Leah’s Travel Page

So the morning after the lip-synching ridiculousness, we got up super early because we were leaving Kigali again, and met back up again with Lindsay, Sam and Steph. We went and got our groceries at this wicked cafe/supermarket called La Galette, which makes you feel as though you’ve entered Europe upon crossing the threshold, with everyone sitting around watching Premier League football (the team everyone supports in Man United) and eating 20 cent baguettes…We used these baguettes many a time to make giant peanut-butter and banana hot dogs. Mmmm. Then we had to catch a bus to take us down to Butare, 2 hours to the south. Butare is the main university town in the country, and we visited the National Museum there, which was supposed to be extraordinary…and I’m sure it was when it opened in 1987, but I think the only exhibit they’ve changed there since then is the picture of the president on the wall, so needless to say it felt a little outdated… However, as we were walking along the road to get to the museum just outside of town, there was a road sign that said “Bujumbura – 155km”, and therefore me, in all of my African Studies geekiness, was ridiculously excited at how close we were to the border with Burundi! No one else I was with thought that this was exciting at all…but naturally I took a picture. Then after the museum, the three girls went back to Kigali – this was the last time we were going to see each other because they had to run off to climb Kilimanjaro – and the other three of us spent the night in the most ridiculously vast and bare hotel room imaginable. Imagine a giant cement room the size of an olymic swimming pool with nothing but a bed and a chair sitting up against one wall…very bizarre.

Since there’s not really much to do in Butare, we decided to leave the next morning for Cyangugu, a town that’s right on the border with the DRC. After a a bit of a fiasco getting bus tickets and then having to wait for four hours for another bus to come, we managed to finally get on the most packed minibus imaginable…not an exciting prospect when you know there’s an imminent 3-hour journey on possibly the windiest road in the enitre road. I was crammed into the back row with three other people (and really only designed for three people maximum), and there was so little leg room that I had to sit leaning slightly forward for the whole bus ride, which meant that with every bump my head pounded into the ceiling – it’s an Easter miracle that I didn’t get violently ill. Although at least I was better off than Charles, who was sitting directly in front of me and got vomited on not once, but twice, by two different people! Apparently when Rwandans puke out the window of a rapidly moving vehicle, they neglect to check whether or not the windows behind them are shut! Poor Charles…

When we finally got to Cyangugu (pronounced Chan-googoo), it was in the middle of a torential downpour, and this was the one location where we had made no accomodation arrangements at all! So we ran under an awning to wait for the rain to stop, and were immediately swarmed by dozens and dozens of locals just standing there looking at us…We soon discovered that this is quite the norm in Cyangugu, and later when we’d be walking around town, the second our feet stopped moving in a forward motion, we’d be completely surrounded by easily 50 or 60 people, just waiting to see what we were going to do. But anyways, under the awning we met a guy named Hamza who spoke a fair bit of English (as did a lot of people in Cyangugu, surprisingly, which was nice for me because that meant that I didn’t have to do all the translating all the time), and he showed us to this awesome little hotel called La Petite Colline, which, as the name would imply, is built down the side of a little hill…Except we were planning on staying for three days be we could only get it for one night because the president had booked the entire hotel for the next two days! You see, this was April 5th, and on April 7th was the national commemoration day for the 12-year anniversary of the start of the genocide (actually the entire month of April has many commemoration events), and each year the really big ceremony is in a different part of the country. This year it was to be in a small village an hour from Cyangugu, so most of the accomodation in the small town was booked, except for really expensive stuff. So while Charles stayed back at the Petite Colline to wash the vomit off of himself, Zach and I went out into town to see if we could find even so much as a room for the next two nights (we did manage to get a place – probably the most meager accomodation ever, but the only room in town, a tiny cement room with a single bed so that two of us would sleep on the floor in our sleeping bags, and no bathroom – but hey, you couldn’t beat the price at $2 a night!). As we were wandering around, Zach and I met two guys named Said and Ali (cousins) who were secondary school students on Easter vacation. We ended up becoming really good friends with them over the next few days, and they told us where we could get really cheap dinner that night. So we joined up with Charles, and went to the tinest little unmarked restaurant ever, that certainly has never seen a mzungu of any sort. The woman who served us turned out to be the kindest lady ever, and spoke French because she’d moved from Kinshasa a few years ago to work as a chef in this, her brother’s restaurant. And it was one of our best deals at 300 francs! She was really interested in us, and I had a big long conversation with her, and she just seemed so excited that we had come to her place! So we promised her that we would come back again for sure.

