Two heights, both authoritative
Mount Rungwe is the high point of the Southern Highlands and it has two published elevations. Tanzania Forest Services, which manages the reserve the mountain sits in, gives 2,981 metres and calls it the highest peak in the Southern Highlands. The Smithsonian Institution’s Global Volcanism Program, which catalogues it as a volcano, gives 2,953 metres.
Both bodies are authoritative within their own domain and neither is correcting the other. A forestry agency and a volcanological catalogue measure and cite differently, and a 28-metre difference on a broad volcanic summit is not a contradiction worth resolving by guessing. Both figures are given here, as they are on the Mbeya and Tukuyu guides, and any source that quotes one without mentioning the other has simply picked.
What kind of mountain it is
Rungwe is a stratovolcano, and the Global Volcanism Program’s description of it is worth reading before the climb because it explains everything about the shape of the walk. The summit is cut by a four-kilometre-wide caldera breached to the west-south-west. Hummocky ground extending at least twenty kilometres south-west of the mountain is a debris-avalanche deposit — the remains of a collapse of the summit and the western flank. The caldera itself is largely filled with young, uneroded, sparsely vegetated pumice cones, lava domes and explosion craters, with more craters on the northern and southern flanks and a field of basaltic cones and lava flows on the north-west.
The programme dates the largest explosive eruption to about four thousand years ago and catalogues the last known eruption at around 1250. It is the largest volcano in the Karonga basin north-west of Lake Nyasa, and the rock is trachyte and trachydacite.
In practice this means the summit is not a peak in the Kilimanjaro sense. It is a rim around a filled bowl, and what you walk among at the top is the volcano’s own recent plumbing.
The forest and the kipunji
The massif is one of only two places in Tanzania that hold the kipunji, the monkey described in 2004 in a genus new to science. The other population is in the forest reserves beyond the boundary of Udzungwa Mountains National Park. It lives high in the canopy and is difficult even for researchers; a sighting here is luck rather than an itinerary item, and anyone promising one is overselling.
Climbing it
Rungwe District Council records the mountain reserve as covering the Isongole, Ndanto, Kiwira, Ikama and Suma wards, and lists the tourism works carried out on it: a toilet, a gate, a visitor reception building, signboards, shelters and an improved road at Ngumbulu. That is the level of infrastructure to expect — enough to start from, not enough to follow unguided.
This is mountain trekking in wet, cold, forested country that is among the rainiest in Tanzania. No authority publishes a route time, a distance or a compulsory-guide rule for the climb, so none is given here; arrangements are made through Tanzania Forest Services and locally in Tukuyu. Cloud on the summit is normal in any season and a clear view from the top is never a given.