Review: Singita Mara River Tented Camp (2026 Review)

Singita Mara River Tented Camp. It does exactly what it says on the tin. Mara River — yep, there’s a river. Correct. Tented — oh, we’ll come to that. Every single word in the name is doing honest, literal work. The only misleading word is “Singita.”

Getting there

None of this is Singita’s fault, but the faff at Kilimanjaro is currently competing with Escher for mind-fuckery because the VIP lounge is being rebuilt. Our bags were scanned to go into the lounge, and then scanned again to leave it. Just in case, in those twenty minutes, sat in plain view of three members of staff, one of us had knocked together a device. I smiled. I always smile. It’s that or the cavity search.

Then a chartered flight, one hour ten, before landing at a shared airstrip with a little tin shed shop beside it selling both its wares and the soul of the Serengeti. It breaks my heart a bit, that shop. But everyone wants a better life for themselves, and who am I to be sentimental about it — a man who has just chartered an aircraft in order to arrive somewhere a little bit earlier, so I had more free time to complain about it.

Setting

The camp sits in the Lamai Wedge, right at the top of the Serengeti, pinned between the Mara River to the south and the Kenyan border to the north. This is one of the rare Singitas that isn’t on a private concession. In fact, it’s the only one. You’re in the national park, which means off-roading is restricted, other vehicles exist, and the usual Singita trick of buying up half of East Africa so you never have to look at another human being simply isn’t available to them. Every vehicle in the northern Serengeti has precisely as much right to be wherever you are as you do.

The camp itself sits right on the river, and there are no lights anywhere around it at night, which does make it feel properly isolated and rather wonderful. And apparently crossings can happen directly in front of camp, later in the season.

Facilities

I was back here because of their refurb that took place a few years ago. So, with great excitement I walked into camp, looked around with wide-eyed excitement and went “oh, no, this really is one of those refurbs where they changed the cushions that I always take the piss out of”. It’s all still the same. Which is to say very small. Unlike every other Singita, where the public spaces are so vast you could go a full week without meeting another guest, maybe eventually stumble across the ghosts of the ones who never found their way out. Here, two people were having lunch and my options were: sit in front of them, or sit behind them. Or on them. And I don’t need another hotel ban.

There’s a firepit. There’s a lounge, and behind it, under the same roof, a computer, the library, the office and a dining table, all sharing one space like a family that’s fallen on hard times. There’s an unheated pool that isn’t really for swimming. In fact, not sure what it’s for. Probably jumping in to escape the unbearable heat.

There is no gym, except an outdoor wooden structure they refer to as an outdoor gym, but which I would describe as the architect not giving a shit. It looks like a scarecrow that just went wrong.

There is no spa either, though there is a therapist on staff, who will come over and ask whether you’d like a massage, at the exact moment when you’re at your most vulnerable: face down, like a pig-in-shit, stuffing your face with food and looking like someone who needs all the help they can get.

Accommodation

I don’t like it. Let me be precise, because “I don’t like it” is lazy and I’m here doing the Lord’s work. The interiors are fine. The refurb has made the place brighter, more playful, some lovely textures and colours. No complaints about the taste. My objection is the canvas itself. I think we have all, collectively, as a species, moved on from tents. And do you know who has moved on further and faster than anybody? Singita.

There are six rooms. I was in room six, the furthest out, and it was still a short walk to the lodge. That is not a compliment. The rooms aren’t spread out the way they are at most luxury properties. Here, your neighbours are one loud conversation away from ending up on TMZ. Either that, or you turn your fan off, and then you can hear everything. Which brings us neatly to the fans.

There is no air conditioning. Just two fans, in 30 degrees, doing about as much good as pissing on a man who’s on fire. That’s not a cooling system; it’s a little ray of hope, just before you send the heavies in to crush a rebellion. Made even worse when the power went out one afternoon. And I know what you’re thinking, because I’ve thought it myself while sneering at other people: it’s a safari, toughen up, listen to the lions, feel the canvas breathe. No. I draw my line at being uncomfortable in my own room, and I am drawing it here, in the blood of my enemies. Get me that goddamn air con. Or get me out of a goddamn tent.

Cos the tent does nothing for me, and not even the weather likes it – like when, late at night, the wind began smashing itself against the tent like a drunk trying to remember which house is his.

(The turndown note is a charming little card advising you how to get a good night’s sleep, including a tip about not setting the air conditioning too low. There is no air conditioning. Thank you. Thank you so much for that.)

The rest of the room is a bed and the space required to walk around a bed. There’s a little cabinet for drinks and snacks, a zip through the canvas to a loo area which, thank heavens, does contain an indoor shower as well as the outdoor bath and shower. There’s a safe. There’s a small platform to rest your luggage on. There’s some hanging space beside the bed that I’m told is a wardrobe. I’m listing furniture at you because there is so little to say that I’m having to pad, and I’d like you to feel that with me.

The living room is really the terrace: a dining chair, two sunken chairs facing the river, and a chair by the entrance next to the hooks for your poncho and your bag. It’s the nicest part of the room by a distance. It is also where the flies live. So your options for daytime respite are the lodge, or the shaded terrace with the flies, and you will spend an embarrassing amount of your holiday choosing between them.

