Three cascading waterfalls on the edge of Mount Elgon — Uganda's most scenic hiking destination with the world's most consistently reviewed coffee growing on the same slopes
Sipi Falls is a series of three waterfalls (the highest, Sipi Falls proper, falls 100m into a pool ringed by natural amphitheatre basalt cliffs; the second, Ngasire Falls, a 75m drop through a narrow gorge; the third, Chema Falls, the widest, 58m, approached through a coffee plantation) on the western slopes of Mount Elgon (4,321m, the world's largest extinct volcanic caldera, on the Uganda-Kenya border — Mount Elgon National Park, established 1993) in the Kapchorwa District of Eastern Uganda, approximately 260km from Kampala by road. The falls are dramatic individually and linked by the Sipi…
Mount Elgon's human history is bound to the Sebei people (the Highland Nilotic Kalenjin speakers of the western Elgon slopes) and the Bagisu people (the Bantu-speaking community of the lower slopes, whose traditional circumcision ceremony — imbalu — is performed every two years in even years and is among the most significant cultural events in Uganda). The mountain was first ascended by European explorers in the 1890s (the British geographer Joseph Thompson and later Frederick Jackson reached the caldera in the 1890s). Mount Elgon's caldera (the Wagagai peak, 4,321m, is the caldera's highest…