We arrived in Ruhengheri ready for perhaps the most exciting part of our trip, an audience with the mighty mountain gorillas, the very same gorillas made famous by Diane Fossey whose book I had been avidly munching through in preparation. The area where the gorillas live is absolutely breathtaking. Lush terraced fields climb towards conical volcanic peaks, occasionally peeking through swathes of blue mist. The flanks of the volcanoes are densely forested and it is in these areas that the gorillas spend most of their days, alternating between different types of vegetation for their feeding. There are patches of dense forest, bamboo groves and open fields, all of which the gorillas choose on certain days.
There are 56 passes available per day at a cost of $500 per person; eight passes for each of seven groups of gorillas. Some live close to the park headquarters and some far away. Mike and I were very keen to visit the furthest possible group for two reasons. Firstly as this group is also the largest, with 41 gorillas, 4 silverbacks and several young. Secondly because as hiking in the area is $150 dollars a day we wanted to combine the two in one day. You have to hire a driver who comes to the HQ in the morning and then drives you to the trail head of whichever group you will be tracking. We chose an established driver called Alex as we heard that the more known the driver, the more chance he has of securing the group you want. We chose well. We were first at the HQ and Alex schmoozed the head honcho and secured us a place to see the Suza Group.
Other groups arrived and we enjoyed a cup of tea as people milled about. The majority of punters were kindly middle-aged Germans lorded over by a fearsome warrior of a woman – a cross between Jackie Collins and Dr Evil’s female sidekick. She marched around in full make-up barking orders at her charges and waving her arms about. One sidelong look at Mike told me he was thinking the same as me ‘sod’s law she’s in our group’. She was. The rest of the group were absolutely charming and we managed to keep a straight face when Jackie Evil introduced her self as the ‘Silverhead’ of the group and said ‘’but you can call me Mama Safari’’. I could think of more appropriate names.
The walk up to the edge of the national park was stunning. We climbed steadily through terraced fields, followed by two armed guards and a gaggle of porters that the Germans had hired to carry their day packs. Small, shy children peeked from between the crops and smoke snaked from their small mud huts. The scene would be almost totally unchanged from Diane Fossey’s days, or indeed many decades before that.
After a couple of hours we reached the edge of the forest and received our safety briefing and the excitement started to build. From here we passed a low stone wall and into the forest, following a trail upwards. It was one of the more beautiful forests I have ever seen. Wild celery, nettles and ‘sticky weed’ carpeted the floor and huge lobelia plants dotted the fields. Curtains of moss hung from the higher trees. As we climbed higher and higher, tendrils of mist crept in intermittently but we were mercifully free from the torrential rain that is typical of this area in this season.
We climbed up for another few hours. The guides were being very secretive about how far we had left to go, which added to the excitement. Finally we reached the advance tracking team. These men leave the camp in the early morning and return to where they had seen the gorillas nesting the night before. They spend the entire day with them until they nest that night. They communicated with our guide through walkie talkies. The advance tracking group remains with the same gorilla group every day and are very well known to the gorillas. Their presence is necessary to reassure the gorillas that we are friends.
We left all of our bags on the forest floor and headed up. My heart was beating and I was almost quivering with excitement. Suddenly, there they were! Two small females crossed my path and I gasped with shock. Then everywhere we looked there were gorillas. Sitting under the base of the trees, munching away in the bushes, passing to within a few feet of us. One of the trackers took my hand and led me over to see one of the silverbacks sitting at the base of a tree and surveying the scene. Suddenly the second ranking silverback moved over to mate with one of the dominant females. The main silverback, outraged at this, came crashing over to head him off and then he too mated with the female. The tracker led me forward and bent small branches to one side to give me a clear view. Gorillas share 99% of their make-up with us and I have to say I did feel a bit voyeuristic watching this intimate moment as it seemed so human! We walked around the area. Gorillas came from all directions. A small gorilla climbed a tree and we were amused to watch as it misjudged a branch and came crashing down with an embarrassed expression.
Suddenly as we were standing in a clearing watching several small gorillas, the dominant silverback walked over. He settled amidst the group, scratched his chest and watched, feigning nonchalance. Then in an instant he was up on his hind legs and running towards us, chest beating. My knees literally collapsed as the guide whispered to move back He returned to all fours and advanced towards us. Mike filmed this episode and you can clearly here me saying, in a quivering voice, ‘I’m scaaaaared’. Such a wimp.
We spent the rest of the hour peering through the undergrowth at various members of the group. We watched one of the older females grooming one of her infants, turning the baby 360 degrees as she picked through her fur. We also saw one mother with a two week old infant, nestling the rag-doll like baby against her enormous stomach.
All too quickly our hour with the gorillas was at an end, and we reluctantly left the group. We returned down the mountain elated and overwhelmed with what we had seen. We both still look at the photos and videos that we took every couple of days to recall the experience.
We loved the area so much that we stayed a further day, taking a stroll down to the neighboring villages. As usual we attracted a procession of children. There were many boys who wanted to talk football with Mike. One boy spent about 20 minutes reeling off every footballer that he knew, then every competition, then every manager and finally every football ground. I amused myself by showing the children the videos of the gorillas I had taken on my camera. Many of them, of course, have never even seen the gorillas that they live amongst and were amazed by both the pictures and videos.
We spent our last evening in Rwanda by the fire, drinking wine and looking through our gorilla photos once more. We are so amazingly lucky to have had this experience and we will never forget it.
Monday 24 November 2008
Monday 10 November 2008
Rwanda, beyond 1994
Ah Rwanda, what a fascinating, bewildering, awe-inspiring and above all beautiful country. On the flight from Arusha we flew across the wide plains of the Serengeti and passed directly over the Ngorogoro crater, so dramatic from above. Finally as the pilot announced that we were coming in to land the plains of western Tanzania gave way to the densely populated hills of Rwanda. Red roads snaked through the lush green landscape and tin roofs sparkled like diamonds as far as the eye could see. We arrived in Kigali airport where legions of Sikh UN troops were loading their kit on to trucks to head for the border and on to Goma. An hour later we were in the city centre and were surprised at the cosmopolitan, busy city we found. The ladies are glamorous and dressed up to the nines, and jeans and striped polo shirt-clad tall, slim young guys stroll languidly around the streets. The western -style cafes are full of smart-suited Rwandans on their mobile phones and laptops sipping lattes.
