Mount Kilimanjaro

Ptolemy's Mountains of the Moon — a glaciated range rising to Margherita Peak at 5,109m, the third-highest point in Africa. The climb passes through vegetation zones found almost nowhere else: bamboo, then a surreal Afro-alpine belt of giant lobelia and tree groundsel taller than a person, then rock, snow and ice on the equator. The full summit circuit takes eight to nine days and demands real mountain fitness.

Fourteen thousand square kilometres of grassland carrying the largest terrestrial mammal migration on earth. The name comes from the Maasai siringet — the place where the land runs on forever — and the plains genuinely deliver that. Where you go depends entirely on when you come: calving on the southern short-grass plains around February, the western corridor mid-year, the northern Mara River crossings from August.

The world's largest intact volcanic caldera — 260 square kilometres of crater floor 600m below the rim, holding roughly 25,000 large animals that mostly never leave. It is the surest place in East Africa to see black rhino, and one of very few where lion, elephant, buffalo, leopard and rhino occupy a single enclosed bowl. Descending through cloud forest at dawn into that natural amphitheatre is the moment people remember.