RUPI MANGAT: Tracing Elsa’s tracks

We’re driving through Meru National Park en route to Kora National Park. The only wildlife we see as we drive through the impenetrable thorn thickets are lesser kudu – the males majestic with spiraling horns –, ground squirrels in suicidal dashes across the road, tiny dikdik and eagles soaring in the skies.

It’s been a long dry spell. In this sweltering heat, herdsmen bring their goats, sheep and cows for a drink at the mighty Tana, the life lung of this arid region.

Abdi Gimbe the Kenya Wildlife Service driver who has worked in the park for 15 years knows every route in the vast 870-square kilometre park that borders the 1,788-square kilometre Kora National Park, once the home of the legendary Bwana Simba, George Adamson, where he worked to reintroduce lions to the wild and create a safe haven for them. Joy Adamson, his wife penned the iconic novel Born Free about Elsa the lioness.

Abdi stops at a clearing in the bush. It’s one of the spots where Elsa came to drink. Elsa’s trust in the Adamsons was amazing. She mated with a wild lion, gave birth and brought her cubs to the Adamsons. In the 1960s, Joy penned Born Free which became

a bestseller and the series made into a TV serial and a movie, bringing wildlife conservation for the first time into people’s living rooms.

A short drive away, we stop again. It’s where Elsa rests under the shade of the acacia tree which she sometimes scratched her claws on. Reading Born Free, it’s nostalgic to picture Elsa and her trio of cubs playing in Ura River and shortly after, Elsa dying by its banks from a tick-borne disease.

Now, the Ura is dry. A group of kids watch us from across the dry lugga. They don’t know anything about the legendary lioness that’s buried there. Although Elsa lived a few short years from 1961 to 1965, she’s immortal. A beautiful poem on her tombstone by Joy adds to the nostalgia of the full moon watching over the child. The tombstone is from the Serengeti where Elsa’s cubs were taken and set free.

The stone is so hard that the fundi’s chisel broke while trying to carve on it.

AMAZING BAOBAB

A few kilometres away, the Ura meets the Tana with rich earth-coloured water. We’ve met the Ura high in the Nyambene Hills and now on the plains. Hippos grunt in the distance, while the crocodiles lie hidden. Driving on, Abdi’s next stop is the most amazing baobab I’ve ever seen.

It has a chamber inside it that fits all six of us with plenty of space left for more. It is easily 1, 200 years old. Nicknamed Mwariama, it’s believed to have housed Mau Mau freedom fighters.

In the heat of the day, we’re finally at George Adamson’s steel bridge built between 1986 and 1990. It straddles Meru and Kora national parks over the Tana, close to the rapids named Adamson’s Falls.

We enjoy a picnic at the newly-built bandas by the rapids and then stroll along the banks upstream. The banks glitter with minerals washed down.

And then we’re in the once inhospitable Kora that was closed territory because of the warring shifta. It’s where Goerge lived and died by poachers’ bullets on 20th August 1989. He was buried there. A herd of camels browse on the thorn scrub and look down on us haughtily.

Past them, Paul Omondi the warden at Kora shows off the new KWS offices by the Tana where the British built a cable bridge in 1965. Even after all these years, it’s intact with no rust or damage to the thick cable strung across the Tana. The only thing missing is the cable cart. It’s a spectacular view of Meru National Park from this side of the river full of doum palms and dry plains and the thick flow of earth-coloured waters.

As the day cools, we’re back at Meru National Park. The animals wander out to the swamps lining the rivers. Buffaloes wade close to the Rojowero River, where a pair of Egyptian geese frolics and hippos relax in the cool water.

From the thickets, the terrain changes to grassland and somewhere in it lies Pippa the cheetah. Joy met Pippa for the first time as a cub at what is now The Sarova Stanley in Nairobi.

Her owners were leaving the country and needed someone to take her. With Pippa lies one of her cubs. Joy wrote the Spotted Sphinx and Pippa’s Challenge narrating the story of returning a cheetah to the wild, something that had never been done before.

WHERE TO STAY

Log on www.kws.go.ke for KWS guesthouses, campsites and bandas in Meru and Kora national parks. You can also stay at iKWETA Safari Camp www.ikwetasafaricamp.com or Rhino River Camp www.rhinorivercamp.com or Leopard Rock Lodge www.leopardmico.com.