Discover mesmerising Meru and a once decimated national park with a Hollywood backstory
No one speaks. I’m not sure they’re even breathing. For a taut tense hour, on a still, heat-infested afternoon, our safari vehicle follows a muscular lioness stalking a waterbuck as she pads from bush to bush, crouching on front paws, eyes lasered on her prey: the stage set for blood-soaked theatre.
Meru in central Kenya has a multi-layered script. Beyond the Darwinian life and death struggle of Africa’s wilderness, there’s the restoration drama of a national park rebounding from chaotic decay, and the cinematic drama of Elsa, an orphaned lion cub raised in captivity and released into the wild: the central character of an adored movie celebrating its 60th anniversary next year. Might today’s silently stalking predator be Elsa’s distant relative?
We’ll never know. But one thing is certain. Our compelling safari would have been impossible 30 years ago. In the 1980s and 1990s, Meru – one of Kenya’s oldest national parks – was decimated by an unholy trinity of poaching, banditry and land invasions. Elephants were slaughtered, rhinos wiped out and, with the infrastructure in tatters, visitor numbers were flatlining. The government, it was rumoured, would de-proclaim the park.
Except it didn’t. It kept the faith. Funded by international organisations, the Kenya Wildlife Service reinvigorated the hypnotically beautiful landscape. It cut new dirt roads, established a specialised poaching intelligence unit and translocated 1,350 animals from other parks, while creating a large rhino sanctuary with 24-hour surveillance.
Today Meru blossoms over 870 strikingly photogenic square kilometres: the core of a Tana River ecosystem that, alongside Kora National Park and Bisanadi and Mwingi reserves, links a vast variety of biomes over 5,000 square kilometres. Littered with forked doum palms and Gorgon-like baobabs, Meru is one of East Africa’s most diverse national parks blending forests, lava fields and swamps with tall grassland, laced with 13 rivers and spiked with otherworldly granite outcrops.
Lionesses relax in the sun
As well as the Big Five, including the sanctuary’s 70 black and white rhino, there are zebra, cheetah and hippo, alongside hartebeest, oryx and 427 bird species. However, unlike the blockbuster parks and reserves, Meru remains well below the mainstream tourist radar.
A key player in its phoenix-like rise was Elsa’s Kopje, one of only two camps in the park: a source of crucial lease payments and upmarket visitors since 1999. Threaded through Mughwango Hill’s white bark and sausage trees, Elsa’s is one of the continent’s most romantic lodges, its thatched cottages slipped among massive boulders with private decks, tree-branch showers and elegy-inducing views.
The lodge also has top-notch guides. After spotting elephants and rhinos, we encounter three North Kenyan “specials”: reticulated giraffes; Somali ostriches; and Grevy’s zebra – named after Jules Grévy, the French president gifted one of the animals by the Ethiopian emperor in 1882.
Alongside the generous wildlife, Elsa’s Kopje adds a Hollywood twist to a safari with the backstory of its famous movie star namesake: the orphaned lion cub taught to hunt and survive in the Meru’s wilderness by George and Joy Adamson. Three years after being released into the surrounding bush, Elsa returned to the couple, proudly presenting her triplet of cubs: a story immortalised in Born Free, the film based on Joy’s 5-million-selling book.
The romantic Elsa’s Kopje lodge
Both the emotional storyline, and the Adamson’s brutal deaths – Joy was murdered in 1980, George in 1989, protecting a tourist from armed poachers – add a poignant twist to visits to landmarks from their lives. We stop beneath Mughwango Hill, where a warm breeze caresses the rusted fragments of George’s Land Rover that mark the site of his camp. He clearly embraced a free, wild existence away from humanity.
Another day, another exquisite sunset, another reminder of the man’s extraordinary life. This time a natural pool, high on a rocky outcrop, where he’d regularly bring the two lions he’d help train for the filming of Born Free.
Most touching of all is Elsa’s grave on Meru’s southern border, shaded by trees alongside the Ura River where the lioness once played. The tomb also holds half of Joy’s ashes, interred by George as she’d requested. It’s deeply affecting.
My trip climaxes with a climb in the morning, ascending Mughwango Hill in the cool dawn air. As I reach its peak, the sun levitates above the horizon, alchemising the massive empty Earth into a thousand shades of mauve, black and ochre, an experience, memory and landscape that no cinematic trickery, post-production tinkering or AI prompt can ever replicate: magnificent, mesmerising Meru.
Meru is one of East Africa’s most diverse national parks
Combine Elsa’s Kopje and the Maasai Mara’s Elephant Pepper Camp for six full-board nights from £5,750pp including all activities and transfers. International flights extra; expertafrica.com
