Shooting Kilimanjaro: Visiting Kenya's Amboseli National Park It’s all Toto’s fault. In their chart-topping hit from the 1980s, the lead singer of the Canadian dad-rock outfit crooned the line ‘Sure as Kilimanjaro rises like Olympus above the Serengeti’. To those who know their geography, such a scenario is absurd and that you can’t, in fact, [...]
The camps of Kilimanjaro: a highly subjective list of the best and worst By our reckoning there are around 25official campsites on Africa’s highest mountain, as well as several unofficial ones that are still used regularly by tour operators but which have yet to receive official sanction from the park authorities, KINAPA. Admittedly, the locations [...]
Can people climb up Kilimanjaro without a mountain crew? It's a question I still get asked several times a year: Is it possible to just turn up at the foot of Kilimanjaro with a rucksack full of camping gear, food and warm clothes, and head up the slopes to the top? The people who ask [...]
Climbing Kilimanjaro during the rainy season - whether to do it, how to do it - and what to expect April and May is traditionally the low season on Kilimanjaro, and few people climb at this time. There's a good reason for this, of course: these two months are usually when the 'Long Rains' happen [...]
Homophobia in East Africa - can it stop you climbing Kilimanjaro? I was prompted to write this article after we had been contacted by a gay travel agency from California, who were looking to climb Kilimanjaro later this year. Amongst the usual fears they had about altitude sickness and the safety procedures on the mountain, [...]
Climbing Mount Meru Mount Meru, which overlooks the city of Arusha from the north, about 60km from Kilimanjaro, is used by many trekkers as a warm-up trek to Kilimanjaro. In other words, it acts as an hors d’oeuvre to the main course of Kili. And a perfect starter it is too: though smaller, it’s also [...]
Looking to climb Kilimanjaro next year, but having trouble settling on a date. One of the best ways to choose when to climb is to see what astronomical events are happening over the next 12 months and see if you can time your trek to coincide with one. After all, there are few things more [...]
Has Kilimanjaro's most popular route become too popular? For over a decade now the Machame Route has been Kilimanjaro’s most popular trail. According to the most recent figures given to us by KINAPA, 20,339 trekkers used the Machame Route in their attempt to reach the summit in one year. That figure represents a massive [...]
We have had reports recently that KINAPA, the Kilimanjaro National Park Authorities, have started to enforce certain rules that had previously been, if not exactly ignored, then certainly regularly flouted. One of these rules states that children under 10 are not allowed to go to the summit, but only to 3100m. Although this rule has [...]
It’s important to prepare properly when it comes to taking a camera on Kilimanjaro. After all, it’s likely that your camera will not have spent seven days in constant use before and almost certainly not in the dusty and/or humid conditions one finds on Kili, with its extremes of temperature and weather. The first thing [...]