Kitulo National Park is the only national park in tropical Africa created to protect flowers rather than big game. Behind that decision was a trade in tubers: across Tanzania's Southern Highlands, collectors were digging up an estimated 2.2 to 4.1 million wild orchid tubers a year and sending them to Zambia, where they are pounded into a dish called chikanda. Botanists surveying the plateau counted more than 350 species of vascular plant, among them 45 kinds of terrestrial orchid and three plants — including the orchid Pterygodium ukingense — that grow nowhere else on Earth. President Benjamin Mkapa announced the park in 2002 and it was gazetted in 2005: 413 square kilometres of open grassland at about 2,600 metres, held between the Kipengere and Poroto ranges. The people who live below it call the plateau Bustani ya Mungu, the Garden of God; botanists call it the Serengeti of Flowers.
The show arrives with the rain. From late November the grass fills with orchids, red-hot pokers, aloes, geraniums and papery everlasting flowers, and by December the colour runs to the horizon between mist-wrapped hills. This is a walking park, not a driving one — most of what you came for is at your feet. Blue swallows, a bird down to a few thousand adults worldwide, nest in the grass through the wet months, and Denham's bustard stalks it in Tanzania's only population. Below the escarpment, in the Livingstone forest, lives the kipunji, a monkey unknown to science until 2005 and given a genus of its own a year later — the first new monkey genus named since 1923. Come between June and August and the plateau is another place: brown, quiet, frosted at dawn, with long views down towards Lake Nyasa. In October 2018 twenty-four zebras were trucked in from Mikumi, the first herd to graze here since the 1960s.