Mount Kilimanjaro National Park
Kilimanjaro is the roof of Africa, and there is nothing else quite like it. Rising alone from the plains of northern Tanzania to 19,341 feet, it is the highest mountain on the continent and the tallest free-standing peak in the world, a snow-capped volcano on the edge of the equator that you can see from a hundred miles away. For all its scale, what draws travelers to us is something simpler: this is a summit you reach on your own two feet. There are no ropes, no ice axes and no climbing experience required, and standing on the highest point in Africa is a goal that ordinary, reasonably fit people genuinely achieve. It is the kind of trip people carry with them for the rest of their lives.
The climb is a trek rather than a technical ascent, and the great pleasure of it is the way the world changes beneath your boots. You start in lush rainforest, where colobus monkeys move through the canopy and the trail is soft and green, then climb up into open heather and moorland dotted with strange giant lobelias and senecio trees that grow nowhere else. Higher still the land turns to a stark alpine desert of rock and dust, and at the very top you cross into an arctic world of glaciers and bare ice. Walking from rainforest to the edge of the snow line in the space of a few days is like passing through every climate on earth, and our guides set the pace slow and steady, polepole as they say in Swahili, so your body has time to adjust to the thinning air.
The summit comes on a single unforgettable night. You set out from high camp around midnight, head torches strung out in a line up the dark slope, climbing slowly through the cold to reach the crater rim as the first light breaks. From there the path curves around to Uhuru Peak, the true summit, where the sign marks the highest point in Africa and the glaciers glow pink in the dawn. Below you the clouds stretch out like a sea, the plains of Tanzania appear far away through the gaps, and the sun comes up over the curve of the continent. It is a hard-won, deeply emotional moment, and we plan every day of the route to give you the best possible chance of being there to see it.
