Satao Elerai Camp, Amboseli National Park

Amboseli is all about Kilimanjaro.   Shaped like an enormous Christmas pudding, the mountain is a looming presence in the park.  It is the first thing I see in the morning when I open my tent flap. Some mornings long ribbons of gauzy mist enshroud the base. On others it hides behind banks of of clouds. "The mountain is shy," explains a Masai.

When Kilimanjaro is visible at sunrise the top is frosted with gleaming crystalline white,  pale pink and gold.  This appearance heralds the daytime pageant which begins with a dawn chorus of crickets, and birdsong. All that is left of the velvet blackness of the African night are lion, hyena and kudu prints in the dusty elephant paths.

Kilimanjaro stands 19,000 ft and its volcanic legacy has completely shaped Amboseli. The vast tracts of the land are salty white traced with animal tracks. In some places even the termite mounds are an ashy gray.

Once entirely within Kenya (British East Africa), it is said it was given to Kaiser Wilhelm by his doting grandmother, Queen Victoria. He had complained he did not have a volcano in his territories and she had some to spare in Uganda and Kenya. So, allegedly, he received Kilimanjaro as a birthday present from Her Majesty and the map was redrawn.

Today the snowy cap and glacier are endangered like much of the African wildlife. Satelite images of the crown reveal rapidly shrinking ice.  In ten to fifteen years experts estimate snow and glacier will be gone. Currently the run-off water from the volcano feeds watery swamps where hippos and elephant wallow. The water table supplies water to support tree and bush life.  What will this mean for Amboseli Park, the wild animals, the Masai who herd their cattle and goats there? No one knows.

But this morning Kilimanjaro was the first thing I saw. The remaining snow gleamed. Strings of gray elephants plodded along age old tracks at the base of the volcano, once given by a Queen to a Kaiser.  This morning Kilimanjaro seems like the essence of Africa.

TTFN