Cheryl Thomasgood, 65, says she deeply regrets leaving her family
It’s a story that once made tabloid headlines across continents—a British woman trading her life of routine for a Maasai warrior she met on a Kenyan beach. Decades later, Cheryl Thomasgood says the fantasy came with a price.
Back in 1994, Cheryl was 34, a mother of three, and married to her second husband, Mike Mason, when a holiday to Mombasa’s Bamburi Beach Hotel changed everything. There, she met Daniel Lekimencho, a 6’2″ Maasai cultural dancer, and instantly felt “a spiritual connection.”
Swept up in a romance she called “magnetic,” Cheryl left her family, filed for divorce, and returned to Kenya to live with Daniel in a traditional Samburu manyatta.
She swapped a warm bed for goat skin mats, meals for boiled cabbage and blood, and her usual comfort for daily village routines, fully embracing a life she barely understood.
“I thought I was healing,” she told Daily Mail Online. “But really, I was just escaping.”
The couple later returned to the UK, intending to raise their daughter Mitsi along with Cheryl’s other children. But Cheryl says her dream soon collapsed.
“Daniel wasn’t the same. He was obsessed with money, flashy items, and sending everything back home. It wasn’t what I expected.”
Their relationship ended just a year after Mitsi was born.
Today, Cheryl lives alone in Somerset, far from her past headlines. She has no contact with Daniel and has left that part of her life behind—except for Mitsi, who she says was the only beautiful thing to come out of it all.
“I chased what I thought was love, but it wasn’t,” she says. “I was broken, and I used a stranger to fix what I hadn’t even faced.”
What once read like a global fairytale has faded into personal reflection. Cheryl’s name may no longer trend in gossip columns, but her story remains a quiet lesson about decisions made in pain, and how sometimes the heart’s leap can lead to a heavy landing.
