At 19,341 feet, Kilimanjaro is Africa’s highest, and one of Earth’s most massive mountains. But its loftiness and immensity are only a hint of the great peak’s importance. As John Gunther once wrote, “the mountain gives life….It plucks purple clouds out of the monsoon from the Indian Ocean, makes rain, carries forests on its back…it is one of the most useful mountains in the world, as well as most romantic.”
We see still-glaciated, often snow-dusted Kilimanjaro from many places on Micato safaris, perhaps most dramatically from Amboseli National Park and most unusually from the Chyulu Hills, Hemingway’s Green Hills of Africa, where we gaze through the Hills’ lush cloud forest at the mountain, and remember Peter Matthiessen’s words in The Tree Where Man was Born: “A snow peak in the tropics draws the heart to a fine shimmering painful point of joy.”