Cottar's 1920s Camp in Kenya seems to revel in its colonial-era image, yet its owner says his forward-thinking policies sustain rather than exploit local culture, incomes and wildlife.
It's the oldest and most prestigious lodge in Kenya's Masai Mara wildlife reserve, a luxury 100-year-old establishment with Edwardian-style tented bedrooms, a mahogany bar overlooking the open bush and outdoor canvas baths that make you feel like Robert Redford could start washing your hair at any minute.
Cottar's family has been very much embroiled in the history of Kenya: his great-grandfather Charles was an American hunter famous for surviving leopard attacks and developing a reputation for befriending tribal communities. The recently renovated open-front mess tent, meanwhile, is as opulent as it gets with crystal whisky tumblers, oil portraits, vintage mirrors and antique teak dressers.
It felt like a scene from an Agatha Christie novel, had she gone through a surrealist phase. The animal was lying in a pool of its own blood while surrounded by first-edition books and leather armchairs."Fighting for breeding rights," Cottar said with a nod, and asked his team to drag it down to the watering hole to see what would eat it.
"All this 1920s decor is tricky though because there is still such an appetite for it, and the guys who work here don't mind -- it's just theater for them -- but urbanite Kenyans are vehemently anti anything colonial-looking, and I get it." Wildlife is dying because fences -- simple structures made of wood and wire -- now cover huge swathes of the Masai Mara. They impede all migrations and are the reason why, even with poaching figures dropping each year, lion and elephant populations are in freefall.The solution, Calvin says, is biodiversity easements, which sounds complicated but which actually means renting the land from the Masai rather than owning it.
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