The next morning, after some elaborate planning with minibus drivers, we managed to get a ride out to the Nyungwe Forest National Park, an hour from Cyangugu back on the road to Butare. We had really wanted to visit, the rainforest looked amazing as we’d driven by the day before and it has a huge concentration of monkeys and chimps…But after all the effort of getting dropped off out there, it turned out to be waaaayyy more expensive than the tourist office in Kigali had told us – the park entry fee was $20 US, but that didn’t allow you to do anything except walk through the gate. To do any sort of hike would cost at least another $30 US…which seemed totally excessive to do a little 3-hour hike. So one of the guides there, Edward, told us that the best he could think of to do would be to walk us up and down the main road (aka the highway) and point things in the park out to us from afar. Well, we really had no other choice since we’d gone through all the trouble of getting out here and were going to have to hitchhike back, so we decided to do that… It actually turned out to be a great afternoon. Edward was awesome, and we just had lots of conversations with him about a great many things. We began to talk about the commemoration the next day, and I asked him if he’d lived in Rwanda during the genocide. He was probably 6’4″, and he said “Are you kidding? I’m so tall, I would have been one of the first people to be killed!”, which shocked me to hear him say it so matter-of-factly, and he said that his family had been refugees in Uganda and Congo for nearly 20 years before 1994. After walking up and down the road, we sat by the gate and Edward tried to signal down any buses or vehicles going by that had space, but they were all so full because of the number of people going to Cyangugu for the commemoration – there were tons of military vehicles passing too, and we thought it would be a riot to hitch a ride back with a bus full of soldiers, but none of them stopped for us. After a few hours of talking and watching various monkeys run by, it started to rain, so Edward took us up to the building where the park guides live while they’re working at Nyungwe, fed us tea and bananas, and taught us some phrases in Kinyarwanda. Then, when we got back to the road, almost immediately a big bus stopped by and picked us up. It was completely full, but we sat in the door-well of it and only had to pay 400 francs, thanks to Edward’s bargaining with the driver. We agreed that we’d meet him the next day at the commemoration, and headed back to town.

When we got back to Cyangugu, we bumped in to Ali and Said again (I swear, everyone in town knew where the three mzungus were at all times), and they insisted that we come over to their house for dinner – the night before we had been talking to them about how much we like ugali, the local dough-like substance made from cassava, and they had said we were most welcome to come over and have some. Naturally we weren’t about to say no to being invited into a local home! So we went down to Ali’s house – which was actually really nice compared to the houses around it – and met Ali’s family and Said’s family, and all of the neighbours…Said even said that word must have spread that there were mzungus at there house, because there were children looking in at the doorway that he didn’t even recognize! There were probably three dozen children running around, but they were so curious and playful…and of course they loved it when we got our cameras out and started taking photos. Every time the flash would go off, they would all start running around screaming and laughing… The most hilarious moment for me was one of total chaos – we’d just taken group photos with Charles’ and Zach’s cameras, and then the children were shouting and pushing to get close to the two of them to look at the photos on their camera display…it was total madness and noise, and then just at that moment, the front door flew open and six goats came running in to join the melee, pranced around for a few seconds amongst the dozens of people, and then went running out into the back room! It all happened so fast and there was so much going on that the others didn’t even notice! Pretty funny stuff. Then, Said’s mother shooed all the kids out of the house and brought out the biggest African feast I’ve seen…the food just kept coming! Ugali and beans and cabbage and fish in vast quantities… oh my gosh, and we were expected to eat it all! They even bought us Fantas for the special occasion of our visit, which was so incredibly generous. I made a valiant effort, but I physically was not capable of consuming more than half of the food they gave me! I felt really bad, and I’m sure they were all wondering why we weren’t eating all the food, but we tried to explain as much as we could that we’re simply not accustomed to eating so much at once. By the time we left it was dark, and we thanked them so much for being so kind to us…they were all really sad that we were leaving and kept saying just how happy they were that we had come. Imagine all this after knowing someone for less than a day! It was a really great experience.

I’m back now in Nairobi – you have no idea how hard it is to find reliable internet cafes in small Rwandan towns when half the time they’re closed for national holidays, and the other half the internet is out because it’s rainy season and apparently that happens a lot… I don’t really know the connection between the two, but apparently that’s their excuse when you’re half-way through a giant blog update and suddenly all the power dies!

