Our Story
Lake Shore wasn't created by a hotel company or dreamed up in a boardroom. It grew slowly, beside a remarkable lake, into the place we call home.
We came to this corner of western Tanzania nearly twenty years ago and fell completely under the spell of Lake Tanganyika. Since then we've built, changed, repaired, planted, learned, made plenty of mistakes and watched a small lakeside lodge grow into something we are enormously proud of.
Through it all, one thing hasn't changed.
We live here. We love this place. And we'd like you to experience it too.
How We Got Here
In 2007, we arrived on the shores of Lake Tanganyika to build a lodge on an island just west of Kipili.
We thought we were coming here for a job.
Lake Tanganyika had other ideas.
The lake, the landscape and the people of this extraordinary part of Tanzania got under our skin, and before long we knew we wanted to make a life here. We eventually found our own little piece of shoreline at Kipili and began building what would become Lake Shore Lodge.
There wasn't a grand masterplan. Lake Shore grew with us — one building, one idea and, occasionally, one slightly ridiculous project at a time.
Nearly twenty years later, we're still here, still building things and still discovering reasons why Lake Tanganyika is such an extraordinary place to call home.
Somewhere along the way, Lake Shore stopped being a project and simply became home.
Life at Lake Shore
Lake Shore is owner-operated in the truest sense of the words. We live here, alongside the lodge, and this has been our home for nearly twenty years.
Living on the edge of Lake Tanganyika is wonderful, and it also teaches you to be fairly self-reliant. We're completely off-grid, producing our own power, pumping and treating our water and solving most problems with whatever — and whoever — happens to be available.
Behind Lake Shore is a remarkable team of people, many of whom have been part of the journey for years. Together we cook, build, repair, garden, launch boats, fight storms, welcome guests and deal with the endless surprises that come with running a lodge in a remote corner of western Tanzania.
It isn't a resort manufactured somewhere else and dropped beside a beautiful lake.
Lake Shore has grown here — slowly, locally and very much by hand.
Lake Shore may have started with only two, but it has been built and shaped by a much bigger family.
Our team comes largely from Kipili and the surrounding communities, bringing together an extraordinary collection of skills, personalities and experience. Some have been with us for many years; others are the next generation finding their place at Lake Shore.
They are the people who welcome you when you arrive, cook your meals, look after your room, take you onto the lake, tend the gardens, fix the things we inevitably break and somehow keep everything working behind the scenes.
More than anything, they are the people who give Lake Shore its character.
You may arrive as our guest. Don't be surprised if they know your name before you've finished your first drink.
Protecting the Lake We Call Home
Lake Tanganyika has been our home for nearly two decades. The longer we've lived beside it, the more we've come to understand just how extraordinary — and how vulnerable — it is.
Beneath the surface is one of the most remarkable freshwater ecosystems on Earth, home to an astonishing diversity of life and hundreds of species of cichlid found nowhere else. Living here has given us a front-row seat to that world, but also to the pressures it increasingly faces.
Over the years, what began as simply caring about the lake in front of our home grew into something much bigger. That journey eventually led us to establish Sustain Lake Tanganyika, an independent conservation organisation working with local communities and partners to help protect the lake and the livelihoods that depend upon it.
Lake Shore remains our home and our lodge. Sustain Lake Tanganyika carries the conservation work forward.
But for us, the two will always be connected by one simple idea:
If you're lucky enough to live somewhere this extraordinary, you have a responsibility to look after it.
Lake Shore has grown and changed enormously in that time, and so have we. But the things that made us fall in love with this place remain much the same — the enormous lake, the islands, the people, the wildlife and that wonderful feeling of being a very long way from somewhere else.
We still wake up beside the lake every morning.
We still stop to watch the sunsets.
And we're still enormously grateful that somehow, this extraordinary corner of Africa became home.
Come and see why we stayed.