The whole room felt like a beta version of Singita Explore, where they were testing new ways to torment me before rolling them out at scale.

Service

The service is excellent in that everything-just-happens-seamlessly way. Full kudos to everyone who worked here (well, except one person….), who, I would like to say, made it an absolute pleasure, but I think that would heavily contradict what I’ve written. So, let’s instead say they did their absolute best, and were a pleasure to be around, given the circumstances. Like going to the funeral of your best mate….. who you murdered, but at least all your other mates are there.

I’ve now been at this so long that this was the second camp in a matter of weeks where I was recognised by a staff member — she’d worked at Faru Faru, and was as lovely then as now. I have reached the stage of my career where I am recognised in the bush like a mid-tier soap actor at a garden centre.

Food

The food is superb. All of it, without qualification. Lunch is around five choices plus a dessert. Dinner is five choices, though one is a soup, so it’s really starter, main and pudding, and everything is beautifully done. Small enough not to make you stagger your way back to the room, but large enough that you’re never hungry.

Even the takeaway breakfast — normally a soggy condom of a thing handed over in a paper bag — was excellent here. Proper sandwiches, fresh fruit, some yoghurt, done. And the in-room snacks, all made on the premises, are wonderful, including a liquorice-ish sweet I’m currently missing as I write this.

Activities

Right. The reason you come. The wildebeest. Bazillions of them, looking at a river filled with crocs and saying “Hey, Barry, you fancy taking a dip? Yeah? Ok, you go first”.

The mechanics of it are both fascinating and deranged. You spend hours seeing almost no other vehicles — the park felt remarkably calm, and I’d been in the Mara only two weeks earlier where it was crowds and rangers and radios all day — and then the moment a crossing begins, roughly fifty manifest out of the ether like they’ve been summoned by the Dark Lord. They blocked our path entirely. We were shoved into a corner with what should have been a terrible view.

And from that corner, for the first time in my life, I watched a crocodile take down a wildebeest.

The low rainfall had made a croc appearance look extremely unlikely. So: a corner I didn’t choose, at a crossing I nearly missed, in a season that perhaps shouldn’t have delivered it. I reserved this a year out and won the lottery — the first proper crossing of the season landed on my first day. This is safari at its best. It was absolutely epic.

The rest of the time, though, it’s the ultimate safari of patience. If you’re hunting a crossing, there tends to be very little else going on. I did see the same three cheetahs I’d seen a few weeks earlier in Loirien Mara, which felt like bumping into colleagues on holiday.

You’re in a national park, so you can leave at 6 am, and have to be back in at 7 pm. There are no other activities besides game drives or a hot-air balloon trip.

The vehicles have that middle storage area I love, but no way to get above the roofline for a better angle, which for a photographer is frustrating. And the hand sanitiser in the vehicle smells absolutely magnificent. Why does nobody else do this?

The Unbearable Weight of Being My Guide

Something was very off. Being a guide is a tough job. You’ve gotta work long hours, get asked the same questions over and over again, and occasionally deal with giant arseholes – like this guy. But most of them are extraordinary. This one was not. Yes, I’ve had my share of turds, but this was a level of incompetence mixed in with outright nonchalance.

He was unsure of most things, just spouting incorrect information like a man who once read Twitter on the toilet in 2020 and became a virologist, and — worse, far worse — offered no enthusiasm whatsoever. Having my own photographer-guide along didn’t help; he deferred every question to him instantly. But it went beyond that. Like he had a vendetta against photographers. He carried himself like a man on the last day of his job who had discovered his wife was cheating and received a terminal diagnosis. All on the same afternoon. Maybe he walked in on her with a photographer and the mystery unravels.

The final interaction was the clincher. We’d been told we could stay by the river until eight. At 7:15 he announced we had to leave, and then drove the single most convoluted route imaginable to the airstrip. I said nothing the entire way, because I’d convinced myself we were either heading to a different strip or there was a surprise bush breakfast waiting. Reader, there was not. We just drove around, far from where we wanted to be, for absolutely no reason at all, only to get to the landing strip an hour early.

I can only conclude that the man hates river crossings. Which, at a camp whose entire reason for existing is river crossings, is like joining FIFA and coming over all squeamish about brown envelopes.

The Good

• A park that is dramatically, blessedly calmer than the Mara.
• Service

The Bad

• Accommodation
• Fans
• Facilities
• A guide who appeared to be actively grieving.

The Luxurious

• Food
• Crocs!

Conclusion

This is a very, very basic lodge. If I told you Singita were the best of the best and you came straight here, you’d assume I was smoking crack.

It needed knocking down, not refurbishing. But they’re closed six months a year, which explains a great deal about the level of investment — this is essentially a feeder camp, built so people don’t feel the need to go to Kenya for the migration. They should go to Kenya. And I say that as someone who has spent a career trying to talk people out of going to the Mara.

Service, food: wonderful. River crossing: tick. Public concession: less tick. Facilities and room: boo. Guide: fuck my life.

Impressively, they are fully booked through from July through to October, so you couldn’t come last minute even if you begged. I have almost never recommended this camp to a client, and nothing about coming back has changed my mind — despite having an absolute blast. But that blast was a combination of the river crossings and the sound of my guide’s personality falling off a cliff.