Kilimanjaro Factfile

Mt. Kilimanjaro is the highest mountain in Africa, the highest free-standing mountain in the world, and one of the largest volcanoes ever to break through the earth's crust. Seen from a distance it looks as though it is sitting on the clouds. Although only three degrees south of the equator, glaciers and snow cover its peak. Almost four miles high, it can be seen on a clear day from more than one hundred miles away.

And this is not all: within its one great ecosystem lies almost every kind of environment found on earth. In the space of a few days you will pass, as it were, from the equator to the Arctic: through tropical rain forest, Alpine meadows, moorland, desert uplands, to snow and ice. We can trace the grand process of evolution in reverse: from the animals of the forest to the first stirrings of bacterial life on the summit.