Lake Paradise

Lake Paradise is a still sheet of water inside a steep, wooded volcanic crater on Mount Marsabit, and it is the sight that gives Marsabit National Park its reputation.

A Crater With Water In It

Mount Marsabit is pocked with volcanic craters, known locally as gofs, and only three hold water: Lake Paradise, Lake Marsabit and Lake Horr. The Kenya Tourism Board records these as the only permanent surface water in the region, which explains the wildlife on a mountain that looks, from the plains, like an unpromising green lump.

The crater has a name of its own. The Kenya Wildlife Service park brochure calls it Gof Sokorte Guda and describes it as a natural amphitheatre with a caldera 150 metres high sheltering the fresh waters of Lake Paradise. That is the detail most accounts leave out and the one that explains the place: the water is fresh rather than alkaline, it sits enclosed behind a high wall, the forest comes down to the edge, and mist frequently sits on the rim. The wildlife service calls it the park’s most scenic crater and a location used in a number of films.

It is not the biggest crater on the mountain. Gof Bongole, on the eastern side of the park, is the largest, with a round rim the brochure gives as ten kilometres. No dependable figure for Lake Paradise’s own area or depth is published, so none is given here.

The Johnsons and the Name

The name is not local and not old. It was given by Martin and Osa Johnson, American film-makers whose expeditions shaped how audiences in the United States imagined East Africa between the wars. On the second and longest of their African trips, from 1924 to 1927, they camped above this crater and built a house overlooking it. Footage from those years went into films including Simba: King of the Beasts, and Osa Johnson later published a memoir titled Four Years in Paradise. Nothing of their camp survives as a visitor attraction, and the name is what lasted, which is worth knowing because a good deal of writing implies it translates something older.

Wildlife at the Lake

The lake is a water source in a region with almost none, so the interest is in what comes down to drink. Elephant, buffalo and greater kudu use the mountain, and sightings in forest take patience. Flamingos have been recorded breeding seasonally here, and the forest around the crater is walkable. See forest walks in Kenya and birdwatching in Kenya.

Visiting and Camping

The lake is inside Marsabit National Park, a 360 square kilometre park in Marsabit County according to the wildlife service’s own brochure fact file, and it sits in the Kenya Wildlife Service special interest fee band. Entry is per person per day: KSh 500 for an East African citizen adult and KSh 250 for a child or student, KSh 675 and KSh 350 for a Kenya resident, USD 40 and USD 20 for a non-resident, and USD 20 and USD 10 for an African citizen from outside East Africa. These figures come from the Kenya Wildlife Service conservation fee schedule and were checked on 21 September 2026.

The Kenya Wildlife Service operates a special campsite at Lake Paradise, inside the crater, which is the reason to come for more than an hour. Special campsites are charged above the public rate and carry a non-refundable reservation fee of KSh 10,000 a week. See camping safaris in Kenya.

Getting there is a 570 kilometre drive from Nairobi by way of Nanyuki and Isiolo on the A2, tarmac the whole way, with an airstrip at Marsabit town. Inside the park the roads are forest tracks and the mist can close visibility right down.

Questions Travellers Ask About Lake Paradise