It's an unforgettable sight, the twice-annual ebb and flow of animals—zebras, blue wildebeests and gazelles among them—across the vast, primeval-seeming Serengeti Plain, in northern Tanzania and neighboring Kenya. Visitors head to East Africa from all over to witness this, one of the largest such migrations in the world.
Nduara Loliondo, a safari camp within the Serengeti ecosystem, parallels these peregrinations, moving in six-month intervals between northern and southern Loliondo. The camp, run by an aptly named company, Nomad Tanzania, was created with the help of designers Chris Payne and Emma Campbell, British expatriates whose Nairobi-based firm is called Interior Idea. Asked by two of Nomad's founding directors, Milly and Mark Houldsworth, to upgrade their existing camp, the Idea team suggested that they "turn everything on its head," Payne says.
In the case of Nduara Loliondo, all roads led to the yurt, the circular tents that have sheltered Mongolians and other nomadic cultures for centuries. (Nduarameans "circle" in Swahili, Tanzania's national language.) For the Houldsworths, the idea was a natural: Milly Houldsworth's brother is "a hippie yurt maker," as Campbell teasingly points out, and the couple had long discussed "how fun it would be to do a yurty thing," she says.
The fact that this is the country of the Masai also made these tents a logical choice. This geometric shape is a theme in the culture of the seminomadic tribe, whose members traditionally dwell in round structures known as bomas.
Most modern-day yurts aren't easily movable—that is, unless they're designed by Mike Jessop, known in the intriguing, close-knit world of yurt makers as "pop-up Mike." Jessop has patented the Zip-Yurt, a cleverly constructed tent that, like a ship in a bottle, springs up with the tug of a rope, metamorphosing from something flat into a fully formed dwelling.
Jessop worked with the Houldsworths and the designers on adapting the tent for African use. "We began with the premise that it should be as eco-friendly as possible," Payne explains, adding that the tent they devised is "totally tropicalized." While most yurt frames are made of willow or ash, these are bamboo—a material that grows plentifully here. The wheel at the center of the roof is made from grevillea, a local wood, that's steamed until it assumes its final, circular shape.
Unlike Mongolian yurts, of heavy felt, these are done in canvas, with sides that can be rolled up for ventilation in the heat of the African day, then back down when the evening chill sets in. Left open, the canvas-capped wheel at the top lets "the air flow, like natural air-conditioning," Milly Houldsworth points out.
Nduara Loliondo is composed of 10 tents, eight sleeping ones with en suite baths (which are housed in pop-up yurts), and separate dining and lounge yurts. Each sleeping yurt measures 23 feet in diameter, Campbell says, noting that the diameter of the Mongol ruler Genghis Khan's tent—an icon in the yurt world—was about 30 feet. "If you looked at a yurt from above, it would be like a big mushroom," Campbell says; the resort resembles a cluster of them. But they move in a way no mere fungus could, transported, contents and all, via truck convoy between the Piyaya plains (where they remain from December to June) to the Ololosokwan village, in the north, for the rest of the year. Legend has it that Genghis Khan's yurt, by contrast, was stowed on a cart and pulled along by 22 oxen.
