Meru National Park
Expert Reviews (9)
Kenya Parks
Ariadne is a renowned African wildlife photographer whose work is featured in many well-known guidebooks and magazines.
7 people found this review helpful.
A Success Story for Rhino Conservation
Meru National Park is a stunning and often overlooked wildlife haven. Although all the Big Five are present, big cats aren’t very easy to see. Reticulated giraffes are common and you might be lucky to see gerenuk as well, but I would say that rhinos are the biggest attraction in Meru.
The history of rhinos in Meru National Park is marked by both significant conservation successes and challenges. Initially, the park, established in 1966, was home to a healthy population of both black and white rhinos. However, by the late 1970s and 1980s, rampant poaching for rhino horns led to a dramatic decline in their numbers across Kenya, including in Meru. In response to the alarming decline, the Kenyan government established a dedicated rhino sanctuary within Meru National Park in the late 1980s.
“You can’t miss the rhinos”, said the game warden on our recent visit. He wasn’t wrong: we saw several every time we entered the sanctuary, and on our last drive we counted 10 individuals. Due to the increasing rhino population, the sanctuary was expanded a few years ago from the initial 45km2 to about 80km2 and it now covers about 10% of the park. The fencing consists of close-together short stumps, so only the rhinos, with their little legs and round tummies, can’t pass. All other wildlife moves around the reserve and sanctuary freely. It’s a great success story in wildlife conservation and hopefully it will put Meru National Park a little bit more on the tourist map to help reduce the overcrowding in some of the more popular parks.
Philip is an acclaimed travel writer and author of many guidebooks, including the Bradt guides to Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya and South Africa.
6 people found this review helpful.
The Phoenix Park
Meru National Park was one of Kenya’s most popular parks in the 1970s, when it was strongly associated with Joy and George Adamson of ‘Born Free’ fame. It fell off the tourist map in the late 1980s, after being commandeered by commercial poachers. Fortunately, however, this underrated park has undergone a near-total recovery since I first visited it in the early 1990s, and game viewing and amenities have improved over every subsequent trip. Meru today supports large herds of elephant, buffalo and plains zebra, along with a good variety of antelope. The 83-sq-km drive-in rhino sanctuary close to the main gate is one of the best places in Kenya to see white rhinos (most commonly around Mururi Swamp in the early morning or late afternoon) and it is also home to a few elusive black rhino. Meru supports several northern species at the southern extent of their range (e.g. reticulated giraffe, Beisa oryx, gerenuk, and a variety of birds), but it should be noted that these are generally more common and easily seen in Samburu and Buffalo Springs National Reserves. Meru is not a great reserve for large carnivores: lions are quite common but leopard, cheetah and spotted hyena sightings are rather unusual. Above all, Meru NP is most memorable for its wilderness atmosphere, which is enhanced by the limited tourist traffic – you can still go entire game drives here without seeing another vehicle.
Emma is an award-winning travel writer for Rough Guides, National Geographic Traveller, Travel Africa magazine and The Independent.
6 people found this review helpful.
Where Elsa the Lion Roamed Free
If you’re longing for a Kenyan park which the crowds have yet to find, Meru is well worth considering. You have to work a little harder to see the animals here than in, say, Amboseli or on the open plains of the Masai Mara, but the feeling of discovery more than compensates. I really enjoy its mixture of grassland, marshland and wooded landscapes – it feels more like a southern African than an East African park.
Several watercourses cross the park, ensuring a good supply of vegetation all year round – enough to support a good population of elephants, along with buffalo, giraffes and zebras. I’ve spent some highly enjoyable hours birdwatching in Meru, too.
Stuart is a travel writer and author of numerous Lonely Planet guidebooks, including 'Kenya', 'Rwanda' and 'Tanzania'.
5 people found this review helpful.
Kenya’s Forgotten Park
At one time, way back in the 1970s, Meru was one of the most famous and popular parks in Kenya. But, throughout the ’80s it gained a reputation for insecurity and poaching, which culminated in the murder in 1989 of George Adamson (of Elsa the lioness and Born Free fame). Security has since returned to the park and it’s today a perfectly safe place to visit, but for reasons that still remain something of a mystery to me Meru hasn’t really caught on again.
