro Crater and Highlands. The mobile camp allows for game driving along the shore of Lake Natron itself and around the slopes of Ol Donyo Lengai, as well as walking safaris or a combination of both. You should be aware though, that while there can be good game at time, Lake Natron is principally about awe-inspiring scenery as opposed to animal viewing.
These mobile camps give you real flexibility, allowing you to move every couple of days and if you do want to visit the remoter parts of Northern Tanzania like Lake Natron, this is by far the best option. Take a week or so and spend a few days in each location, moving at your own pace. The camp is lightweight enough to be mobile, but still very comfortable. The tents are large walk-in ones, the beds are camp beds and the loos are outside instead of being en-suite.
Like many of the really good camps, these aren't for every body. If the compromises that allow for mobility are off-putting to you (short-drop loo, camp beds) then this possibly isn't for you. However, it's just worth saying that these camps are a million miles from camping as most people would think of it and amount to more than the sum of their parts.
The luxury is in the freedom they give you to get well off the beaten track, the great food and drink and the superb way in which you are looked after by the crew.
Location - Lake Natron
Lake Natron is a sublime and ethereal presence in an area dominated by rocky escarpments, vast open plains and volcanic mountains. While the lake is one of the most important nesting sites of the lesser flamingo, you absolutely mustn't come here with the principal objective of seeing wildlife; Natron is dramatically harsh and beautiful and as yet, mercifully untouched by the hand of man, and it is to soak up this rarified atmosphere and scenic beauty that we'd highly recommend taking the very long, spectacularly dusty and bumpy road to this place.
Natron is located North of the Ngorongoro Crater and Highlands in the bottom of the Gregory Rift area of the Rift Valley. To the south is the active volcano, Ol Donyo Lengai, and to the west, above the rift escarpment, is the edge of the Serengeti Ecosystem. Natron is best accessed from a mobile Camp en route to or from the eastern Serengeti or as the destination for superb walking safaris of several days from the Ngorongoro Highlands, as part of which you can also climb Ol Donyo Lengai, although it has only very recently erupted in quite a major way in late 2007.
The sheer scale of this part of the country is breathtaking. The Ngaresero River provides an extraordinary and truly unexpected contrast to the heat and dust as it flows clean and cool out of the rift valley wall into Lake Natron. This area is home to nomadic Maasai and it's impressive to see how they manage to conduct a lifestyle, unchanged for many hundreds of years, in such a harsh environment.
You probably begin to get the picture...If the words, harsh, rocky and dramatic exite you, then you will fall in love with Natron, otherwise, stay well away. Jump to page?
More articles that you might find helpful
Northern Tanzania - Serengeti and the rest
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