Tanzania

Tanzania is East Africa's showpiece, the country that somehow ended up with both the continent's highest mountain and its most famous wildlife spectacle. Kilimanjaro rises to 5,895 meters from flat savanna, snow-capped and improbable near the equator. The Serengeti's Great Wildebeest Migration - two million animals following the rains in an endless loop - is arguably the most dramatic natural event on Earth.

But there's more to Tanzania than safari brochures. Zanzibar, the semi-autonomous island archipelago off the coast, was a hub of the spice and slave trades for centuries and still has the winding alleys, carved wooden doors, and clove-scented air to prove it. Freddie Mercury was born in Stone Town. The Nobel Prize-winning novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah grew up there. Swahili, one of Africa's most widely spoken languages, evolved along this coast. And at Laetoli and Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania is where some of the oldest evidence of human evolution was found - footprints 3.6 million years old, pressed into volcanic ash by our earliest ancestors.