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 Our Lonely Planet was woefully out of date – numbers had changed, prices had doubled, information was incorrect.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.