The city was out of our price range. We checked into the only hotel we could afford - a dark dingy hole on the outskirts of town with squishy foam mattresses covered with crackly waterproof covers and no hot water (at an exorbitant 30 quid a night) and skulked around the streets in our scruffy clothes feeling like fish out of water. Transport around town was on the back of mopeds, each driver wearing a lime green tabard and carrying a mandatory spare lime-green helmet for their passengers – several sizes too big even for my enormous bonce and subsequently offering zero protection were you to crash. We spent our first day trying to sort out onward travel through Rwanda. Our Lonely Planet was woefully out of date – numbers had changed, prices had doubled, information was incorrect. When we did get through to a few places they were fully booked, or spoke neither French nor English. We eventually secured the help of a lovely girl in the Rwanda Tourist office who helped us sort out accommodation and an itinerary for the week ahead. We were off!
Next stop was Kibuye on the shores of Lake Kivu which forms the border between western Rwanda and the DRC. We had originally planned to go to Gisenyi which has a land border with the Congo and more specifically Goma. We were assured it was safe, but internet chat rooms informed us that the town was crawling with journos and aid workers and the hotels were over-crowded. Kibuye with no land border with the Congo sounded like a better option.
We arrived early at the bus stop on Kigali and watched the morning bustle whilst intermittently being clapped on the back by various groggy-eyed but elated locals exclaiming “Obama” – the election results had come out in the night and to East Africa Obama is the knight in shining armour who will rescue Africa and bring untold riches. I even heard amidst a gabble of Kinyarwanda “now it is Black House, not White House”. It has been a fantastic new perspective to be in Africa in the run up to the US elections – people speak of little else and support for Obama, his father a Kenyan, is unanimous. Soon the bus came and we were ushered into the front seats next to the driver. This proved to be very lucky indeed as successively more people crammed into the seats behind. Of particular note were the older men who wear Stetson-like hats. Some of the hats were fairly traditional but a few were plastic animal-print or spangled versions more commonly seen on the heads of fake-tanned lovelies on hen dos in Brighton. One distinguished looking old gent in the back seat seemed perfectly comfortable in a fetching ocelot-print number with a glittery silver band.
It wasn’t long after leaving Kigali that the smart, clean streets gave way to a more traditional rural African scene. The bus chugged through picturesque villages, snaking through never-ending hills with breathtaking drops to either side. Rwanda is one of the most densely populated countries in the world and this is evident all around. Every inch of hill is given over to agriculture with even the steepest slopes terraced from top to bottom. Small ragged children and young and old farmers walk bare foot or in plastic slippers up and down the steep hills with bundles of sticks, sacks of potatoes or bananas on their heads. All of this was a feast for the eyes and ably distracted me from the young girl sitting behind me silently throwing up into a bag. I handed wet wipes back to her but averted my eyes and nose.
We arrived at Kibuye and hopped onto a couple of motos to take us to the intriguingly named Hotel Golf Eden Rock. This was an interior-design extravaganza with a roughly 70’s style building with lofty ceilings. It had clearly been decorated by the Rwandan version of Lawrence Llewellyn Bowen. It was an orgy of colour and patterns with brightly patterned silky nylon drapes, tiled walls, painted concrete floors and bundles of cobweb-fringed plastic flowers in cracked vases. It was really playing the game of being a swanky hotel with a TV in every room and hot and cold running taps in the shower. Later we learned that the TV didn’t actually work and there wasn’t actually any running water. If you wanted to wash you had to ask for a bucket of warm water to be delivered to your room. Oh well. It was easy to ignore this assault on good taste one you had clapped eyes on the stunning wrap-around view of the meandering inlets and promontories of the lake shore with the mist-clad mountains of the Congo beyond.
We whiled away the rest of the afternoon with a wander through the village and to a Catholic church on the top of the hill and playing chess on the verandah as an enormous thunder storm crackled through, leaving a swathe of torrential rain in its wake.
The next day we arranged for a boat to take us out into the lake. I waited on the shore for the driver to arrive watching a young girl flailing around in the water attempting to swim. I had not yet seen an African who could swim, most favouring an exaggerated doggy paddle which expends huge volumes of energy but does little in the way of forward-propulsion. As I watched, a young boy stripped off and dived into the water, speeding out into the lake before executing a perfect tumble turn and swimming butterfly back to the shore. It turned out he was Rwanda’s premier swimmer who had just returned from Beijing. He moved over to help the by-now drowning girl beside him.
We stopped at Chapeau de Napoleon, a tiny island where our guide ran into the forest clapping his hands and hundreds of thousands of birds ascended into the sky in a cacophony of bird calls, and then continued to Peace Island, a mere dot in the lake where the owners have built a beach volley ball court, erected some tent pitches and have a small shack on the beach with some tables and chairs, a swing in the trees and a monkey tethered to a rope. We ordered some delicious fish and chips and chatted to our guide, Bisman. He was only 17 but mature beyond his years and with an excellent grasp of English. He told us that he has been forced to leave school this year to try and find a job because his mother is sick and he has no older siblings to support her. He had had work as a tennis coach in a nearby hotel before the government had forced its closure. His only means of income currently is to take infrequent tourists out on to the lake.
After a few hours we returned and decided to take a walk around the lake shores, accompanied by Bisman. He taught me some basic kinyrwandan greetings and this transformed the reaction from the locals from blank faces to broad smiles all round. We went again to the Catholic church where Bisman told us at the age of three he had fled with his Tutsi mother during the genocide, seeking protection. The protection was not forthcoming and everyone in the church was shot – Bisman and his mother surviving because they were able to pull the bodies of others over them as protection. His father was a Hutu and later fled the country once Kagame had taken power fearing retribution; he later died in a refugee camp on the Congolese border. Extremely humbling stuff. The memorial at the church has a display cabinet with the skulls of those killed in the church and a small grass pitch in the village marks the mass grave of 10,000 locals killed in the 1994 genocide.
