Kilimanjaro

The southern slopes have been densely settled for centuries. The Chagga lived in a patchwork of small chiefdoms, each under its own mangi, farming irrigated banana and coffee gardens on the volcanic soil and trading with the caravans that passed below. German colonial rule broke the chiefdoms' independence in the 1890s; the mountain itself was claimed for the empire, and the boundary with British East Africa was drawn to put it on the German side.

The summit was first reached on 6 October 1889 by Hans Meyer and Ludwig Purtscheller, with a local party that, by long-standing Tanzanian account, included Yohani Kinyala Lauwo of Marangu, who went on to guide on the mountain and lived until 1996. The route they took runs close to what is now the Marangu trail.

Coffee shaped everything that followed. Chagga growers organised early — the Kilimanjaro Native Planters' Association was formed in 1925, and the Kilimanjaro Native Co-operative Union, the oldest co-operative in Tanzania, followed around 1930. Coffee money paid for the schools that made this one of the best-educated regions in the country.

The Chagga of the Kilimanjaro slopes and the Pare of the Mwanga and Same highlands are both mountain farming peoples with long traditions of irrigation, terracing and trade, and both are known across Tanzania for schooling and enterprise. Maasai graze the drier plains between and below them.

Away from the climb, the region rewards slow travel. Marangu has waterfalls and the old mission churches; Materuni and Kilasiya are falls within reach of Moshi; the Pare Mountains above Same offer walking with almost no other visitors; and Lake Chala, on the Kenyan border, is a startling green-blue crater lake with a footpath around its rim.

South-east, the land drops to dry bush and the boundary of Mkomazi National Park, shared with Tanga Region — rhino, elephant and open country against the backdrop of the Pare and Usambara ranges.