Marsabit National Park
Updated: Jul 12
It was 1:07 a.m. inside Lake Paradise crater when I woke to heavy feet crackling through dry thickets. Awake on my back, I slowly propped myself up onto my elbows, and peering through a hand-sized plastic window in my rain fly, I saw a full moon spot-lighting the crater's rim.
My eyes wrenched to the left. In a split second, a heart-skipping vacuum tore through my chest. Every nerve ending flared to white-hot life as my brain and chest reconnected in a brutal jolt of pure adrenaline. Sweet Jesus, it’s an elephant.
A giant loomed at my doorstep, a mountain of a shadow creating a void inside a cosmic midnight-blue sky. I couldn't move; the sheer weight of its gaze had me pinned down as it seemed to now occupy the entire universe outside my tent.
The o.o33 mm worth of woven fibers between him and me provided no comfort. As a physical sensation of thrill pumped through me — equally matched with utter helplessness — the elephant shuffled a step closer. I pushed my elbows outward and slowly reclined, stiff on my back... and waited.
The elephant took another step forward. Dry brush popped like fireworks under its foot; "one more," I thought, "and it's going to crush me." A darker shadow ballooned over the tent, and with his trunk, he bopped the top of it with a thud sending tremors through its aluminium ribs. "Hey, man... um, someone's sleeping in here, yeah?" I stayed silent.
I've watched elephants in nature shows use outcroppings as back scratchers, rolling there backs to and fro while pushing with their back legs as they try to quell the itch. I could do little more than hope its trunk was transmitting a neuro-message that this flimsy thing in front of it was no boulder.
He then unfurled his trunk and with another thud it landed next to my ear, seperated by a nylon wall inches away. Investigations continued.
Its prehensile 'fingers' pinched at the tent while a deep inhale emptied my skull of all air and sound, sucked into a metallic echo of some kind of reverberating didgeridoo psychedelia, like a miniature bright-organge cartoon me spinning into a spiraling wormhole to another universe. The noise was absolute, a deafening roar that bypassed my ears and vibrated deep inside every fiber of my body.
In a moment, it felt like the blinding brilliance of auditorium house-lights had been switched on, and I was back in my tent again. The elephant pivoted right and with three short steps began interrogating a cooking pot and a backpacking stove I'd left out. With a clumsy lurch, my Helinox camping chair was toppled over next. Another step, and its colossal foot came down square on an empty can of Tusker lager, flattening Kenya's finest brew with a sharp crunch. The snap of the can triggered a bizarre mental flash—a vivid, disjointed commercial for an aluminum recycling campaign that flickered through my brain like a broken projector. Yet through it all, I stayed completely pinned to my sleeping pad, horizontal and helpless, while my heart continued its thrill-pumping against my ribs.
Seemingly satisfied with its investigations, the elephant pivoted once more towards the tent, blocking the moon again and filling my space with a darker darkness. It made one more query of the tent's dome with its trunk and then slowly slumbered off, staggering up the crater's slope until I could head it no more.
I saw only one solitary bull elephant while camping at Lake Paradise, pictured here. I’m certain he was my midnight visitor. Indeed, from the day before, you can see his plan being formed in that photo: munch some succulent grass, play it cool with no startling movement, and wait for nightfall. A standard routine of any midnight prowler.
After managing a few hours of fitful, adrenaline-rushed sleep, I unzipped the tent fly and dragged myself out into the dawn.
As I staggered upward, a cluster of sharp thickets snagged viciously into my scalp. After wrenching myself free, my vision swept across the wide panoramic rim of the lake until it abruptly locked into focus on a lone spotted hyena. It was poised tall, perfectly rigid and far more upright than my own achy posture. Its dark, unblinking eyes pinned me to the spot where I stood, awkwardly plucking twigs from my disheveled hair.
"Dammit", I thought, "I'm in no condition to deal with a situation." This was another first for me: facing off with a hyena while I'm wearing only socks on my feet. But a few seconds later the hyena turned in the direction of the rising sun and galloped off, silently slipping into the encircling forest and out of sight. I managed a very poor photo, but it seems to capture well what felt like a ghost at the time.
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Sir Richard Francis Burton, the 19th Century polyglot swordsman explorer, is known for many things, among them his travels to Mecca and travails in East Africa. Less familiar to readers are his writings on journeying from North America's Salt Lake to the Pacific Ocean in The City of the Saints and Across the Rocky Mountains to California (1860). In this book, a few of its pages describe the Native American tipi with the Bedouin bayt al-shar, offering what is likely the only first-hand account of nomadic life among both groups in the same book.