After our walk we went to the hotel bar with Bisman where Mike joined in a game of pool. Bisman was a total whiz and despite Mike putting in a pretty fantastic effort, he was soundly beaten in a couple of games.
The next day we rose early for a long journey heading south along the lake shore to Cyangugu and then east on to the Nyungwe forest. The bus was due to leave at 7.30am so we arrived early. The bus left three and a half hours later after a flat tire had been changed and a driver was found. We were thoroughly entertained by a beautiful three year old girl called Dianne who adopted us on first sight, throwing her arms around me and then crawling on to my lap, before bestowing similar affections on Mike. Eventually a huge lumbering school bus-style old banger arrived and we all clambered aboard, the grandmother of our new friend handing her to me for her to sit on my lap. We chose a seat next to a window with no glass in it thinking this would be an excellent way to guarantee that we would have sufficient respite from the cocktail of sweat, pee and vomit that fragrances the air on the heaving buses. We set off along the pot -holed unmade road, clinging for dear life onto the hard, slippery bench seats with a cooing Dianne on my lap, beaming beatifically. A nurse from the local hospital joined us at the next stop. He was an uncomfortable companion in that he wished to talk at the top of his voice about which contraception methods we used, vaginal bleeding and cancer associated with use of the pill (?) and how we expected to arrive in heaven if neither of us planned to convert to the other’s religion. The latter point he would not let drop and we felt thoroughly chagrined for our heathen existence.
Half an hour into the journey Dianne lapsed into a deep sleep and lolled on my lap, waking two hours later with a beaming smile and a demand for bananas and bread. We had both and duly obliged. At this point the journey began to take a comedic turn. A young girl perched on our backpack in the space in front of our seat where another seat had been ripped out began to vomit into a paper bag. As the liquid permeated the paper we rushed to move our bags away from her. Then the heavens opened and an enormous storm erupted. Everyone hurriedly closed the windows but I had no option but to sit next to the open window and let the rain pour in onto me. I was totally drenched which the entire bus found hilarious, handing me cloths and an umbrella to fend off the downpour. Dianne, sitting on my lap and wrapped snuggly in my hoodie just giggled and chattered. The storm slowed our progress and we stopped frequently along the way as yet more people piled in to the bus, standing in every available space and passing their loads of potatoes, bananas and small children on to the bus through the windows. Our missionary nurse explained that many of the villagers and children we passed were exclaiming on the mystery of two “musungus” (white people) with a black baby. The hours bumped by as more and more people succumbed to travel sickness. You don’t see the ubiquitous plastic carrier bag often in Rwanda so the locals have two options – either to stick their head out of the windows or just to be sick on to their own clothes, most choosing the latter. It is a miracle to me (and to Mike!) that I didn’t succumb myself, but I was fine.
We arrived at Kamembe on the Congolese border at 5pm after a sad farewell to our Rwandan daughter for a day, far too late to catch an onward bus to Nyungwe. A friendly local helped us find a guest house and to book the first bus out in the morning and we bought him a beer and grabbed a quick bite – very welcome indeed after an entire day without eating and drinking for fear of needing the toilet on the long journey.
The next morning we were back on the bus again for the short hop to the Nyungwe forest home to a range of primates including chimps, colobus, blue and mountain monkeys. The bus dropped us on a lonely road and we hiked to our home for the night – a sparse room, again with no running water, on a tea estate in the spectacular misty hills. We hiked down the road to the park headquarters to find that most of the information we had been given by the Rwandan Tourist Office was totally inaccurate. We were not actually at the head quarters of the park at all and the hikes we planned to do were another 18km away and we were not allowed to hike without a guide which made each walk a hefty $100. Colobus monkey tracked from this location would have been $120 dollars but I had spied some colobus just near the tea estate when we had dropped off our bags so we left the park and walked back to see what we could find. Sure enough, our luck was in and in the trees behind the estate a troupe of 50 monkeys cavorted in the trees. We sat on a low wall and watched for a few hours, joined by a gaggle of local children who were totally fascinated by our binoculars which got handed from child to child and were used to spy on the activities on the neighbouring tea factory workers cottages rather than the monkeys.
In the afternoon we walked through the village to cries of “musungu’, proceeding like a pied-piper double act accumulating more and more bare-footed ragged children whilst we searched for something to eat. The only thing we could find were yet more bananas and one shop with some dubious looking plain biscuits which tasted like they were a few years past their sell-by date. I had to use my dusty GCSE French yet again as some of the elder villages were keen to chat to us.
We spent a thoroughly enjoyable evening at a neighbouring guest house – the only option for food in the area. It was run by a very entertaining Congolese guy and the other guests were a Ugandan, an Italian and a Congolese who were in the area conducting research on bird, reptile and amphibian life after an aborted mission to the Congo to do the same. They were fantastic company and we all sat around and swapped ‘close encounters with wild animals’ stories before Mike and I left to hike back to the teat estate in the pitch black, lit by the intermittent glow of lightning in the hills over the Congo.
The next morning we were out on the road by 6am, sitting on our packs as trucks laden with freshly picked tea leaves arrived at the factory. We hailed a minibus and piled in with a mix of locals and soldiers for the spectacular drive to Uwinka, the main park headquarters. As we had no choice but to cough up $100 dollars to hike in the rainforest we chose the longest trails, marked as ‘6 hours, very difficult’ in order to get our money’s worth and we set off with David, our guide. The walk was a steep and frighteningly slippery descent down slick red mud pathways through the layers of dense moss-adorned rain forest to a series of waterfalls. The views were out of this world with mist caressing the valleys below and the sun above lighting up Lake Kivu and the Congo in the far distance. We stopped frequently to listen to monkey calls in the trees and to watch birds. David was very apologetic that we had failed to spot any primates but we were happy with the views alone. The second portion of the hike was a 1500 metre relentless ascent to 3000m, but we made very good time and returned to the camp in time to arrange a hot cup of tea and to raid the store room. All we had, again, were bread, bananas and the dodgy biscuits but we managed to unearth a tin of sardines in tomato sauce in the store room. Heaven!
