Wayo Serengeti Green Camp South

Location

This camp has two addresses and no fixed one. From December to March it stands out on the short grass of the southern Serengeti, east of the Kusini kopjes.

Wayo pitches around an hour and a half’s game drive back from the Ndutu woodlands in the south, which is to say back from the places everybody else wants to be. The operator is unusually plain about why: those are where the vehicles gather. The cost is real and you should count it. What you get for it is a camp nobody is driving past, and evenings with far fewer engines on the horizon.

The southern plains sit on ash blown off the volcanoes to the east, which has set into a hard calcareous layer close enough to the surface that tree roots cannot get through it. Nothing much grows tall. That single fact explains why the south is cheetah country, and why leopard, elephant and giraffe are thin on it, all three wanting trees for shade, for browse, or for somewhere to haul a kill.

Rooms

Wayo makes its own tents. They are sewn by Tanzanian teams the company employs for the purpose, which is not something we can say about any other camp on this site, and once you have noticed it you keep noticing it.

Start with the front, which is mesh where a wall would be. Lie in bed and there is nothing between you and the plains but a screen fine enough to forget about. Stretch canvas runs overhead for shade and for privacy, and the overhang throws a veranda across the front with chairs under it. There are ten tents and they are all the same tent. Nobody is in a better one.

Inside is where the making tells. The bed panels are woven from banana leaves in Mto wa Mbu, the town where Wayo keeps its activity centre. The cushions are Maasai, belted. The chandeliers are built out of Chaga cups. Wayo says it brought in anthropologists to help with the sourcing, which reads like a press release until you look at the objects and find that each one comes from somewhere specific and is credited to the people who made it. Beyond that the inventory is plain and sufficient: a writing desk, day beds, reading lamps beside the bed, luggage racks, somewhere to hang a coat.

Behind a zip at the back there are twin basins, a low flush loo and a bucket shower filled with hot water when you ask for it. Wayo says that is where the name comes from: a bucket lets the camp watch how much water goes out, and the loos are low flush for the same reason. Nothing is certified and the company claims nothing beyond what it does. Outside, a canvas basin is topped up warm each morning. Twin basins in a camp that has decided not to plumb a shower is a fair summary of where the money has gone, which is into the fabric of the place and the people who take you out.

Communal Areas

The same decision that took the wall off the front of the tents has been made again at the mess: one tent with its sides up, holding the lounge, the bar and the dining, with the country running through it.

Cooking is often done over an open fire and eaten outdoors. Full board takes in local beers, wine and spirits. Wayo buys its ingredients from markets, shops and farms around the region and does part of the preparation back in Arusha, which it says keeps waste out of camp.

After dark, lamps mark the paths between the tents. Nothing is fenced, and animals walk through camp, so somebody sees you back to your bed. Dinner is sociable and largely communal: you eat with whoever else is in camp that night. The fire gets lit.

Activities

Two game drives a day is the shape of it, morning and afternoon, and they are not folded into the bed rate. You either take the game package or book a vehicle and guide of your own.

The Serengeti holds its drivers to the roads, with no off road driving anywhere in the park, and that matters more here than the rule usually does: the camp cannot cheat its way to a sighting, and the guides earn their keep by knowing where to be. They ask what you have already seen before you set out, and they will pull off a crowded sighting to find you a quieter one, which is the camp’s whole logic, applied to a morning.

In the south the calving ground fills, close to half a million wildebeest born inside roughly three weeks in January or February, and the calves bring cheetah with them onto plains that researchers have been working since 1975.

Walking is what Wayo is known for, and the company is one of only a handful licensed to walk the park’s wilderness zones. What this camp offers of it is a sample and not a programme: a short walk morning or afternoon, with longer days kept for those who have taken a vehicle and guide of their own. The operator’s own word is taster, which is refreshingly exact. On foot the scale changes: the length of the grass, the tracks, the insects that a vehicle turns into scenery. Every walk goes out with a rifle trained Wayo guide and an armed park ranger, and the park sets twelve as the minimum age.

The guiding is worth a word. Wayo’s guides come up through activity guiding, walking and cycling and paddling, before anybody hands them a vehicle. There is no grading behind it, but as an account of how a person learns a landscape it is more convincing than most.

Balloons can be arranged, at extra cost.