Angama Mara

From the deck of a tent at Angama Mara the land simply ends. The Oloololo Escarpment drops some 300 metres to the floor of the Mara Triangle, and the plains run away east to the Mara River and beyond it to the Serengeti. Angama Mara, in the Maasai Mara, was built on this edge in 2015, on the spot where Sydney Pollack filmed the picnic scene of Out of Africa thirty years earlier.

History

Nicky and Steve Fitzgerald spent two decades building &Beyond, the safari company that began as Conservation Corporation Africa, and left it in the early 2010s to build one lodge of their own. They chose a lease on the escarpment above the Mara Triangle, the western third of the reserve managed by the Mara Conservancy, and opened Angama Mara in June 2015. The name is the Swahili for suspended in mid-air. The Fitzgeralds' daughter and a small team run the company, which has since added a mobile camp in the Triangle and, in 2023, a second lodge, Angama Amboseli, in the Kimana Sanctuary below Kilimanjaro. The Angama Foundation funds a clinic and schools in the communities along the escarpment.

Architecture and design

The lodge was designed by Silvio Rech and Lesley Carstens, the Johannesburg architects behind North Island in the Seychelles and several &Beyond lodges, with interiors by Annemarie Meintjes. Each tent is a steel-framed pavilion under canvas with a floor-to-ceiling glass front facing the drop, a bed on a raised plinth to catch the view from the pillow, a bathroom behind and a deck beyond the glass. The two camps, North and South, each have fifteen tents strung along the edge, with their own guest area, pool and dining tent so that neither feels the other's presence. A central building between them holds the shop, the photographic studio, the beading studio where Maasai women work, and the pool.

Rooms and suites

There are 30 tented suites in two camps of 15, including family tents with a second bedroom. Each tent runs to around 90 square metres with a day bed on the deck, a bath with a view and a private butler team. Angama Safari Camp, a mobile camp of four tents on the floor of the Triangle, lets guests sleep among the herds for a night or two before returning to the escarpment.

Dining

Meals are cooked from the Shamba, the lodge's two-acre kitchen garden on the hillside, where guests can eat lunch at a long table among the vegetables. Breakfast is served on the deck or taken out onto the plains in the vehicles; dinner in the camp's dining tent or in the boma. The wine list is drawn from South Africa, and a picnic lunch at the Out of Africa site is part of most stays.

Wellness

Each camp has a pool on the edge, and the lodge has a fitness room and a small spa offering massages in the tents or on the deck. Walks with Maasai guides on the escarpment and runs along the ridge are offered in the mornings.

Weddings and events

Angama Mara hosts weddings and vow renewals on the escarpment, at the Out of Africa picnic site or on a camp deck, with dinner in the boma, and takes exclusive-use bookings of one camp of 15 tents or both. There is no conference room; small corporate groups use a camp's guest area and the photographic studio for sessions between game drives.

Location

The lodge stands on the Oloololo Escarpment on the western edge of the Maasai Mara National Reserve, inside the Mara Triangle. Flights from Nairobi's Wilson Airport land at the Angama Mara airstrip, just below the lodge, in about 45 minutes, and the Mara River crossings of the migration, at their height between July and October, lie within the Triangle's drives. As a safari lodge in the Maasai Mara it has the view, and the view decides most things.