Meru

Meru is the county town on the north eastern shoulder of Mount Kenya, a busy highland market centre where the mountain’s farmland runs out and the road begins its drop towards the dry country. It is the place a traveller stops to buy things, change plans, look at a museum and understand the Ameru, and it is the last real town before the park that shares its name.

Meru Town and Meru National Park Are Different Places

The names cause constant trouble. Meru National Park is a remote lowland wilderness with the Adamsons’ history and a rhino sanctuary, and it has its own guide here. Meru town is a highland administrative and commercial centre at a different altitude, in an entirely different landscape, a long drive away.

Visitors routinely book accommodation in one believing they are near the other. The park is reached from Meru town by heading north east through Maua, with Murera Gate 35 kilometres beyond it. That is a real drive on a road that degrades towards the end, not a short hop, and it needs to be allowed for in a day’s planning.

Where the Town Sits

Meru is the headquarters of Meru County, on the north eastern slopes of Mount Kenya just north of the equator, at highland altitude in country that is green, steep and intensively farmed. The town runs along a ridge, and its streets carry the traffic of a large agricultural economy: coffee, tea, dairy, bananas, potatoes and, above all, miraa.

Its position on the mountain’s ring road makes it a junction. West is Nanyuki round the northern side of the mountain. South is Chogoria and the long road to Embu. North east is the Nyambene range, Maua and eventually the park. North west is the drop to Isiolo and the road to Samburu.

The Ameru and the Njuri Ncheke

The town is the centre of the Ameru, and the institution most worth knowing about is the Njuri Ncheke, the supreme council of elders. It functions as the apex of the Meru traditional judicial system, settles disputes, holds and transmits customary law and cultural knowledge, and retains real influence in local social and political life. Its headquarters is at Nchiru, in Tigania West, at the foot of Nchuura Hill.

The National Museums of Kenya records that an Njuuri Ncheke House, near the road leading to Meru National Park, was entrusted to it in 1989, which is the formal heritage recognition of the institution. Visiting is not a matter of turning up; this is a living council rather than a monument, and access is arranged locally and respectfully. The broader subject sits under cultural tours.

Meru National Museum

The museum is the one conventional sight in town, and it is better than its low profile suggests. The National Museums of Kenya records that the building dates from 1916 and served as an administrative node in the Mount Kenya region, having been the District Commissioner’s office before he vacated it. The museum itself was founded in 1974, jointly by the Meru municipal and county councils and the National Museums of Kenya.

Inside and around it are displays on Meru cultural history, a garden of indigenous medicinal plants, a theatre, traditional homesteads and a small collection of live animals including snakes, monkeys, tortoises, a monitor lizard and Nile crocodiles. An hour covers it. For anyone heading on to the park or into Ameru country, it is the most efficient introduction available. See heritage tours for the wider context.

Miraa and the Nyambene Hills

North east of the town the Nyambene hills produce miraa, the stimulant leaf and stem known elsewhere as khat, and Meru supplies the rest of the country with it. Maua is the trade’s centre. The crop shapes the region’s economy, its roads and its rhythm: the harvest is cut early, bundled, and driven fast, because freshness determines value, and the miraa vehicles on the Meru road are a recognised local hazard.

For a visitor this is not an attraction so much as an explanation. It is why the road towards the park is busier and faster than its surface deserves, why the hill country north of Meru is wealthier than the land around it, and why a conversation in a Meru bar is quite likely to be about prices in Somalia. Miraa is legal in Kenya and its legal status varies sharply between other countries, which is worth knowing before carrying any.

Using Meru as a Base

Meru is a staging town rather than a holiday one. The three things it stages are worth stating plainly.

• Meru National Park. The northern approach runs through Maua to Murera Gate. A night in Meru before an early start is the sensible way to avoid arriving at a gate that closes at 6pm.
• Mount Kenya from the east. The Chogoria route, on the eastern side of the mountain and the one that passes the high lakes, is reached from the Embu to Meru road south of the town. Logistics are covered under mountain climbing.
• The road north. Meru sits on one of the two routes towards Isiolo, Samburu and the northern conservancies, the other running through Nanyuki.

The town also serves its own county, and the country around it repays a slow day: tea and coffee smallholdings, forest edges on the mountain side, and the Nyambene ridges. None of it is packaged, which is the appeal and the difficulty in equal measure.

Getting to Meru

Kenya Wildlife Service gives the road distance from Nairobi to the park as 348 kilometres by way of Nyeri, Nanyuki and Meru, or alternatively via Embu, and the town sits on both of those routes. Either way it is a long day’s drive from the capital on tarmac of generally good quality, with the mountain on one side for most of it.

Matatus and shuttles run frequently from Nairobi and connect Meru with Nanyuki, Embu, Chuka, Maua and Isiolo. There is no significant commercial passenger airstrip at the town itself; visitors flying into the region land at Nanyuki for the mountain or at one of the Meru National Park strips, principally Kinna and Mulika, for the park.

Best Time to Visit Meru

The town is temperate and green year round. The long rains from March to May and the short rains in late October and November are heavy here, and they matter less for the town than for what lies beyond it: the road to the park and the tracks inside it are considerably harder in the wet. The drier months, roughly June to September and January to February, are the practical windows for anything that continues east or north.

Meru Questions