Seeing Kilimanjaro without climbing it, and the one day you can walk on it
Guests arrive in Moshi and sometimes go two days without seeing the mountain at all. Then one morning they come out for breakfast and it is standing there above the rooftops with snow on top of it, and nobody says anything for a while.
Which is the thing worth knowing before you come. The mountain is not always visible, and that has nothing to do with luck.
We have lived in Moshi at the foot of it since 2009. This page is about when you can see it, and about how high you can walk on it in a single day without going anywhere near the summit. Those are two very different days, and most people want the first one.
Seeing Kilimanjaro without climbing it
Yes, you can, and that is what almost every visitor to Tanzania does. It stands above Moshi. It stays in view for about an hour as you drive the Moshi to Arusha road. And on a clear day you see it from the aircraft on the way into Kilimanjaro Airport, which is the first time most people see it at all.
Height | 5,895 metres, 19,341 feet, at Uhuru Peak on the Kibo cone |
Where | Northern Tanzania, on the border with Kenya |
Nearest town | Moshi, at about 900 metres, roughly 2,950 feet |
What it is | A volcano with three cones, Kibo, Mawenzi and Shira. Kibo is dormant rather than extinct |
Why it looks like that | The highest free-standing mountain in the world. It belongs to no range, so there is nothing beside it to measure it against |
It sits about three degrees south of the equator and carries snow on the summit. That snow is there because of the height, not in spite of the latitude, and it is the single thing visitors find hardest to believe until they see it.
When the mountain is out, and when it is not
Early in the morning, in the last hour before sunset, and more reliably in the dry months. That is the whole answer, and almost nobody is told it before they arrive.
The mountain makes its own weather. The plain heats up through the morning, the moist air is pushed up the slopes, it cools as it rises, and by around ten in the morning there is a blanket of cloud sitting on the mountain that often stays there into the afternoon. That is not bad weather. That is what this mountain does on an ordinary good day.
So look early. From first light until about eight is the most reliable window there is, and it is also the best one, because the low sun puts a pink on the snow that it does not have at any other hour. The second window is the last hour before sunset, when the cloud frequently pulls back. If the only times you look are between ten in the morning and four in the afternoon, you will see nothing and conclude you were unlucky, and you were not.
By season, late June through October is the driest and the clearest. January and February are good too. During the long rains, March to May, you can get days on end of cloud, although an April morning can also come up completely clean, and we have watched it happen from our own garden.
Where you look from changes what you see. From Moshi you are looking at the south side, with the flat dome of Kibo and the jagged edge of Mawenzi standing next to it, and that is the shape almost everybody has in their head. On the road to Arusha it stays over your right shoulder. And the joke of it is that from the slopes themselves the view is worse, because you are standing too close to it and facing into forest.
A day walk on Kilimanjaro, from Machame Gate to Machame Camp
We have walked this one ourselves, which is why it is the one described here. It starts at Machame Gate at 1,800 metres, about 5,900 feet, in rainforest, and runs 11 kilometres, just under 7 miles, up to Machame Camp at nearly 3,000 metres, close to 9,850 feet, which is where people climbing to the summit spend their first night. That is 1,100 metres of climbing, about 3,600 feet. Roughly four and a half hours up and three hours down.
The first stretch is quiet rainforest, birds you cannot see and leaves moving when nothing is there. Then the vegetation thins and goes rocky, and it gets noticeably colder the higher you go, which surprises people who were sweating an hour earlier. You eat lunch at the top among the tents of climbers who are going higher in the morning, and that is a strange and good place to be sitting with a sandwich.
The way down, rain and sore legs. The same 11 kilometres back, and it looks easier on paper and is not. The rain started on us and we were wet through inside half an hour. Going down it is the thighs and the calves and the knees doing the work rather than the lungs, which is a different kind of tired, and we were properly tired by the time we reached the gate.
Who this is for, and who it is not for. Twenty-two kilometres, nearly 14 miles, with 1,100 metres of ascent, is a hard day even for people who are fit. If you walk 15 kilometres or more at home without thinking about it, you will be fine. If a walk for you means two hours and then somewhere to sit down, this is not your day and we would rather say so now than at the gate at half past six in the morning.
What to wear. I walked it in a sports shirt and leggings and put a fleece on at lunch, because the moment you stop moving up there it is cold. Take a poncho or a rain jacket, because the weather in that rainforest turns in minutes. Walking shoes with real tread are best, although sturdy trainers are enough on this particular route. Poles help, and they help most on the way down.
And if you would rather stay at the bottom
Not everybody wants to walk up anything, and that is a perfectly good position. Around Moshi you can visit a coffee farm on the lower slopes and follow the bean to the cup in a morning, walk to the waterfalls near Marangu, or sit on your terrace with a coffee and wait for the cloud to lift, which is what we do most mornings and it still works.
Looking at it, or walking on it
So there are two versions of this day, and which one suits you depends on how much you want to have done by the evening. We will tell you plainly when a walk is harder than it sounds, because the alternative is somebody having a miserable day on a mountain they came a long way to enjoy.
Either one drops into a trip without trouble. Most of our guests start in Moshi, which means the mountain is already outside the window on the first morning, and this day goes in before the safari rather than instead of anything.
Safari njema.
Most of our guests start in Moshi
Which means the mountain is outside your window on the first morning, and this day goes in before the safari rather than instead of anything.