We had arranged and paid for a bus for the 5 hour journey back to Kigali but just as we were about to leave an American guy with a 4x4 offered us a lift with him instead. He was an economist, a graduate of LSE and SOAS on a 2 year placement working for the Rwandan Ministry of Finance and made excellent and informative company on the stunning drive back.
Today we find ourselves in Kigali again getting everything together for the next part of our trip. Tomorrow morning we will visit the genocide museum. On Wednesday we meet the mighty gorillas. I am racing through a second-hand copy of Diane Fossey’s Gorillas in the Mist in anticipation. After that we plan to do a second hike in the Volcanoes bordering Rwanda and Uganda before we head overland through Uganda.
We have both been captivated by Rwanda. It does of course have more than its fair share of African bureaucracy a frustratingly leisurely speed of service and the accommodation at the lower end of the scale is of poor quality and meager value for money but all in all, we are firm fans. The people have been incredibly friendly, especially since I learned a bit of the local lingo. The security and orderliness of the country have been unexpected. Speed limits on the roads are enforced, there is an obvious police presence, there are timetables and advanced booking on all but the most rural buses and Kigali feels the safest of any city we have visited on this trip. The speed of recovery after the genocide is amazing. Though below the service it is obvious that tribal indicators remain in the disparate appearances of Tutsis and Hutus and in their surnames, it is extremely taboo to even mention the words ‘Hutu’ or ‘Tutsi’, and everyone is keen to stress that they are a Rwandan, not aligned to one tribe or another. It is an industrious nation and a well organized society and petty corruption is all but extinct. The landscape is of unparalleled beauty and the natural wonders are fantastically preserved and protected, in no small part thanks to the exorbitant national park fees.
With the gorillas to look forward to as the cherry on the top of an extremely tasty cake we are very pleased to have made the journey here and hope that this account will paint a picture of a country that should be defined more for the delights it holds today than the scars of its past.
The city was out of our price range. We checked into the only hotel we could afford - a dark dingy hole on the outskirts of town with squishy foam mattresses covered with crackly waterproof covers and no hot water (at an exorbitant 30 quid a night) and skulked around the streets in our scruffy clothes feeling like fish out of water. Transport around town was on the back of mopeds, each driver wearing a lime green tabard and carrying a mandatory spare lime-green helmet for their passengers – several sizes too big even for my enormous bonce and subsequently offering zero protection were you to crash. We spent our first day trying to sort out onward travel through Rwanda. Our Lonely Planet was woefully out of date – numbers had changed, prices had doubled, information was incorrect. When we did get through to a few places they were fully booked, or spoke neither French nor English. We eventually secured the help of a lovely girl in the Rwanda Tourist office who helped us sort out accommodation and an itinerary for the week ahead. We were off!
Next stop was Kibuye on the shores of Lake Kivu which forms the border between western Rwanda and the DRC. We had originally planned to go to Gisenyi which has a land border with the Congo and more specifically Goma. We were assured it was safe, but internet chat rooms informed us that the town was crawling with journos and aid workers and the hotels were over-crowded. Kibuye with no land border with the Congo sounded like a better option.
We arrived early at the bus stop on Kigali and watched the morning bustle whilst intermittently being clapped on the back by various groggy-eyed but elated locals exclaiming “Obama” – the election results had come out in the night and to East Africa Obama is the knight in shining armour who will rescue Africa and bring untold riches. I even heard amidst a gabble of Kinyarwanda “now it is Black House, not White House”. It has been a fantastic new perspective to be in Africa in the run up to the US elections – people speak of little else and support for Obama, his father a Kenyan, is unanimous. Soon the bus came and we were ushered into the front seats next to the driver. This proved to be very lucky indeed as successively more people crammed into the seats behind. Of particular note were the older men who wear Stetson-like hats. Some of the hats were fairly traditional but a few were plastic animal-print or spangled versions more commonly seen on the heads of fake-tanned lovelies on hen dos in Brighton. One distinguished looking old gent in the back seat seemed perfectly comfortable in a fetching ocelot-print number with a glittery silver band.
It wasn’t long after leaving Kigali that the smart, clean streets gave way to a more traditional rural African scene. The bus chugged through picturesque villages, snaking through never-ending hills with breathtaking drops to either side. Rwanda is one of the most densely populated countries in the world and this is evident all around. Every inch of hill is given over to agriculture with even the steepest slopes terraced from top to bottom. Small ragged children and young and old farmers walk bare foot or in plastic slippers up and down the steep hills with bundles of sticks, sacks of potatoes or bananas on their heads. All of this was a feast for the eyes and ably distracted me from the young girl sitting behind me silently throwing up into a bag. I handed wet wipes back to her but averted my eyes and nose.
We arrived at Kibuye and hopped onto a couple of motos to take us to the intriguingly named Hotel Golf Eden Rock. This was an interior-design extravaganza with a roughly 70’s style building with lofty ceilings. It had clearly been decorated by the Rwandan version of Lawrence Llewellyn Bowen. It was an orgy of colour and patterns with brightly patterned silky nylon drapes, tiled walls, painted concrete floors and bundles of cobweb-fringed plastic flowers in cracked vases. It was really playing the game of being a swanky hotel with a TV in every room and hot and cold running taps in the shower. Later we learned that the TV didn’t actually work and there wasn’t actually any running water. If you wanted to wash you had to ask for a bucket of warm water to be delivered to your room. Oh well. It was easy to ignore this assault on good taste one you had clapped eyes on the stunning wrap-around view of the meandering inlets and promontories of the lake shore with the mist-clad mountains of the Congo beyond.