What relevance am I trying to make of this here? The Marsabit experience is best discovered by threading day with night by camping inside the park. Whether it be bison hide, goat skin, or a standard nylon variety, the material of your tent makes little difference. What’s important is that this quintessentially Kenyan wilderness experience not be limited to an in-and-out midday drive, but rather a continuous (and, ideally) 24-hour experience. If you can find the ground space for a bayt al-shar, might as well make add some additional days.
But it's the word safari, introduced by Burton to the English language from Swahili in the mid 1800s — taken earlier from the Arabic safar — that I turn my attention to in the context of Marsabit National Park.
Safari, meaning 'travel' or 'journey', has, as a concept, transformed wildly since the 1800s. Today it applies to just about any type of wildland joy-seeking from bicycle to boat to hot air balloons and more. A common thread between all safaris, at least to most westerners, is the idea of coupling the journey part of the of the word to wildlife. But there's a lesser practiced safari, one you've never heard of and won't read about in glossy magazines or see featured in time-kill Instagram reels. It's the least sexy and photogenic of all of them, but in Marsabit, it is, frankly, the only safari-type that will achieve what you've come here to do. It's the lawn-chair safari... or as Burton might have called it, a Bedouin-style self love experience, or something in that vein. In any case, let me explain.
You might be thinking that a lawn-chair safari sounds like lazy-person indifference to — or avoidance of — adventure and physical exertion. I suppose it could be called a camping-chair safari — if that sounds more Wild Bill-ish for your liking, but campfire songs and ashy marshmallows are not your principal objectives in Marsabit. Lawn-chair, instead, evokes an image of day-time leisure while outside on freshly-cut grass under a warm sun, where time and obligation pause. This is what you're aiming for, performing only one activity from sun up to sun down in the comfort of that chair: watching wildlife for the entirety of a day while you move no further than three meters from your morning position in effort to track with the shade of the tree you're sitting under. It's most certainly the antithesis of the 4x4 game drive.
If your usual park experience is done with the intention to drive in, follow some roads and see what you find, and then drive out — which is lovely to do in many other parks — this is not the place for that. But, if you lawn-chair it, then what you should expect in Marsabit is something unlike any other safari experience you've ever had... EVER!
Most of the park’s 1,500 square kilometers are covered with dense forest and bushy ground cover. From a moving vehicle you’ll see a lot of trees, leaves, and low vegetation. It's more Karura Forest than Masai Mara.
Marsabit National Park is a mountain shrouded in montane forest that sits above a expansive dry landscape stretching all directions for hundreds of kilometers. Despite this isolation within an extremely arid region, the park’s altitude creates a peculiar ecological zone that is kept green by relatively high rainfall — some 90cm per annum — and with its rich volcanic soils, a lot of that water is retained, inducing evergreen forests and deciduous woodlands and perennial grasses, that latter favored among elephants and buffaloes.
Rainfall pools in the park's two volcanic craters, with each accessible by road or foot, but Lake Paradise is ideal for camping. The other, Sokota Diko, is home to the park's only lodge, which, in October 2020, appeared to be deserted, or at least in some sort of pandemic-induced dormancy.
Lake Paradise is like a 24-hour improv theatre with a cast comprising of some of the most extraordinary animals on earth. It's a show with no beginning and no end, and your seat — that lawn chair you brought with you — is the only seat in the house. The stage — the lake — is nearly a half kilometer wide and a full kilometer long, while the theatre — the crater — is another 2x larger.
So, to say it again, bliss here is achieved by spending an entire day — or more — relaxing in your chair on the lake’s edge eagerly watching for who's next to emerge from the forest 'curtain' and saunter down to the crater water's edge. Pole pole. To stretch your legs midway, and meet the cast, go for a walk around the lake.
Abundant in the park are grevy's zebra (an otherwise uncommon forest dweller), elephants, buffaloes, bush bucks, kudus, baboons, spotted hyenas and birds galore, both permanent residents and migratory species. There are reticulated giraffe somewhere but I didn't see any. By night, there's limitless nocturnal action, and on one after-hours scan of the lake's edge with all 746 lumens of my Maglite torch, I counted over 50 sets of glowing yellow eyes looking back at me.
