40 Fun Facts About Kilimanjaro

Mount Kilimanjaro is in which country?

Tanzania: the mountain stands in the north of the country, though it is also the famous backdrop to Amboseli National Park, just across the border in Kenya.

Which of these famous peaks is taller than Kilimanjaro's 5,895 m?

Denali, at 6,190 m, is the only one of the four to top Kilimanjaro, whose official 5,895 m dates from a survey made in 1952; later GPS surveys have differed from it by a few metres.

Kilimanjaro holds which world record?

Kilimanjaro is the highest free-standing mountain on Earth: it belongs to no range and rises about 4,900 m from the surrounding plains, giving it the fourth-greatest topographic prominence of any peak.

Which national capital is the closest to Kilimanjaro, some 200 km away?

Nairobi, across the border, is nearer to the mountain than the capital of Kilimanjaro's own country, which lies well over 300 km away.

Which peak is Africa's second-highest mountain, after Kilimanjaro?

Mount Kenya is the continent's second-highest mountain, and the country around it took its name from the peak rather than the other way round.

Which of Kilimanjaro's three volcanic cones carries the summit?

Kibo, the youngest and highest of the three, keeps the classic cone and crater of a volcano; older Mawenzi has eroded into jagged spires and Shira survives only as the remnant of an earlier crater.

What does 'Uhuru', the name of Kilimanjaro's summit peak, mean in Swahili?

'Freedom': the summit was renamed Uhuru Peak in the early 1960s to celebrate independence, and the word lives on in Star Trek's Lieutenant Uhura, whose name was coined from it.

When it was first climbed in 1889, Kilimanjaro's summit was named in honour of which ruler?

Kaiser Wilhelm II was honoured with the name Kaiser-Wilhelm-Spitze because the mountain then lay in German East Africa; the German name was dropped after independence.

Johannes Rebmann, the first European to report Kilimanjaro's snows in 1848, came to East Africa as what?

A missionary: his report was brushed aside as fantasy for more than a decade, because London's leading geographers insisted that snowy mountains in tropical Africa were a myth.

Who made the first ascent of Kilimanjaro's summit in 1889?

Hans Meyer, a German geographer, reached the top on 6 October 1889 at his third attempt; on his first, two years earlier, he had turned back at the ice cap because he lacked the equipment to cross it.

Which European power governed the territory around Kilimanjaro from the 1920s until its independence in 1961?

Britain ruled it without ever annexing it: the territory was held in trust, first under a League of Nations mandate and then a United Nations trusteeship, until independence in 1961.

In 2009 British celebrities including Cheryl Cole and Chris Moyles climbed Kilimanjaro for which charity?

Comic Relief: all nine celebrities reached the summit in March 2009, and the climb raised more than £3.5 million for Red Nose Day, over half of it from BBC Radio 1 listeners.

Which tennis champion was taken to hospital after falling ill on a charity climb of Kilimanjaro in 2010?

Martina Navratilova developed fluid on the lungs during the December attempt, in the same year she had been treated for breast cancer, and was admitted to hospital.

Which leader abolished the Chagga kingdoms, long established on Kilimanjaro's southern and eastern slopes, in 1963?

Julius Nyerere ended the kingdoms in 1963; the Chagga call the two peaks Kipoo and Kimawenze but have no single name for the mountain itself.

Which band's 1982 hit 'Africa' pictures Kilimanjaro rising above the Serengeti?

Toto's David Paich had never been to Africa when he wrote the words, and the lyric stretches the map: Kilimanjaro stands hundreds of kilometres east of the Serengeti.

One theory says 'Kilimanjaro' comes from a Chagga phrase mistaken for a name; what did it mean?

'Unclimbable': on this theory Europeans mistook a Kichagga phrase, kilemanjaare or kilemajyaro, built on kileme, 'that which defeats', for the mountain's name; Krapf instead glossed it as 'mountain of greatness'.

Douglas Adams climbed Kilimanjaro for charity in 1994 dressed as which animal?

A rhinoceros: the Hitchhiker's Guide author was a founder patron of the charity Save the Rhino, and wore its rhino costume for part of the climb to raise money for conservation.

Kilimanjaro is the African peak in which mountaineering challenge, first completed in 1985?

The Seven Summits are the highest peaks of each continent; the list of Dick Bass, the first to finish, counts Australia's Kosciuszko, while Reinhold Messner's rival list swaps in the far higher Puncak Jaya of New Guinea.

Tougher than the 'Coca-Cola' route, Kilimanjaro's Machame route is nicknamed after which stronger drink?

Whiskey: the nickname sets Machame apart from its soft-drink rival as the steeper trek, with nights under canvas rather than in the bunkhouses of the hut route.

Which Kilimanjaro route is nicknamed the 'Coca-Cola' route?

