Rwenzori Mountains

Kilimanjaro gets 35,000 climbers a year.
This gets a few hundred.

Africa's third highest summit stands at 5,109 metres and carries glaciers almost on the equator. Ptolemy put these mountains on a map in the second century as the source of the Nile, and far fewer people climb them in a year than climb Kilimanjaro in a week.

The Rwenzori are not a volcano like Kilimanjaro or Kenya. They are a block of the earth's crust pushed up along the Albertine Rift, which is why they are jagged rather than conical, and why the weather sits on them the way it does.

You walk up through five distinct zones in a week: montane forest, then bamboo, then a heather zone where the trees are hung with moss, then the Afro-alpine bog where giant lobelia and groundsel grow three metres tall and nothing looks like anywhere else on earth, then rock and ice.

Be straight with yourself about the bog. The central circuit involves days of walking on tussocks over standing water, and it is the part people underestimate. It is also the part they remember. If seven to nine days is more than you want, the lower valleys give you the heather forest and the lobelia in two to four, and almost nobody does that either.