Amboseli National Park, a natural wonderland almost as large as Deleware and Rhode Island combined, is famous for its abundance of game, the classic quality of its lodges and camps, and for its beguiling views of Kilimanjaro, the monarch of Africa, thrusting three dizzying miles above the park’s grasslands. The glaciers atop the huge mountain, probably the largest single peak on earth, are still up there, and the mountain is often dusted with snow. As Peter Matthiessen wrote in The Tree Where Man Was Born, “A snow peak in the tropics draws the heart to a fine shimmering painful point of joy.”
Game drives in Amboseli are exceptionally rewarding: the park’s five distinct habitats (ranging from savannah to woodland and sulphur-springed wetlands) support what is probably Africa’s largest population of free-ranging elephants, along with the Cape buffaloes, impalas, lions, cheetahs, hyenas, giraffes, zebras, and wildebeest who—in addition to two score or more other mammal species and 600 bird species—make their domicile in and around the park.
Out of a sapphire sea rose a coral island of incandescent green studded with groves of coconut and mango and orchards of cloves, the palm forest deck with pink convolvulus, a thin line of surf beating languidly on the milk-white sand.
