I’ve been trying to post this blog for three days now, but the internet connections are terrible. Well, here goes…
Our time in Uganda had finally come to an end. I was pretty keen to move forward at this point, as during our ten days or so in Uganda we didn’t have a whole lot of included activities and the optional ones were quite expensive, so I spent a lot of time just waiting around not doing much at all. On the other hand, it was nice to just chill and relax, and in any case I still prefer to be bored in Africa than back home.
In the morning we packed our things from the guest house to the truck and headed for the border. We got a few more people on board that were doing a short trip from the gorillas in Uganda to Arusha, Tanzania, bringing the total number of people on the truck to 23. The border was near, but it took much longer to cross than the one between Kenya and Uganda. First we lined up to emigration. After the first few had gone through, the border official lost his network connection and we had to wait for almost half an hour before he could continue processing our passports. After the emigration there was another queue for a guy sitting in a tent and asking our name and occupation, no idea what that was for. Then we waited until our whole group had gone theough, before crossing the road to enter the Rwandan side. There we had a health check, where they took our temperature to make sure we didn’t have ebola. Then we queued to immigration, got our entry stamps to Rwanda and off we went towards our next stop.
Rwanda seemed very pretty indeed. I was surprised how modern it seemed compared to other countries we’d been to. The road was good, houses were decent and many of them had gardens. As we were driving through town I could see sport arenas, european style gardens and very modern buildings, and all the main streets had street lights. We stayed in a town called Nyakinama, in Red Rocks Cultural Centre, a local community centre that had a campsite, craft shop, restaurant, bar, music studio and that ran workshops in arts, traditional crafts and photography for locals and visitors. Very cool place indeed! After setting up our tents in the artsy campsite we chilled in the lounge bar and some of our group decided to sample the local delicacy, banana beer. After seeing everyone’s faces after taking a sip, I decided to trust other people’s judgemenr rather than trying it myself. Apparently it was quite vinegary, and was more like wine than beer. However, the alcohol content was 15%, and that encouraged the younger members of our group to down quite a few of those during the evening.
During our stay in the hostel in Kisoro we were not doing our own cooking, but instead were served dinner made by the hostel staff. The food there had nit been great, so we weren’t sure what to expect when we heard we would again be served dinner by the campsite staff. Boy were we in for a treat! The restaurant in the camp site had proper professional chefs, and the dinner was amazing! When they started bringing the food out I couldn’t believe how many different dishes were coming out of the kitchen. We had soup and fresh bread for starters, followed by a hot meal with meat, veg, beans, salads, avocado salad and more.
The next morning me and a couple of others went for a guided walk in the local village. Our guide was a young man who was actually from Kisoro, the town where we had been staying for the last three days in Uganda. He had come to Rwanda to do an apprenticeship in the Red Rocks Cultural Centre three years before, and had liked it so much he was now working there permanently. We walked through fields where different kinds of crops were grown, passed houses every now and then and were greeted with ”Amakuro!” everywhere we went. It means ”How are you?” and the reply to that is ”Nimasa!” Again our visit ended in a local school, this time filled with kids! We visited a few different classeooms, and in each the kids sang a song or two for us, both in English and in French, which is also an official language in Rwanda as it used to be a Belgian colony. It was very cute, and to top off all that cuteness we visited the school’s pigsty, which had one day old piglets.
Instead of walking all the way back to the camp site we got on an ”African limousine”, bicycles with a seat in the back. First part of the ride was a rather bumpy one on the village dirt road, but as we got on the main road it was downhill all the way and we were goung fast! I was half fearing for my life when our bikes speeded past other cyclist on the road, but we all made it back in one piece to the camp site, where other members of our group had been taking part in banana beer making, bee farming and basket weaving.
It was about a four hour drive to Kigale, the capital of Rwanda. We were crossing mountains again, and I noticed during the drive that there is very little pristine nature in Rwanda, all the forests have pretty much been cut down and replaced with farmlands, which stretch all the way up to the top of the hills. As we reached the top of the last mountain before Kigale, it got so cloudy that we could barely see where we were going as the top of the mountain was covered in clouds, including the road we were on. I was just glad it was still daylight, it would have been very scary to drive there in the dark! Halfway down the mountain the sky burst open and it started raining very heavily, and the rain followed us for the rest of the trip to Kigali. Driving through town it seemed like some of the smaller roads had turned into rivers, as Kigali is built on steep hillsides and flood management is not great. We later heard that people had died in flash floods that day when the water swept out their houses on the hills.
It was still raining down hard when we arrived at camp, which was actually a hotel on whose lawn we were camping in. This was the first time we had to put our tents up in the pouring rain, and quite a few people ended up upgrading to rooms instead. The price was supposed to be 40$ for a double, but I guess that because of the rain the price jumped up to 55$ instead… All the new people upgraded, while the rest of us knew our tents to be waterproof and decided to save our money and camp anyway. After getting drenched in the rain we sat in the bar waiting for dinner. Again we were not cooking ourselves, which was nice as it was quite wet and cold so it was good to eat inside the restaurant. I didn’t sleep very well that as the hotel had a gym which was very busy, with cars and people coming in and out and the music from the gym glasses blaring over the campsite. Also we were very close to a big road, so it didn’t really get quiet all night.
The next day we visited the Genocide Museum. Although this was a very sad part of our itinenary, at the same time I thought it was a very important place to visit. I saw the movie Hotel Rwanda years ago, and couldn’t comprehend what could lead to such horrific events. I rented an audio guide for 25$ and spent a good couple of hours going through the exhibit and learn about the comonial history and the events before, during and after the genocide. Very heartbreaking indeed. After the museum we drove to a shopping centre to do our shopping for the next few days, and I had a pizza (which was not great) and an iced latte for lunch. After lunch we decided to walk to the hotel featured in the movie Hotel Rwanda, and were surprised to find that it was right next door and the sign Hotel Millé Collines was actually visible from the shopping centre! It was a five minute walk, and we had a drink at the hotel terrace. We then crammed four people on the back of a taxi and drove to a local market close to our camp. We got harassed a lot, bought nothing and walked back to camp. Dinner was already being prepared as we got back. I wasn’t really hungry after eating a pizza for a late lunch, so decided to skip dinner and went early to bed to be ready for a 6am start and a long day in the truck.
Jenni's Africa 