Kilimanjaro

The rainforest zone — day one

The Machame Gate at 1,800 metres sits in dense montane rainforest. You walk through it for the first half of day one — colobus monkeys in the canopy, Impatiens flowers at your boots, the mountain invisible above you. The forest is wet and cool and entirely unlike what follows. It's the continent going up properly, one climate zone at a time.

The moorland and its giants

Above the forest, the vegetation becomes surreal. Giant groundsels — Senecio kilimanjari — exist only on this mountain, reaching six metres. Giant lobelias burn like candles along the trail. The landscape looks designed. The guide explains that these are evolutionary adaptations to altitude: giant rosettes retaining heat, leaves funnelling water to the root. Biology as architecture.

Above the cloud sea

Around 3,800 metres, you step through the cloud layer and onto a ridge. Africa is below you, hidden under white. The sky above is a blue that has no equivalent at sea level. The temperature drops; the air is thin enough to feel. You are above the weather, above the continent, and the only thing above you is the summit — rust-black volcanic rock and the last of the glaciers, impossibly close now.

The Amboseli view — before and after

One night before the climb and one night after: Amboseli National Park, on the Kenyan border. Elephant herds cross the marshland with the full summit of Kilimanjaro behind them — the photograph that defined East Africa for a century. Seeing it before the climb is motivating. Seeing it after, knowing what's up there, is something else entirely.

Uhuru at sunrise

The summit push starts at midnight from Barafu Camp at 4,673 metres. Six hours in the dark, above 5,000 metres, in air that delivers roughly half the oxygen of sea level. The goal is to be at Uhuru Peak — 5,895 metres, the highest point in Africa — as the sun rises over the glaciers. Most climbers cry. Most of them will say it was the best thing they ever did. Both are true at once.