In Conversation with David Guthrie from A Tent with a View: Part I

‘The first camp was in the coastal national park, Saadani, where we began life as a mobile safari operation,’ he says. ‘We then established a small, embryonic camp there, making us the first people to operate in the area.’ It’s true. As amazing as it sounds, David and Masa were the first tour operators to lay down roots in Saadani, a hitherto largely unloved and underappreciated park that laid a unique claim as being the only coastal wildlife park in East Africa.

‘We started out pretty steady, as you do, working our way into the market and basically trying to work things out,’ David says of their first few years. They worked them out pretty quickly, going on to set up another camp in 1999 in the Selous Game Reserve. ‘Sable Mountain Lodge was one of just seven camps in Selous,’ David tells me, which is strange, given that the reserve is the size of Switzerland. ‘It’s actually the biggest park in the whole of Africa,’ and the lodge’s unique position overlooking the Uluguru Mountains is a sight to behold to this day. ‘You’ll go an entire day on safari without seeing another soul – human, that is.’

By the noughties, David and Masa were well into the swing of things and in 2009, they completed the southern circuit by throwing the doors of their newest hotel: The Zanzibari. It’s a beachfront hotel with sweeping views out to sea, ‘the perfect place to unwind after safari.’ The Tent with a View empire was growing and it was around this time that David and Masa began to flex their creative muscles. ‘We’d been building more sophisticated camps throughout our existence, but now it was time to do amazing things with funkier ideas.’ Funky is certainly what they got. ‘Masa takes my silly little drawings and interprets them into something that can actually be done,’ David says with a wry grin. ‘Which led, in 2015, to the development of our Bush Rovers…’

Ah, the Bush Rovers. They must have taken some seriously silly drawings. When apartheid ended and South Africans began travelling around the continent on a much larger scale than they previously had done, David noticed something. ‘They kept asking to come and sleep in our carparks in roof tents that were on top of their big cars. Frankly, we got a little tired of it.’ Tired of it or not, David and Masa had an idea. Together, they developed the idea of putting a tent on top of a Land Rover, something that would allow their guests to drive out into the bush – and not have to return when night fell.

Ordinary roof tents these are not. Each Bush Rover has a bedroom – a bedroom – on top of it. They have a bathroom and a bath. They even have a loo in the passenger seat area with Tudor-style oak panelling. In an outer piece of awning, there’s a shower and, to access the bedroom above the car, there’s a spiral staircase, which leads guests to a dressing room and a smaller loo for those not so keen on descending at night. The Bush Rovers are so wonderful that they’re actually quite tricky to picture, but imagine a Land Rover Defender with a Glasto-glamping style set up on top of it, a gazebo-like structure that hangs from it, and a staircase that descends from one to the other, and you’re probably about half way there.

Unsurprisingly, the Bush Rovers have been a wild success. ‘They steal the show, literally, at the shows we go to with them,’ David says. ‘And one of the best things about them is that they can get to places where others can’t. I think the best safari left on the planet is in Kusini but it’s hard to get to. It’s edgy, it rains a lot, which is why the animals are there.’ The Bush Rovers are, too, and David says guests see live kills in front of the rooms on a weekly basis. ‘The Bush Rovers were designed to follow the migration so our clients are there with calves and the greatest density of cheetah anywhere on Earth.’

They’re a remarkable way to see nature, the Bush Rovers. And, when I ask David about more projects in the country, Tent with a View have yet another. In recent years, the team have been building Little Okavango, a camp situated in the wetland area of the park between the Serengeti and Lake Victoria. ‘We heard that the area was going to be included in the park and designated the Serengeti Wetlands, which was something totally new.’ So, David and Masa being David Masa, they promptly visited the site, dug 7 kilometres of channels in the earth and started on another ‘funky’ camp. From the vast network of channels, guests can take game and boat safaris to see hippos and birdlife like nowhere else on the planet, exploring an area that previously didn’t really exist as a part of a park. Tent with a View are pioneering a new type of safari here, which seems squarely on brand.

As we wrap up and I ask David whether he has any big plans for the future, he chuckles. One of the driving forces behind this remarkable little outfit says that he has plenty on his plate with what he’s already helped to build, but that he does have one other element that’ll be keeping him busy. ‘Just the small matter of changing the universe,’ David laughs, a little cryptically. More on which to follow…