So the last time I wrote anything, it was the night before Zach, Charles and I went to do the gorilla trek. That evening was notable for two reasons. One, we found our cheapest dinner in all of Rwanda! A giant heap of rice, beans, vegetables, potatoes, etc for 250 Francs… about 40 cents! Trust me, this was a very momentous occasion. Secondly, Sam, Steph and Lindsay came back from having done the gorilla trek that day, so we got to get their input on what they had just experienced before embarking upon our own trek…and, frankly, it made me a little nervous! It had poured rain the entire time they were hiking, which was about 7 or 8 hours in total…in fact, the gorilla group they were tracking had gone so far that they were actually in the Congo, and I think there were only 6 or 8 gorillas in the family. When they got back, they were sooo cold and exhausted – it sounded like more of an adventure hiking through stinging nettles and mud up to their waists, and the gorillas themselves seemed kind of secondary. This was totally different from any other account I’d heard from anyone, so I really now had no idea what the next day would be like.

So we got up bright and early at 5:30am and met with our driver, who drove us on the bumpiest, boulder-filled road imaginable for 45 minutes to get from Ruhengeri to the actual Parc National des Volcans. When we got there, we were ridiculously lucky – usually there are thirty people registered to do gorilla trekking every day, with 10 people in each group to see the different gorilla groups… However, our day, for whatever reason, there were only 10 other people registered and none of them showed up! They thought that maybe their flight didn’t get in from Belgium or something…I mean, it is low season there, but we never imagined that it would be just the 3 of us in our group, and that we’d get to totally pick whichever gorillas we wanted to see. I think they really wanted us to go see the Sabinyo group, which had just recently had an extra silverback join the group, so they were really agressive, which is very unusual – we met some people who had just done the hike the day before, and they said that they were terrified! Instead, though, we opted to go to the group that would involve the longest hike possible, and that was the Amahoro group (which means “Peace” in Kinyarwanda). They said it would be about 2 hours, and that the group had two babies, one 11 months and one 2 years old, and we’d be able to get much closer to the gorillas than if they were fighting for male dominance! So we chose to go to see them, and I know it was definitely the best choice! After only actually about an hour of hiking up the side of a massive volcano covered in bamboo and jungle (partly bush-whacking with machetes) with our guide (who was actually one of the people who had habituated this particular group) and two armed guards (as protection from poachers, mostly), we came to an open clearing on the mountain-side where we met the two trackers who had been following Amahoro group and letting our guide know by walkie-talkie where to go. They told us to keep quiet and bring only our cameras and jackets… And sure enough, we looked to the left and about 200m away we could see the big black hairy forms of gorillas through the dense foliage! As we approached, one of the gorillas was peering over a bush at us, and as someone had described to us before, it really looked like it was a man dressed in a gorilla suit watching us!

As we got there, the gorillas were all scattered about in different trees and bushes, eating leaves and wild celery…One of the first gorillas we came across was the giant silverback, who was unfathomably huge! His head and hands were massive – he was probably the size of three linebackers put together! He just sat there munching away with his gigantic belly giggling away, every so often turning his head in an entirely uninterested fashion to look at us before returning to his meal…and we were probably only about three feet away from him! Gradually I started to realize that we were actually surrounded by gorillas – there were 14 in Amahoro. There were both males and females climbing the trees, muching away on plants – they would grunt just like you would imagine hearing the sounds King Kong would make (I hate to make that comparison, but that’s what they sounded like!). And when they would chew on the celery, it sounded just like a human eating celery, which was so crazy! And then one of the females came through a trail with the tinest, most adorable gorilla imaginable clinging to its back – you just wanted to reach out and put it in your backpack and take it home with you! For about 20 minutes, they just all surrounded us doing their own thing, but they must have communicated somehow because they all converged in a line and started walking to a small clearing about 10m away. We followed them, and watched as the silverback rolled spread-eagle onto his back for a nap, while the two little ones and even some of the older gorillas took this to signify playtime! They would jump on top of one another and play-wrestle, swinging off trees and jumping off of other gorillas. One of the adolescent males actually did a ninja roll and then started pounding his fists on his chest! What a show! And we were no further from them than I am to this computer screen… Actually, at one point, we walked a little further to see one of the gorillas that was standing guard just off in the forest to keep watch from threats – he was the second-most senior male, but had lost his left hand in a poaching trap. As we were descending the hill a bit, another adult male came suddenly and unexpectedly running out from the bushes to the right of us. The guard tried to push me back out of the way, but the trail was really narrow…The gorilla was brushing right up against me, and actually fully grabbed on to my leg with his hand to pull himself up the mountainside! I was seriously shocked – a wild gorilla just grabbed my leg!