Each evening begins the same way — an opening chorus of zealous crickets who are eventually relieved by the day-cast ensembles of Egyptian geese, sacred ibis, and fiscals, among many others... and collectively — with elephants, buffalo, and baboons, oh my — maintain a steady 24-hour acoustic rhythm that bounces around the crater. Here's an audio clip of an elephant-herd matriarch at odds with a not-so-coy buffalo fussing about who has right-of-way to the sunny-side of the lake for the day’s last drink. (volume up)
Over two and half days I saw no other people at Lake Paraside - only a pair of rangers on my way in and out. One of the largest tuskers ever known in Kenya lived in Marsabit National Park, Ahmed. His legendary status, cemented by his huge frame and 70kg tusks, goes back to the 1960s when word spread throughout Kenya of a giant elephant in the north, so long were his tusks that they would drag on the ground as he walked. In the 1970s, documentaries were made, elevating his pop-icon status. All of this compelled President Jomo Kenyatta to provide Ahmed with his own protective detail of two armed rangers on 24-hour watch. When Ahmed died at 55 years, the nation mourned, and plans were soon made to preserve Ahmed’s massive bones and tusks for all Kenyans to see for themselves. “The King of Marsabit” is today at the Kenya National Museum in Nairobi.
The campsite
There's one 'official' campsite at Lake Paradise, or "big sweet water crater". It's a good spot for several tents, but if you're few and neat, there’s a better one. The special campsite is behind the tree line on the northwestern edge of the lake. If it’s been raining, it’s a slog to get there. On the map below, it's marked 'special', which typically means you need a reservation, but I didn't have one, and I don't think you need one really: there was no one else there. The header photo on this page is taken from the park's lake viewpoint, on the road, directly above the special campsite. In the distance in that photo is an opening in the trees on the opposite side of the lake, and a solitary tree in the middle of that opening closer to the water's edge. That's where I camped (yellow circle on the map below), and that tree will provide shade for you and your lawn-chair safari.
The view of the lake from that lone tree is perfect. Elevated, it affords a panoramic vantage point to see everything, unlike the special campsite which sits, as mentioned, behind the trees and is a 25m trot on a rocky path to better the view.
My reasoning for the lone-tree spot was two-fold. One, the view's great. Two, since everything that visits the water emerges from somewhere through the tree line, I wasn't interested in sitting alone in a dark grove waiting for something to flop onto my lap on its way for a drink. Also, the baboons keep to the western edge of the lake and so little concern of sticky fingers grabbing my stuff and scampering off. On this map, the road into the crater enters through that clearing, so it's the first spot you come upon as you approach the crater.
Marsabit, or "mountain of cold", is certainly much cooler than where I was just before, Samburu National Reserve. T'was nice to wear layers in the cool morning, like a misty Oregon campout, and the third day included an early fog roll-over above the lake.
If in need of provisions before going into the park, there's a market, Basmart, on the right side of the A2 as you enter Marsabit town from the south. It's adjacent to the Total petrol station. A bit further, another couple hundred meters or so (and at the next right turn as you move east into town), is the main road to Ahmed Gate. There's a Shell station on that corner. If you need some of those mentioned Tuskers, you can get them by the case from the Saku Beer Agency a hundred meters past the Shell station on your way to the park entrance, on the left side of the road. (The Marsabit NP map, btw, was available only at the Ahmed gate, and not the more informal Karare gate.) The road conditions in the park, in October, are good, easy in, easy out.
Of everywhere I've camped in Kenya, this place is among the best... no menacing monkeys, no people doing nonsense (see Hell's Gate post), and enough inquisitiveness on both sides of the tent to maintain a steady cycle of awe. Whether you go to camp there or not, don't forget, above all else, to bring something to sit on. You'll be happy you spent as many hours as possible on the edge of Lake Paradise, and, I believe, leave with full appreciation of the lawn-chair safari. Kids? Yes!
When you return home from Marsabit you’ll tell your friends and their friends about what happened here. Chances are good they’ve never been, and, sadly, like most everybody else, will never go, but you’ll try to convince them anyway. Marsabit is far off the tourist circuit, and with so many other spectacular Kenyan parks more readily accessible, visitation will remain low. But its lack of popularity is your benefit. And the drive is fabulous on what is possibly Kenya’s best road from Archer’s Post to Moyale.
As Kenyan long-distance runner Jalis Lukong enthusiastically said during an interview, describing the moment he looked over his shoulder and realized victory was imminent in the 2013 Kass FM marathon, “no peepol, no peepol, noooo. And I happi.” Marsabit... take your lawn-chair safari to the next level.
Marsabit National Park Bush Camping & Self-Drive Safari Guide
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