Samburu Game Reserve is situated 350 kilometers from Nairobi on the northern banks of Ewaso Nyiro river. The park borders Shaba Game Reserve and Buffalo Springs National Reserve and both are separated by Ewaso Nyiro River.
Samburu has a very evocative and iconic landscape that reminds each visitor of “the Africa of my dreams”: dry and stunningly beautiful, wild and at the same time serene. Samburu also has one of the best concentrations of elephant, but also good numbers of lion, leopard and as well as the plains game. Then, there’s the Samburu Special Five: Grevy’s zebra, reticulated giraffe, Beisa Oryx, Somali ostrich and gerenuk (species that occur only in this part of the country). Wild dogs are also regularly seen.
Samburu and Shaba reserves were the two areas in which conservationists George and Joy Adamson raised Elsa the Lioness. Their story of raising Elsa – the orphan lioness cub in the 1950s and her subsequent release into the African bush is one of the great conservation stories of all time. It was made famous by the bestselling book and award-winning movie “Born Free”.