It’s certainly not because there are no animals. The manager of one of the park’s few lodges recalled to me how when he’d first arrived in Meru he was amazed by the variety of wildlife. It was true, he’d said, that animals aren’t to be found in the huge densities that they are in the Masai Mara, where he’d previously been based, but in just his first couple of hours in Meru he reckoned he’d seen more species than he would in a week or more in the Mara.
For a visitor there’s plenty of plains game, beautiful giraffes, a fair few elephants, and lions and leopards among many others. It’s also one of the best places to see rhinos. They live in an 83-square-kilometre ‘park within a park’ that has been fenced for their own protection. But maybe more than the wildlife it’s the sense of peace that so captivates. On my last three-day visit I didn’t see a single other safari jeep!
This is also a very beautiful park and one with a real wilderness feel. One of my abiding memories of Meru is of sitting atop one of the kopjes (granite outcrops) with rock hyraxes playing just beyond my reach, the sun setting and a herd of several hundred buffalo marching across the plain below me.
To summarise, Meru is a park for people who want variety, a sense of wilderness and a total escape from other safari-goers.
Anthony is a photographer and writer for travel magazines and Lonely Planet, including the guides to Kenya and Botswana & Namibia.
4 people found this review helpful.
Meru: Kenya’s Forgotten Park
The more I visit Meru, the more convinced I become that this is Kenya’s most underrated park. I’ve seen lions and rhinos, sometimes lots of them, every time I’ve visited, and leopard sightings are surprisingly common too. And, of course, buffalo, elephant and others are frequently seen, and the backdrop of northern mountains and palm-fringed pools is rather lovely. But it’s the sort of park where I keep having some really cool wildlife experiences – a python swimming in the river, a crossing of more than 20 reticulated giraffes just meters from the vehicle, a stand-off between lion and rhino. And the park is never crowded.
I also love a park with a story. It was here that George Adamson and his lioness Elsa (of the film ‘Born Free’ fame) roamed the plains and wrote their story.
Mike is an award-winning wildlife writer, former editor of Travel Zambia magazine and author of the Bradt Guide to Southern African Wildlife.
4 people found this review helpful.
Meru National Park: ‘Born Free’ Born Again
Meru National Park was the real-life setting for ‘Born Free’, the story of conservationists Joy and George Adamson and their hand-reared lioness Elsa. The site of the original Adamson camp stands close to Elewana Elsa’s Kopje, an upmarket lodge built upon Mughwango Hill, where the couple used to take Elsa for walks. From the lodge, a 360-degree panorama allows a spectacular overview of the rich mosaic of savanna, forest and swamp that makes this one of Kenya’s richest conservation areas.
My three-day visit included good lion encounters – the population has been boosted by reintroductions – and evidence (tracks, kills and calls) of both leopard and cheetah. We also found several breeding herds of elephant, plus large buffalo herds and an impressive variety of antelope, including eland, Beisa oryx, Grant’s gazelle and the elusive lesser kudu. There are also hippos and crocodiles in the Tana River and a special fenced protection zone that is home to both species of rhino. A wealth of birds includes such riverine specials as African finfoot and, during my visit, huge numbers of wintering Afro-palearctic migrants – from wheatears and bee-eaters to Montagu’s harriers quartering the marshes. Activities here include night drives and bush walks, and with visitor numbers low you will seldom meet another vehicle.
Lizzie is a reputed guidebook writer and author of the Footprint guides to South Africa, Namibia, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and Zimbabwe.
4 people found this review helpful.
A Beautiful Off-the-Beaten-Track Wildlife Haven Without the Crowds
Rampant poaching had just about decimated Meru when I first visited in the 1990s. But the Kenya Wildlife Service and other interested donors turned it around into a conservation success story thanks to a dedicated force of rangers and restocking of wildlife, and today it’s a Big Five park. The terrain is quite beautiful with khaki-coloured grasslands, acacia woodlands, sludgy marshes and riverine forest with doum and raffia palms. It receives very few visitors compared to the southern parks – on a self-drive visit, I didn’t see one other vehicle, so this unspoilt and pristine environment was simply enchanting. Its disadvantage, however, is that the game is definitely harder to spot – the lushness in the wet seasons means that animals are often obscured, and the arid dry seasons force them to disperse to out-of-reach regions even outside the park. Nonetheless, I’ve seen large herds of buffalo and elephant, both black and white rhino in the fenced-off sanctuary, and at the Rojewero River viewpoint and boardwalk, half-submerged hippos and crocs, reticulated giraffes loping down to drink, and kingfishers, rollers, bee-eaters and weavers flitting about. Meru has little accommodation, but the Kenya Wildlife Service cottages and campsites are good, and the spectacular 5-star Elewana Elsa’s Kopje on Mughwango Hill is the best place I’ve stayed in this region of northeast Kenya.
