Maasai Mara National Reserve is Kenya's finest wildlife reserve. Everything about this reserve is outstanding. The wildlife is abundant and the gentle rolling grasslands ensure that animals are never out of sight.
Between July and October, when the great wildebeest migration is in the Maasai Mara National Reserve, the sensation is unparalleled.
Cottar's 1920s Safari Camp, which is situated in the Maasai Mara, bordering the Serengeti and Loliondo ecosystem, in an untouched 200,000-acre exclusive concession providing the visitors an abundance of wildlife.
Thank you Calvin Cottar, Ken (our guide) & Lasase (Maasai Mara), Douglas ( camp manager), Daniel & Francis (mess tent butlers), Bernard (room steward) and the great Cottar's Camp team.
Cottar's 1920's Mara Safari Camp, email: info@cottarsafaris.com
COTTAR’S 1920s SAFARI CAMP
HARPERS ABROAD
"Cottar's Safari Camp is sublime: pure Out of Africa. The golden age of safari is recreated in a heady cocktail of marquee tents, antique furnishings and liveried staff."
COTTAR'S HISTORY
In 1919, together with his sons, Mike, Bud and Ted, Charles established Cottar’s Safari Service, one of the very first registered safari companies offering superior big game hunting and film safaris outfitting throughout Africa, India and Indochina. Charles Cottar survived elephant, buffalo, and three leopard attacks in his life, finally succumbing in 1939, at age 66, to a deadly rhino charge in the Mara region. Mike and Bud carried on the safari business guiding for the Duke and Duchess of York, Woolworth Donahue and Martin and Osa Johnson, amongst others. Mike Cottar was friends with many of the famous characters from ‘Out of Africa’ and was Beryl Markham’s first flying passenger.
Charles Cottar came to Africa in 1909 from the USA after reading President Theodore Roosevelt's exhilarating accounts of his big game hunting expedition of 1906. Charles quickly established himself amongst the first professional hunters and safari guides in East Africa, and in 1915, brought his entire family back to Kenya to settle for good.
The family was renown amongst the British administration for being rebellious and antiestablishment, preferring long stints with African tribes in wildest Africa. The Cottars’ were the first to import American vehicles for safaris, the first to reach new areas such as Lake Paradise, the first to obtain never before seen wildlife footage.
In this family it was normal to have lions, leopards, wild dogs and chimpanzees as family pets. Mike’s son Glen, with his wife Pat, continued the family business and pioneered hunting and explorations expeditions into remote parts of Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Sudan, Zaire and Botswana. Glen and Pat pioneered the photographic safari, setting up the first established tented camp just for photographic safaris in the early sixties in Tsavo National Park; Cottar’s Mara Camp in the Masai Mara in the seventies and Cottar’s Kimana and Cottar's Bushtops in the eighties. Glen passed away in 1996 and Pat in 2010. Glen’s son Calvin, together with his wife Louise, began Cottar’s 1920s Safari Camp in the Masai Mara in the mid-nineties and continues to this day to represent the Cottar family safari heritage. It is hoped that some of their kids, (Danni, Jasper, Charlie and Ella) will continue the safari legacy into the future!
THE COTTAR'S PEDIGREE
Calvin and Louise Cottar established Cottar’s 1920s Safari Camp in the mid-nineties. The camp is situated in a timelessly unspoiled setting with sunset views stretching to distant horizons of the Masai Mara and the Serengeti plains covered in boundless game.
SAFARI EXPERIENCES
Nearly a century since 1919, Cottar's Safari Services has been organizing bespoke safaris to Africa for discerning travelers and African specialist travel agents. The service provides advice on where to go, develops personalized itineraries, and organizes expeditions to far flung places, accompanied by our hand-selected professional safari guides. Many of our safaris have been written about in classic and contemporary Africana and safari history books.
We can organize a breadth of African experience - from month long remote adventure expeditions to unexplored South Sudan to honeymoon safari and surf trips to family eco-lodge and cultural visits. We are in the business of making lifelong memories for our guests, providing just the right amount of adventure, adrenaline, elegance and comfort. Safaris can be organized in mobile tents, at our award-winning Cottar’s 1920s Camp in the Masai Mara, or in our private homestead combined with other camps, lodges and locations.
At the Cottar’s 1920s Camp and Cottar’s Private Homestead, we focus on a very special part of Africa in the country of Kenya, in a unique wilderness area adjacent to the Serengeti National Park of Tanzania and the Masai Mara National Reserve of Kenya. This area is home to the largest concentration of terrestrial wildlife on earth - the immense wildebeest, zebra and plains game migration that numbers over to 2.5 million animals.
The landscape is high altitude (6000 ft) rolling savannah, with no fences or man made structures to corrupt the wilderness, and with pure wildlife that has not been trans located or manipulated by man. We have some of the highest success rates of big five sightings in the business - although our focus is never on ‘ticking off’ the check list of species; rather we focus on the quality and privacy of the viewing, the interpretation and ‘capturing the moment.
At the time of going to print, the Cottar's safari team comprises the largest number of gold standard Kenya Professional Safari Guides in Kenya.