Sadly, we only had 1 hour with the gorillas, because they do get stressed by humans if they stay too long, so it’s important for their conservation that we don’t stay too long. If you can believe it, there are less than 700 mountain gorillas left in the world, found only on the Virunga volcanoes of Rwanda and DRC, and in Bwindi rainforest in Uganda. Even though the price was steep ($375 US!!!), it was 100% worth the hike…Easily one of the most exciting and memorable experiences of my life. Not only that, but we were really lucky, and it didn’t rain!!

By the time we got back into Ruhengeri town, it was about 2pm, so we decided that there wasn’t much need to stay the night and we’d head back down to Kigali, which is only about a 2 hour drive. So we got back to our old friend, the Kigali Hotel, and our other old friend, Le Palmier (the place with the 500 franc all-you-can-eat buffet). The day had been pretty exhausting and exhilarating, so we had decided we were going to call it a night, but then suddenly the phone rang in our hotel room…it was a guy named Abdul that Zach had met a few days before playing basketball, who had noticed us coming back to the hotel and wondering what we were doing (yeah, it’s like that…everyone knows the every move of the 3 mzungus in the neighbourhood). So we decided to go out to the Sky Hotel, which is kind of a hot spot for young people in Kigali…and put on one of the most entertaining spectacles I’ve ever witnessed in my life!

As we walked in, we saw someone performing on a stage and signing into a microphone, so we thought “Hey, live music!”…but then we realized that the guy on the stage was lip-synching his heart out! Not even karaoke, lip-synching! At first we thought that this seriously couldn’t be for real, until he finished and five guys – who were obviously all really cool guys – came out and started doing a whole routine lip-synching to some rap song. It was totally ridiculous, but this was obiviously the cool think to do in Kigali! Over the course of three hours, it just kept going… Some guys had costume changes, there were two girls in matching outfits that must have put hours and hours into a choreographed routine, one guy was the most amazing dancing I’ve ever seen – this was serious stuff! And they would lip-synch to everything from Ugandan music to rap to NSync and Britney Spears…one guy came out dressed up as Kenny Rogers (he put something like baby powder all over his head and face to look like Kenny’s white hair and beard) and did a whole rendition of “The Gambler”…Then as the night went on, the three of us and Abdul were just sitting there and thinking we were blending in as the club filled up with several hundred people, but then the guy who was the MC called out to us from the stage on the microphone, asking where we mzungus were from, etc etc…clearly we had not blended in even remotely! And then of course the MC started pointing to me and saying that I would be his wife, and then another guy came on stage and then started arguing about whose wife I really was (this was not unusual at all by now for me, because I probably got about 6 marriage proposals a day during the time we were in Rwanda)…So then the second guy dedicated his next lip-synched song to me which, based on the lyrics, wsa probably called “You’re my African queen…”, and after that the first guy dragged me up on the stage to sing some kind of Rwandan love song to me. Possibly the most awkward moment of my life! But the whole night was pretty hilarious in general… I really want someone to do a documentary about lip-synching in Kigali, it would be awesome!

Okay, so that day was ridiculously full…and so even though I’m not even close to being caught up on our Rwanda trip, I think I’m going to leave it there for now… Next update soon!

Okay, so I’m in Ruhengeri right now, not Butare. It’s way up north, near the border with Uganda (and Congo, but I shouldn’t say that because my parents will freak out regardless of the insane amount of security). We were talking to some people in Kigali yesterday who told us that the main national activities on April 7th (which is Genocide Commemoration day here – 12 years after the genocide began) are in a town called Cyangugu this year, which we hadn’t known before because the location changes every year. So we had to rework our itinerary somewhat, and we’ve been able to change our dates to see the mountain gorillas to tomorrow! So exciting! So the town that I’m in at the moment is just outside the Parc National des Volcans, surrounded by the absolutely stunning and massive Viruga volcanoes. The road up here was equally as dramatic, similar to the amazing hills and valleys that we went through coming from the border…although it was raining rather torentially, which made the ride somewhat hair-raising, but thankfully there are guard-rails everywhere. The only problem was when the roof of the minibus started leaking all over us, and I guess also when the windshield fogged up so much that I quite sure the driver must have had superman vision to see through it.