Brian is an award winning travel writer, author of safari books and regular contributor to magazines such as BBC Wildlife and Travel Africa.
3 people found this review helpful.
Home of Elsa the ‘Born Free’ Lioness
There’s a real away-from-it-all frontier feel about Meru that sums up the magic of northern Kenya. Overlooked by the blue Nyambeni Hills, its grassy glades and thorny seas of combretum thickets convey an overwhelming sense of wildness seldom encountered elsewhere. Swamps and rivers lined with doum palms provide year-round water for the game, and red granite kopjes loom out of the bush, including Mughwango Hill, where George and Joy Adamson camped with Elsa, their famous ‘Born Free’ lioness. Today Elsa’s descendants still roam the park, and the hill itself is now the site of Elewana Elsa’s Kopje, one of my favourite Kenyan lodges, from which you can set out in search of Meru’s Big Five as well as species seen only in the north, including reticulated giraffe and Beisa oryx. Birding is good, too, especially along the banks of the Tana River and its tributary, the Rojewero, which are home to giant kingfisher and African finfoot.
Dale is a multi-award-winning writer and photographer with more than 500 published magazine articles featured in magazines such as National Geographic, BBC Wildlife, Travel Africa, and CNN Travel.
Iconic Africa With a Few Surprises
My eyes started to wobble in their sockets as I tried for all my worth to capture Grevy’s zebras on my camera. Those closely spaced stripes really do confuse the senses, and I was able to appreciate how their ‘camouflage’ disorientates predators and tsetse flies alike.
There are other arid specialists to be found in Meru National Park too. Take the gerenuk, for instance, a weird-looking antelope that appears to have had its neck elongated on a rack, its head shrunk, and its ears stretched to an outlandish size.
You will see Beisa oryx with magnificent long horns, and you’ll also encounter reticulated giraffes with their pretty patterns and doleful eyes.
The usual suspects will be there in abundance too: large herds of buffalo. Lions, cheetahs, and leopards, as well as hippos, warthogs, elephants, and gazelles. You have a good chance of seeing them all, especially if you are doing a guided safari from one of the lodges in the park.
For me though, the real attraction of Meru is not just the varied and unusual species you’ll encounter, but also the fact that it isn’t as heavily visited by tourists as some of Kenya’s other famous parks (like the Mara, for example). You’ll rarely find yourself in traffic or fighting for space at a sighting.
Safari Tours to Meru NP
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![10-Day Ultimate Indulgence - Ultra Luxury Safari to Kenya]()
10-Day Ultimate Indulgence - Ultra Luxury Safari to Kenya
$12,869 to $17,269 pp (USD)
Kenya: Private tourLuxuryLodge & Tented Camp
You Visit: Nairobi (Start), Meru NP, Samburu NR, Masai Mara NR, Amboseli NP, Nairobi (End)
Tapestry of Africa Tours and Safaris
5.0/5 – 29 Reviews
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![7-Day Best of North National Parks Safari]()
7-Day Best of North National Parks Safari
$1,846 to $2,156 pp (USD)
Kenya: Private tour
Mid-range Lodge & Tented CampYou Visit: Nairobi (Start), Aberdare NP, Ol Pejeta Conservancy (Laikipia Plateau), Samburu NR, Meru NP, Nairobi (End)
Imara Africa Safaris
5.0/5 – 28 Reviews
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![3-Day Best of Meru National Park-Ikweta Safari Camp]()
3-Day Best of Meru National Park-Ikweta Safari Camp
$485 pp (USD)
Kenya: Private tour
Mid-range Tented CampYou Visit: Nairobi (Start), Meru NP, Nairobi (End)
Balu Travel
4.9/5 – 96 Reviews