Marangu, the 'Coca-Cola' route, is the only trail with huts instead of tents, and it is the oldest on the mountain, closely following the path of the party that first reached the summit in 1889.

Which jazz trumpeter named a late-1960s album 'Filles de Kilimanjaro'?

Miles Davis took the title partly from a Kilimanjaro import company he had put money into, and he listed every track name in both French and English.

Which town at the foot of the mountain is the capital of the Kilimanjaro Region?

Moshi sits on the mountain's lower southern slopes, which has made it both the chief trading centre of the region and the base from which most ascents set out.

What poses the most serious risk to trekkers on Kilimanjaro?

Altitude sickness: even fit, experienced trekkers can suffer it, and in a 2005 study 77 percent of those attempting the summit showed symptoms while only 61 percent reached the top.

What on Kilimanjaro shrank by almost 85% between 1912 and 2011?

Its ice cover, more than 11 sq km in 1912, has been retreating ever since, and a 2013 study judged it highly unlikely that any body of ice would remain on the mountain after 2060.

Which animal's frozen carcass lies near Kilimanjaro's summit in the opening of 'The Snows of Kilimanjaro'?

A leopard: the opening paragraph says no one knows why it is there at such a height, a riddle left hanging over the tale of a dying writer in the camp far below.

Kilimanjaro's Western Breach and Great Barranco were formed about 100,000 years ago by what?

A collapse of the crater rim about 100,000 years ago opened the Western Breach and the Great Barranco, and glacier ice later flowed out through the gap it had left.

Dendrosenecio kilimanjari, a plant endemic to Kilimanjaro, is a tree-sized species of what?

Groundsel: the giant groundsel of Kilimanjaro's moorland grows as a tree and survives the nightly frost by keeping its dead leaves wrapped round the stem as insulation.

Which two large animals on Kilimanjaro's lower slopes are noted as potentially hazardous to trekkers?

Elephants and Cape buffaloes are the exception on a mountain where large animals are rare, and they are seldom met above the lower slopes.

Which crop grows in the 'Chagga home gardens' between 1,000 and 1,800 metres on the mountain?

Coffee became the Chagga's great cash crop, and in the 1920s their farmers banded together in a growers' association of their own to win a better price for it.

Above the farmland of the lower slopes, which vegetation zone do Kilimanjaro trekkers enter first?

Dense forest begins at about 1,800 m; above it the path crosses open moorland and alpine desert, so a few days' walk takes trekkers from tropical woodland to an arctic summit zone.

Kilimanjaro owes its volcanic origins to which great geological feature?

The Great Rift Valley: Africa is slowly splitting in two along it, and the volcanism that came with the rifting built Kilimanjaro, which stands off to the east of the valley itself.

Which ancient geographer recorded sailors' reports of a 'moon mountain' that may refer to Kilimanjaro?

Ptolemy accepted travellers' reports of snowy peaks at the head of the Nile, and his 'Mountains of the Moon' were mapped for centuries; today the Rwenzori range is their best-known identification.

The Battle of Kilimanjaro, fought near Longido, belonged to which war?

World War I: on 3 November 1914 an Allied column invading German East Africa was beaten back at Longido by German colonial troops, an early German victory in the East African campaign.

Who wrote the 1936 short story 'The Snows of Kilimanjaro'?

Ernest Hemingway published it in Esquire in August 1936; its hero is a writer stranded in a safari camp, looking back in a string of memories over the life and work he has let slip away.

In 'The Snows of Kilimanjaro', what is killing the writer Harry?

Gangrene from a thorn scratch: Harry cut his knee on a thorn while trying to photograph waterbuck and did not put iodine on it at once, and the infected leg has left him stranded in camp.

The 1936 story 'The Snows of Kilimanjaro' opens by saying the mountain's western summit is called what in Masai?

'The House of God': the name echoes Ngai, the god worshipped by the Maasai, and the opening paragraph makes the summit a place of mystery before the story drops to the plain below.

Who played Harry in the 1952 film The Snows of Kilimanjaro?

Gregory Peck starred for producer Darryl F. Zanuck; the story's author took the money for the film but, by one report, could never bring himself to watch the result.

How does the 1952 film of 'The Snows of Kilimanjaro' change the ending of the story?

Harry survives on screen; in the story he only dreams that a rescue plane is carrying him towards the mountain's summit, and one critic said the change made a naive success story of it.

The Chagga, who farm Kilimanjaro's slopes, speak languages of which family?

Bantu: the Chagga speak a cluster of closely related Bantu languages, unlike their neighbours on the plains, the Maasai, whose language belongs to the Nilotic family.

The first Europeans to attempt to reach Kilimanjaro, Rebmann and Krapf, were based in which coastal city?

Mombasa: at the coast the two men had heard marvellous tales of a vast mountain of gold and silver guarded by evil spirits, which Rebmann understood only when he saw it for himself in 1848.