$10 per person daily, camping $2 per night. Entry allowed on foot; minimum group two people. Warden: PO Box 69 Naro Moru tel 0171/21575 .

 

An extinct volcano, some three and a half million years old, with jagged peaks rising to 5200m, Mount Kenya is Africa's second-highest mountain. Its heart is actually the remains of a gigantic volcanic plug - the mountain stood at over 7200m above sea level about a million years ago - from which most of the outpourings of lava and ash have been eroded by glacial action to create the distinctive silhouette. These peaks are permanently iced with snow and glaciers, though the glaciers are retreating due to climate change. On the upper slopes, the combination of altitude and a position astride the equator results in forms of vegetation that exist only here and at a few other lofty points in East Africa. Seemingly designed by some 1950s science-fiction writer, it's hard to believe the "water-holding cabbage", "ostrich plume plant" or "giant groundsel" when you first see them.

Europe first heard about the mountain when the missionary Krapf saw it in 1849, but his stories of snow on the equator were not taken seriously. It was only in 1883 that the young Scottish traveller, Joseph Thomson, confirmed its existence to the Western world. The Kikuyu, Maasai and other peoples living in the vicinity had venerated the mountain for centuries. Park rangers still occasionally report finding elderly Kikuyu high up on the moorlands, drawn by the presence of Ngai , whose dwelling place this is. It's not known, however, whether anyone had actually scaled the peaks before Sir Halford Mackinder reached the highest, Batian, in 1899. Another thirty years passed before Nelion (10m lower, but a tougher climb) was conquered. Both are named after nineteenth-century Maasai laibon or ritual leaders.