We whiled away the rest of the afternoon with a wander through the village and to a Catholic church on the top of the hill and playing chess on the verandah as an enormous thunder storm crackled through, leaving a swathe of torrential rain in its wake.
The next day we arranged for a boat to take us out into the lake. I waited on the shore for the driver to arrive watching a young girl flailing around in the water attempting to swim. I had not yet seen an African who could swim, most favouring an exaggerated doggy paddle which expends huge volumes of energy but does little in the way of forward-propulsion. As I watched, a young boy stripped off and dived into the water, speeding out into the lake before executing a perfect tumble turn and swimming butterfly back to the shore. It turned out he was Rwanda’s premier swimmer who had just returned from Beijing. He moved over to help the by-now drowning girl beside him.
We stopped at Chapeau de Napoleon, a tiny island where our guide ran into the forest clapping his hands and hundreds of thousands of birds ascended into the sky in a cacophony of bird calls, and then continued to Peace Island, a mere dot in the lake where the owners have built a beach volley ball court, erected some tent pitches and have a small shack on the beach with some tables and chairs, a swing in the trees and a monkey tethered to a rope. We ordered some delicious fish and chips and chatted to our guide, Bisman. He was only 17 but mature beyond his years and with an excellent grasp of English. He told us that he has been forced to leave school this year to try and find a job because his mother is sick and he has no older siblings to support her. He had had work as a tennis coach in a nearby hotel before the government had forced its closure. His only means of income currently is to take infrequent tourists out on to the lake.
After a few hours we returned and decided to take a walk around the lake shores, accompanied by Bisman. He taught me some basic kinyrwandan greetings and this transformed the reaction from the locals from blank faces to broad smiles all round. We went again to the Catholic church where Bisman told us at the age of three he had fled with his Tutsi mother during the genocide, seeking protection. The protection was not forthcoming and everyone in the church was shot – Bisman and his mother surviving because they were able to pull the bodies of others over them as protection. His father was a Hutu and later fled the country once Kagame had taken power fearing retribution; he later died in a refugee camp on the Congolese border. Extremely humbling stuff. The memorial at the church has a display cabinet with the skulls of those killed in the church and a small grass pitch in the village marks the mass grave of 10,000 locals killed in the 1994 genocide.
After our walk we went to the hotel bar with Bisman where Mike joined in a game of pool. Bisman was a total whiz and despite Mike putting in a pretty fantastic effort, he was soundly beaten in a couple of games.
The next day we rose early for a long journey heading south along the lake shore to Cyangugu and then east on to the Nyungwe forest. The bus was due to leave at 7.30am so we arrived early. The bus left three and a half hours later after a flat tire had been changed and a driver was found. We were thoroughly entertained by a beautiful three year old girl called Dianne who adopted us on first sight, throwing her arms around me and then crawling on to my lap, before bestowing similar affections on Mike. Eventually a huge lumbering school bus-style old banger arrived and we all clambered aboard, the grandmother of our new friend handing her to me for her to sit on my lap. We chose a seat next to a window with no glass in it thinking this would be an excellent way to guarantee that we would have sufficient respite from the cocktail of sweat, pee and vomit that fragrances the air on the heaving buses. We set off along the pot -holed unmade road, clinging for dear life onto the hard, slippery bench seats with a cooing Dianne on my lap, beaming beatifically. A nurse from the local hospital joined us at the next stop. He was an uncomfortable companion in that he wished to talk at the top of his voice about which contraception methods we used, vaginal bleeding and cancer associated with use of the pill (?) and how we expected to arrive in heaven if neither of us planned to convert to the other’s religion. The latter point he would not let drop and we felt thoroughly chagrined for our heathen existence.
Half an hour into the journey Dianne lapsed into a deep sleep and lolled on my lap, waking two hours later with a beaming smile and a demand for bananas and bread. We had both and duly obliged. At this point the journey began to take a comedic turn. A young girl perched on our backpack in the space in front of our seat where another seat had been ripped out began to vomit into a paper bag. As the liquid permeated the paper we rushed to move our bags away from her. Then the heavens opened and an enormous storm erupted. Everyone hurriedly closed the windows but I had no option but to sit next to the open window and let the rain pour in onto me. I was totally drenched which the entire bus found hilarious, handing me cloths and an umbrella to fend off the downpour. Dianne, sitting on my lap and wrapped snuggly in my hoodie just giggled and chattered. The storm slowed our progress and we stopped frequently along the way as yet more people piled in to the bus, standing in every available space and passing their loads of potatoes, bananas and small children on to the bus through the windows. Our missionary nurse explained that many of the villagers and children we passed were exclaiming on the mystery of two “musungus” (white people) with a black baby. The hours bumped by as more and more people succumbed to travel sickness. You don’t see the ubiquitous plastic carrier bag often in Rwanda so the locals have two options – either to stick their head out of the windows or just to be sick on to their own clothes, most choosing the latter. It is a miracle to me (and to Mike!) that I didn’t succumb myself, but I was fine.
We arrived at Kamembe on the Congolese border at 5pm after a sad farewell to our Rwandan daughter for a day, far too late to catch an onward bus to Nyungwe. A friendly local helped us find a guest house and to book the first bus out in the morning and we bought him a beer and grabbed a quick bite – very welcome indeed after an entire day without eating and drinking for fear of needing the toilet on the long journey.
The next morning we were back on the bus again for the short hop to the Nyungwe forest home to a range of primates including chimps, colobus, blue and mountain monkeys. The bus dropped us on a lonely road and we hiked to our home for the night – a sparse room, again with no running water, on a tea estate in the spectacular misty hills. We hiked down the road to the park headquarters to find that most of the information we had been given by the Rwandan Tourist Office was totally inaccurate. We were not actually at the head quarters of the park at all and the hikes we planned to do were another 18km away and we were not allowed to hike without a guide which made each walk a hefty $100. Colobus monkey tracked from this location would have been $120 dollars but I had spied some colobus just near the tea estate when we had dropped off our bags so we left the park and walked back to see what we could find. Sure enough, our luck was in and in the trees behind the estate a troupe of 50 monkeys cavorted in the trees. We sat on a low wall and watched for a few hours, joined by a gaggle of local children who were totally fascinated by our binoculars which got handed from child to child and were used to spy on the activities on the neighbouring tea factory workers cottages rather than the monkeys.
