Lemala Osonjoi

Location

The Ngorongoro Conservation Area is not a national park in the usual sense. It is a multiple land use area, and Maasai pastoralists live inside it. The crater sits at its centre. Its big advantage is that its animals stay put. There is no migration to wait for, so the time of year changes how many vehicles you share the floor with and how green it looks, but not whether the lion, buffalo, rhino and elephant are down there.

Osonjoi is on the eastern rim, which is the quiet side, and the Lemala Gate, the least used of the crater’s access roads, is close by. To be fair, that advantage belongs to the whole eastern rim and not to this lodge in particular, because at least four other properties use the same gate. It is still why you come over to this side at all.

The lodge itself is on a hill in the montane forest, a little way back from the crest, and that small distance decides what you see. The suites, the dining room and the spa all look into trees, not down into the caldera, and Lemala has never claimed otherwise.

What you get instead is shelter, quiet and a completely different feel from the caldera below. From March to May the cloud comes down and sits on the rim, and those are also the months with the fewest vehicles on the floor and the greenest grass. July to September is busy down there, and it gets busy again from just before Christmas to the end of February. Those are the months when being by the eastern gate really pays off.

Rooms

There are sixteen suites and two two-bedroom suites, and each one is a separate building, well spaced through the forest.

Every room was designed around the cold, and you can tell. A wood stove does the heating, there are heated blankets and winter duvets on the bed, and at turndown someone tucks in a hot water bottle, so you climb into warm sheets after dinner. There is no air conditioning anywhere, and at this height nobody needs it. There are no televisions either.

The suites are big, as you would hope at this price, and the nicest idea in them is a simple one: a daybed built into a nook beside the fire, for a book and a nightcap, with the forest in the window. Large picture windows face the trees and keep the rooms bright. In the bathroom you get a double vanity, a walk-in shower and a freestanding bath. All the bathing is indoors and there are no plunge pools, which makes sense at this height, though it is worth knowing if an outdoor shower is on your list.

What lifts the rooms is that most of what is in them was made by hand, locally, for this lodge. The curtains are strung with glass beads that were blown by hand, and more beads are sewn into the cushions. The carpets are wool, dyed and woven for the place. The wall art is reed, and the pendant lights are acacia thorns fixed together. When the lodge opened, Lemala invited the artists who made all of it to come and stay and see their work in place.

The two-bedroom suites take four adults and two children, and they are the ones we ask for first. The standard suites have a day bed and a safari bed alongside the main bed, which is enough for a family of three or four. Two things to know: Lemala does not recommend children under five at any of its Tanzanian properties, and a child in a room of their own has to be fourteen or over.

Communal Areas

After dark everyone ends up in the same warm room, and the main building is designed for exactly that. Lounge, bar, dining room and a library all sit under one tall double-volume roof with a fire going, and there is an outdoor deck for the hour before the cold sets in.

There is a heated swimming pool indoors, behind floor-to-ceiling glass and warmed by solar, which is not something you expect to find on a crater rim in the Tanzanian highlands. The spa is a single suite on its own among the trees, and treatments run daily.

Meals are à la carte at your own table, and the kitchen moves mealtimes around to fit whatever the crater is doing that day. House drinks are in the rate. Sundowners are at the campfire in front of the lounge every evening, and that is where most evenings begin.

Lemala also keeps an artist in residence here, David Msia, a Tanzanian portrait artist who draws wildlife and people in charcoal pencil on archival paper.

The property is unfenced and buffalo and elephant use the paths, so an askari walks you between your suite and the main building at any hour of the day or night. It is a small ceremony, and it does not wear off.

Activities

A word first on how the drives work, because it depends on how you are booked. Most of our clients arrive with a guide and vehicle of their own for the whole trip and stay on full board, which covers the room, meals, laundry and house drinks, with the crater days already part of their safari. Otherwise Lemala’s game package adds a guide and vehicle, shared unless you book a private one in advance, and that is the upgrade we see taken most often here.

Mornings start early here, and they should. Vehicles are away from around six, and being down among the animals well before the rush arrives is worth the early start. That is what a night here on the rim buys you.

Walking is up on the rim only, since the crater floor is out of bounds on foot, and the walks are escorted by an armed ranger from the Conservation Area Authority and a Maasai guide.

There is also a cultural visit to the Erkeepusi boma, and Lemala says it has sponsored twenty-five schoolchildren from the village and helped put its dispensary on solar power. Children get the Lemala Cubs programme. There are no night drives, because the crater closes to vehicles after dark, and no balloons here either.