Kora National Park

The Tana slides brown and slow beneath doum palms. George Adamson's grave sits on a rocky kopje above the water, overlooking the bush he spent a quarter-century returning lions to. Kora is so remote its rangers patrol by camel — and that is exactly the point.

Kora is Adamson country: the 'Baba ya Simba' ran his lion rehabilitation camp here for twenty-four years until bandits killed him in 1989, and the park's gazettement that same year stands as his monument. His grave and the remains of Kampi ya Simba are still visited inside the park. The Tana's run through Kora is among Kenya's least disturbed river country — crocodiles thick in the brown water, hippo and elephant in the riverine forest, inselbergs breaking a thorn wilderness that has barely met the vehicle. Visits are expedition-grade and ranger-escorted; there is no signal and little track — the park sits far beyond the reach of the standard circuits. For those who do, Kora is the rawest page of Kenya's conservation story, kept exactly where it was written.