In the afternoon we walked through the village to cries of “musungu’, proceeding like a pied-piper double act accumulating more and more bare-footed ragged children whilst we searched for something to eat. The only thing we could find were yet more bananas and one shop with some dubious looking plain biscuits which tasted like they were a few years past their sell-by date. I had to use my dusty GCSE French yet again as some of the elder villages were keen to chat to us.
We spent a thoroughly enjoyable evening at a neighbouring guest house – the only option for food in the area. It was run by a very entertaining Congolese guy and the other guests were a Ugandan, an Italian and a Congolese who were in the area conducting research on bird, reptile and amphibian life after an aborted mission to the Congo to do the same. They were fantastic company and we all sat around and swapped ‘close encounters with wild animals’ stories before Mike and I left to hike back to the teat estate in the pitch black, lit by the intermittent glow of lightning in the hills over the Congo.
The next morning we were out on the road by 6am, sitting on our packs as trucks laden with freshly picked tea leaves arrived at the factory. We hailed a minibus and piled in with a mix of locals and soldiers for the spectacular drive to Uwinka, the main park headquarters. As we had no choice but to cough up $100 dollars to hike in the rainforest we chose the longest trails, marked as ‘6 hours, very difficult’ in order to get our money’s worth and we set off with David, our guide. The walk was a steep and frighteningly slippery descent down slick red mud pathways through the layers of dense moss-adorned rain forest to a series of waterfalls. The views were out of this world with mist caressing the valleys below and the sun above lighting up Lake Kivu and the Congo in the far distance. We stopped frequently to listen to monkey calls in the trees and to watch birds. David was very apologetic that we had failed to spot any primates but we were happy with the views alone. The second portion of the hike was a 1500 metre relentless ascent to 3000m, but we made very good time and returned to the camp in time to arrange a hot cup of tea and to raid the store room. All we had, again, were bread, bananas and the dodgy biscuits but we managed to unearth a tin of sardines in tomato sauce in the store room. Heaven!
We had arranged and paid for a bus for the 5 hour journey back to Kigali but just as we were about to leave an American guy with a 4x4 offered us a lift with him instead. He was an economist, a graduate of LSE and SOAS on a 2 year placement working for the Rwandan Ministry of Finance and made excellent and informative company on the stunning drive back.
Today we find ourselves in Kigali again getting everything together for the next part of our trip. Tomorrow morning we will visit the genocide museum. On Wednesday we meet the mighty gorillas. I am racing through a second-hand copy of Diane Fossey’s Gorillas in the Mist in anticipation. After that we plan to do a second hike in the Volcanoes bordering Rwanda and Uganda before we head overland through Uganda.
We have both been captivated by Rwanda. It does of course have more than its fair share of African bureaucracy a frustratingly leisurely speed of service and the accommodation at the lower end of the scale is of poor quality and meager value for money but all in all, we are firm fans. The people have been incredibly friendly, especially since I learned a bit of the local lingo. The security and orderliness of the country have been unexpected. Speed limits on the roads are enforced, there is an obvious police presence, there are timetables and advanced booking on all but the most rural buses and Kigali feels the safest of any city we have visited on this trip. The speed of recovery after the genocide is amazing. Though below the service it is obvious that tribal indicators remain in the disparate appearances of Tutsis and Hutus and in their surnames, it is extremely taboo to even mention the words ‘Hutu’ or ‘Tutsi’, and everyone is keen to stress that they are a Rwandan, not aligned to one tribe or another. It is an industrious nation and a well organized society and petty corruption is all but extinct. The landscape is of unparalleled beauty and the natural wonders are fantastically preserved and protected, in no small part thanks to the exorbitant national park fees.
With the gorillas to look forward to as the cherry on the top of an extremely tasty cake we are very pleased to have made the journey here and hope that this account will paint a picture of a country that should be defined more for the delights it holds today than the scars of its past.
Sunday 2 November 2008
Fulcrum Challenge fun and games
It is impossible for me to explain the last two weeks. It's something that I will remember for ever. Words (especially mine) will not do the experience justice, but I'll give it a go.
I'm writing this whilst sitting on a sun lounger next to the 'biggest' pool in Arusha on a Sunday afternoon watching local residents and NGO workers splashing about in the pool. We are camping in the grounds of a stunning safari lodge for a few nights collecting ourselves after spending two weeks on Fulcrum Challenge 86. The students and leaders left for the UK on Friday evening and we decided to stay on for a few extra nights after our Tanzanian adventure before we head to Rwanda on Monday.
For those of you who don't know about Fulcrum, Sarah and I volunteered to be leaders on a challenge which brought 23 17 or 18 year olds from various London schools to trek to a community project site and complete a building phase of a new library for a secondary school in Magara, a small town in the shadow of the Rift Valley escarpment.
There were four other leaders who had the difficult job of shepherding the students from the UK to Kilimanjaro airport where we flew up and met them from South Africa. We went via Nairobi where we transferred onto a very dodgy flying baked bean can - broken seats, no overhead lights, and drop-down trays which dropped down whether you liked it or not, bruising your knee caps in the process. It did not instill us with confidence, but we lived to tell the tale and met up with the others.
Sarah has done two Fulcrum challenges before but this was my first experience. I was pretty scared not knowing how I was going to get along with the students and I was definitely out of my comfort zone. I also hadn't appreciated the extent to which the trip was mainly about the personal development of the students, the community project and trek being a a tool through which teamwork and leadership were developed.
Here are my highlights of the trip.
Camping
Sarah and I had a sleeping tent and a dressing tent, side by side. Compared to our Oh Vee the Vango 2-man tents we were issued had palladian-like proportions. Sleeping out in the African wilderness, amidst giant hopping crickets and countless other creepy-crawlies and - in the case of Tarangire - in amongst the lions and elephants, was very cool.
