Kilimanjaro is capricious and sometimes it doesn’t want to be seen, we tell you how we did to see it before the clouds covered it
Kilimanjaro is the highest mountain in Africa and one of the most popular tourist destinations in Kenya and Tanzania. But what many people don’t know is that you can only see Kilimanjaro from certain places and at certain times of the day. In this article, we tell you about the best time to see Kilimanjaro.
Kilimanjaro is capricious, and sometimes it does not want to be seen. Would we be able to see it ourselves? Here we tell you.
What is the height of Kilimanjaro?
This mountain is located in the northeast of Tanzania and is 3962 meters high. It is possible to see it from Amboseli on the Kenyan side, and, in fact, one of the classic images of the park is to see the elephants with Kilimanjaro in the background. We arrived with great enthusiasm, but the clouds were capricious and did not let us see the mountain.
The cute inhabitants of the area
Luckily, the elephants did show up during our visit to the park, we saw everything: small and large males, families of mothers with their children, we almost saw two elephants fighting. But as far as Kilimanjaro is concerned, nothing, every time we turned to see and always clouds. Suddenly, you could see a small piece of the mountain, you could see the white part that reminds of the classic photo in magazines.
“Oh well…” we said to ourselves to console ourselves, as long as nature is involved in the equation, we can’t be sure that something will be this way or that. Even though the day was stunning and sunny, there were those clouds that hid Kilimanjaro.
What is the best time to see Kilimanjaro?
And in that Coletta, our guide, who had also lived in the region for a few years, gave us the GOLDEN Tip:
If you want to see Kilimanjaro, the time you are most likely to see it is 6 AM
Of course, if you would like to go further in your friendship with this mountain, you can consider taking a tour like this one Mount Kilimanjaro Trek: 7 Days
So, get up early!
We would only get one chance, so if we stayed asleep, the chance would be lost. Therefore, the first thing was to get up VERY early.
Luckily, the place we were staying in had a viewpoint from which the Kilimanjaro could be seen perfectly, or so they said, since the day before there were only clouds. So minutes before 6 I went through the entire hotel to see if it was truly at 6 am that I could see it, I had little hope because it was still quite dark.
But at the same time I had faith, since if someone who lived in the place for several years recommended it to me, I wanted to think that it was true.
The surprise!
I arrived on time at 6 AM and… I couldn’t believe it.
I couldn’t believe that now, I was seeing it with my eyes, its snowy top was so beautiful.
I stayed there for several minutes until I began to notice that the Kili (now that we were friends, I even gave it a nickname and everything) was covered in clouds.
And in total, no more than 15 minutes passed and everything was beginning to be covered in clouds. The sighting was literally a few minutes, so really if I hadn’t arrived on time I would have lost it, luckily I had.
A worthwhile memory
And that was the day I got to see Kilimanjaro with my own eyes. Seeing it before the clouds blotted it out for the rest of the time I would be in Amboseli.
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