Don Elvis Muraya · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons

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Mount Kenya

added29 August 2026

Africa's second-highest mountain, held by the Kikuyu to be the dwelling of Ngai: houses were traditionally built with the door facing the summit, and prayers directed there. Climbing the main peak, Batian, was long considered something a person did not undertake. The glaciers the first Europeans described have lost more than ninety per cent of their extent in a century.

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On the map

-0.15083, 37.30750

Ruguru ward Open in maps

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Lake Natron

An alkaline lake in Tanzania with rust-coloured water reaching 60 °C. Its chemistry preserves the bodies of dead birds under a calcified crust — the source of those photographs of "petrified" animals.

291 km away

Anomalous zoneGreen

Danakil Depression

One of the hottest and lowest places on Earth, in northern Ethiopia: acid pools, salt flats and sulphur fields in yellow and green. The landscape is otherworldly enough that Mars life-detection instruments are tested here.

1634 km away

UFO sightingYellow

Ruwa and the School Yard

On 16 September 1994, during break at the private Ariel School in this Zimbabwean town, some sixty-two children between six and twelve said they had seen a silver object down beyond the fence and, beside it, a figure in a tight black suit with large eyes. No teacher was in the yard at the time. A few days later the Harvard psychiatrist John Mack, who studied such accounts, spoke to the children individually. The recordings and the drawings survive. Mack did not claim the event had happened; he claimed the children described it as something they had lived through. It remains the best-known case in Africa and one of the most argued-over anywhere.

2081 km away

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