Trekking
The sweeping Savannah which awaited us on our first trek was very special. Knowing that the next landmark on the horizon- perhaps a single tree - was a few hours away with nothing in between was very weird. We were totally exposed beneath a huge sky and the baking hot African sun so hats, sunscreen, water and yet more water were the order of the day.
Clive
Our man on the ground, an Englishman that has lived in Africa for years, was quite a character. He looked like a cross between Indiana Jones and Ray Meers, always wore safari shirt and shorts, leather hat, carried a big stick, drank no water and wore no socks. He was the font of all Tanzanian knowledge and had a unique sense of humour. In the evening he slipped into something more comfortable - a sarong and African shirt and retired to his tent for a tipple.
The African support team
These guys were quite simply magnificent. Mainly local men from Arusha, they fed, watered us and went far beyond the call of duty in caring for us and our charges. What was fantastic to see was the students interacting with them - playing frisbee, learning Swahili and sharing jokes. There were tears all around when we waved them off in Arusha.
The waterfall.
Surely this was a film set? Right next to the project site camp was a breathtaking waterfall plunging from the top of the Rift Valley escarpment, a torrent of cascades and rock pools which culminated in an invigorating shower plunging into the soft yellow sand. The whole team, and Sarah dived straight in and little did I know as I paddled in the shallows, trousers rolled up, minding my own business, that the kids were scheming behind me. Next thing I knew one of the lads had knelt behind me while another pushed me from the front and I was submerged and surrounded by 23 laughing teenagers, and Sarah. I think is what you call male bonding (the gits!)
The school
Magora Secondary School had around 200 students who were crammed into impossibly small and dingy classrooms. I loved the excitement on the kids faces when we arrived, their singing, their smiles, their interaction with our students. It was all very humbling. Our project was to build roof tresses and fit the windows and doors to a new library block, following in the footsteps of three previous Fulcrum challenges and to be followed by one more. We completed the planned work extremely quickly so we had to think fast and find some extra projects for the students. This included teaching lessons, which they all really enjoyed, and taking on some further projects such as a mural, painting one of the classrooms and building benches.
The benches
This project pleased me no end - our brief was to design and build benches for an outdoor classroom. A bit of a busman's holiday for me but it was a real pleasure to guide the students through the design process and it was a real high point to see ten sturdy blue benches lined up in the sun on our last day.
The local kids
One day Sarah sat in the shade chatting to some young boys that were watching us work. They were only too pleased to teach her bits and pieces of Swahili and were fascinated by her camera, especially the video function. I took the camera and we asked them to perform so I could video them. Sarah and the four little boys put on the a great show of the silliest dance I have ever seen - all of the boys pulling faces and laughing so hard they were in helpless hysterics.
Church service
On our final Saturday on the project one of the classrooms was taken over my local villagers for a church service. People old and young came from far and wide to join a singing and dancing extravaganza which lasted for most of the day and was a perfect musical backdrop to work to. We joined them for a while and it was an amazingly uplifting experience. I'm not sure the constant hammering and sawing helped them but it didn't seem to bother them either.
The snake
It's not often that you find a black mamba. It's also not often that you see a bunch of over-excited locals grabbing anything they can to capture and kill the beast which was hiding under a pile of wood in the library, just a few feet from where the students were working. Apparently this incredibly poisonous snake claims the lives of many school children every year so they weren't going to mess around. Of course, once the snake had been beheaded our students thought it was the coolest thing ever.
Marshmallows on the beach
Thanks to Radha for having her 18th birthday while we were away we had a fantastic party. Sarah and a few of Radha's friends planned a surprise birthday party which included a cake made on the fire, and toasted marshmallows on the fire on the beach by the waterfall. Yum. The event was made all the more special by the singing and dancing by the support staff and the whole event turned into a big rave up on the beach with everyone joining in with the African songs. All this without alcohol!
The students' show
As part of the project handover our students put together a fantastic show which was extremely well received by the Magora students. It was like X-factor without the annoying panelists. 10 out of 10 guys - you were great.
The headmaster's speech
Severin gave a very personal, heartfelt and touching speech to all of us which emphasised the special bond that had formed during our time at Magora. He based it on the words around which we had created a mural on one of the classroom walls. Friendship, acceptance, respect, peace and unity.
The students
I didn't quite know what to expect at the beginning of the trip. I sometimes felt that they or I didn't get it, but as time went on I realised that all of the students were developing day by day. Some of them had to go through some real lows, but it was to their credit that they pulled through and showed such strength of character. Through the challenge they have been given such an opportunity to grow, and I think most of them grasped this and will not look back.
Saying goodbye
As usual with goodbyes I seem to take it all in my stride at the time, shaking hands and hugging everyone. However, true to form, as soon as we waved everyone off and the last jeeps disappeared into the dust, it all became too much. Sarah and I had a big hug and I had a bit of a cry and we both asked "what the hell are we going to do now?". After two and a bit weeks of non-stop energy and action it was really quiet and our little tent looked so lonely in the corner of the campsite.
I really hope that we will keep in touch with some of the students and leaders. What I realised is that it was an education for all of us, and something I hope to do again in the future.
I'm writing this whilst sitting on a sun lounger next to the 'biggest' pool in Arusha on a Sunday afternoon watching local residents and NGO workers splashing about in the pool. We are camping in the grounds of a stunning safari lodge for a few nights collecting ourselves after spending two weeks on Fulcrum Challenge 86. The students and leaders left for the UK on Friday evening and we decided to stay on for a few extra nights after our Tanzanian adventure before we head to Rwanda on Monday.
For those of you who don't know about Fulcrum, Sarah and I volunteered to be leaders on a challenge which brought 23 17 or 18 year olds from various London schools to trek to a community project site and complete a building phase of a new library for a secondary school in Magara, a small town in the shadow of the Rift Valley escarpment.
There were four other leaders who had the difficult job of shepherding the students from the UK to Kilimanjaro airport where we flew up and met them from South Africa. We went via Nairobi where we transferred onto a very dodgy flying baked bean can - broken seats, no overhead lights, and drop-down trays which dropped down whether you liked it or not, bruising your knee caps in the process. It did not instill us with confidence, but we lived to tell the tale and met up with the others.
Sarah has done two Fulcrum challenges before but this was my first experience. I was pretty scared not knowing how I was going to get along with the students and I was definitely out of my comfort zone. I also hadn't appreciated the extent to which the trip was mainly about the personal development of the students, the community project and trek being a a tool through which teamwork and leadership were developed.
Here are my highlights of the trip.
Camping
Sarah and I had a sleeping tent and a dressing tent, side by side. Compared to our Oh Vee the Vango 2-man tents we were issued had palladian-like proportions. Sleeping out in the African wilderness, amidst giant hopping crickets and countless other creepy-crawlies and - in the case of Tarangire - in amongst the lions and elephants, was very cool.
Trekking
The sweeping Savannah which awaited us on our first trek was very special. Knowing that the next landmark on the horizon- perhaps a single tree - was a few hours away with nothing in between was very weird. We were totally exposed beneath a huge sky and the baking hot African sun so hats, sunscreen, water and yet more water were the order of the day.
Clive
Our man on the ground, an Englishman that has lived in Africa for years, was quite a character. He looked like a cross between Indiana Jones and Ray Meers, always wore safari shirt and shorts, leather hat, carried a big stick, drank no water and wore no socks. He was the font of all Tanzanian knowledge and had a unique sense of humour. In the evening he slipped into something more comfortable - a sarong and African shirt and retired to his tent for a tipple.
The African support team
These guys were quite simply magnificent. Mainly local men from Arusha, they fed, watered us and went far beyond the call of duty in caring for us and our charges. What was fantastic to see was the students interacting with them - playing frisbee, learning Swahili and sharing jokes. There were tears all around when we waved them off in Arusha.
The waterfall.
Surely this was a film set? Right next to the project site camp was a breathtaking waterfall plunging from the top of the Rift Valley escarpment, a torrent of cascades and rock pools which culminated in an invigorating shower plunging into the soft yellow sand. The whole team, and Sarah dived straight in and little did I know as I paddled in the shallows, trousers rolled up, minding my own business, that the kids were scheming behind me. Next thing I knew one of the lads had knelt behind me while another pushed me from the front and I was submerged and surrounded by 23 laughing teenagers, and Sarah. I think is what you call male bonding (the gits!)
The school
Magora Secondary School had around 200 students who were crammed into impossibly small and dingy classrooms. I loved the excitement on the kids faces when we arrived, their singing, their smiles, their interaction with our students. It was all very humbling. Our project was to build roof tresses and fit the windows and doors to a new library block, following in the footsteps of three previous Fulcrum challenges and to be followed by one more. We completed the planned work extremely quickly so we had to think fast and find some extra projects for the students. This included teaching lessons, which they all really enjoyed, and taking on some further projects such as a mural, painting one of the classrooms and building benches.
The benches
This project pleased me no end - our brief was to design and build benches for an outdoor classroom. A bit of a busman's holiday for me but it was a real pleasure to guide the students through the design process and it was a real high point to see ten sturdy blue benches lined up in the sun on our last day.
The local kids
One day Sarah sat in the shade chatting to some young boys that were watching us work. They were only too pleased to teach her bits and pieces of Swahili and were fascinated by her camera, especially the video function. I took the camera and we asked them to perform so I could video them. Sarah and the four little boys put on the a great show of the silliest dance I have ever seen - all of the boys pulling faces and laughing so hard they were in helpless hysterics.
Church service
On our final Saturday on the project one of the classrooms was taken over my local villagers for a church service. People old and young came from far and wide to join a singing and dancing extravaganza which lasted for most of the day and was a perfect musical backdrop to work to. We joined them for a while and it was an amazingly uplifting experience. I'm not sure the constant hammering and sawing helped them but it didn't seem to bother them either.
The snake
It's not often that you find a black mamba. It's also not often that you see a bunch of over-excited locals grabbing anything they can to capture and kill the beast which was hiding under a pile of wood in the library, just a few feet from where the students were working. Apparently this incredibly poisonous snake claims the lives of many school children every year so they weren't going to mess around. Of course, once the snake had been beheaded our students thought it was the coolest thing ever.
Marshmallows on the beach
Thanks to Radha for having her 18th birthday while we were away we had a fantastic party. Sarah and a few of Radha's friends planned a surprise birthday party which included a cake made on the fire, and toasted marshmallows on the fire on the beach by the waterfall. Yum. The event was made all the more special by the singing and dancing by the support staff and the whole event turned into a big rave up on the beach with everyone joining in with the African songs. All this without alcohol!
The students' show
As part of the project handover our students put together a fantastic show which was extremely well received by the Magora students. It was like X-factor without the annoying panelists. 10 out of 10 guys - you were great.
The headmaster's speech
Severin gave a very personal, heartfelt and touching speech to all of us which emphasised the special bond that had formed during our time at Magora. He based it on the words around which we had created a mural on one of the classroom walls. Friendship, acceptance, respect, peace and unity.
The students
I didn't quite know what to expect at the beginning of the trip. I sometimes felt that they or I didn't get it, but as time went on I realised that all of the students were developing day by day. Some of them had to go through some real lows, but it was to their credit that they pulled through and showed such strength of character. Through the challenge they have been given such an opportunity to grow, and I think most of them grasped this and will not look back.
Saying goodbye
As usual with goodbyes I seem to take it all in my stride at the time, shaking hands and hugging everyone. However, true to form, as soon as we waved everyone off and the last jeeps disappeared into the dust, it all became too much. Sarah and I had a big hug and I had a bit of a cry and we both asked "what the hell are we going to do now?". After two and a bit weeks of non-stop energy and action it was really quiet and our little tent looked so lonely in the corner of the campsite.
I really hope that we will keep in touch with some of the students and leaders. What I realised is that it was an education for all of us, and something I hope to do again in the future.
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