Ruhengeri is a bit of a one-horse town…. Even though the gorillas are one of the biggest touristy things to do in Rwanda, it seems as though they’ve never seen any Mzungus before. It’s great for us, because I love being in a place that seems so unspoiled and real, but at the same time I wish for the sake of this place that they could get more tourists. Randomly,we managed to find this huge internet cafe with amazing high speed internet, which was definitely a shock. Strangely, the keyboard is like nothing I’ve ever seen before…The letters are in totally random places, the concept of QWERTY clearly having been thrown out the window. Trust me, it’s taken a very long time to write this!

I’ve arrived in Rwanda! Along with the five other people I’m travelling with, Zach, Charles, Sam(antha), Lindsay and Steph. The bus ride here was actually not that bad, considering what it could have been. That being said, it DID involve 24.5 hours in the back row of a coach with seats whose reclining function didn’t work, so they kept on bouncing back and forth. Since the Kenyan roads are so abysmal – and that was the part when we were trying to sleep – it felt rather like trying to take a nap on a rickety wooden roller coaster that didn’t slow down at the station for three hours. Another analogy that came to mind at the time – during a particularly rough period when I’m sure I lost several layers of tooth enamel – was the feeling of sitting on top of a jackhammer. Nonetheless, I probably mustered a few hours of decent sleep, interrupted by a 4am border crossing into Uganda, where it was so pitch black that Lindsay tripped over a foot high curb and fell right into an open sewer! Luckily it had rained recently, so the stench wasn’t too bad! And, at 4 in the morning, that’s just about the funniest thing that can happen. We stopped again in mid-morning in Kampala and then reached the Rwanda border at about 4pm. It was really lucky, because Canadians and Americans don’t need visas to enter, so we saved a bunch of money. And the landscape driving from the border was absoutely stunning – Rwanda is just as beautiful as I’d heard, with amazing steep green hills and beautiful valleys filled with tea fields (and roads in FANTASTIC condition – better than Vancouver for sure!).

It had just gotten dark when we arrived in Kigali at 7, so it was a bit chaotic getting off in the terminal – some people we had befriended on the bus ride made us all panicky telling us to grab our luggage quickly so no one ran away with it, and then we were sort of shoved into cabs to get to our hotel, which was called Hotel Gloria, and turned out to be the sketchiest place in the entire world. It was just kid of this big barren room with a small desk and a couple of rooms leading off of it, and there were a bunch of weird men standing around in the ‘lobby’. Not only that, but they’d given away our reservation and only had two beds, which was actually kind of a blessing because it gave me the creeps. So we were told the name of another hotel nearby- Hotel Kigali – which turned out to have space and was totally secure (it didn’t have running water the first night, which was annoying, but they fixed it by the next afternoon- it was out for the whole neighbourhood)…Phew, it was a bit hectic that first night for sure. But we were tipped off by some other mzungus at our hotel that there was an all-you-can-eat buffet right around the corner for only 500 Rwandan francs…less than $1 US!!! Naturally, we’ve gone there every day since.

The next morning I woke up and got my first view of Kigali…not at all what I had expected! The whole city (only about 250,000 people I think) is sprawled out very dramatically over 3 or 4 big hills, with roads going in all kinds of crazy directions and brown houses built up and down the hillsides. Our hotel costs only about $9 a night, including breakfast, so we’re definitely able to live on the cheap here! We set out that morning for the Tourist Office to ask questions about various destinations, and bumped into another Canadian named Jen – she just finished up her job as a MuchMusic VJ, you might recognize her as the one with the short red hair. She’s been in E Africa since January too, almost the same places as us, doing various journalistic things…And she’s freelancing an article for the Toronto Star/Globe on the “New Rwanda”, which we may very well be referenced in! I’ll let you know more details if it comes out. We met up with her again for our 500 FRw dinner and then went out for drinks afterwards – it was great to talk to another North American who’d gone through the same experiences as us!

We spent that afternoon at the Kigali Memorial Centre, and brand new museum (2 years old) about the 1994 genocide. It was an unbelievably well done exhibition, and of course really emotional, but I learned so much from it. It was multimedia, so there were videos of peoples’ testimonies who lived through it, and boards with the history of what happened before, during, and after it (for you Canadians, there was a whole section on Romeo Dallaire). Then, the second floor had a display on some of the other genocides of the 20th century (Cambodia, Holocaust, Balkans, Albania), and outside there was a burial site of 6 mass graves where 250,000 victims were interred, whose bodies were found in Kigali alone. One woman who was at the museum (she was African, but I don’t know if she was local) left the museum sobbing uncontrollably, supported by her friend. Some of the videos, displays and descriptions were so difficult to watch – especially when you contrast it to the Rwanda of today, which is so unimaginably different and peaceful and friendly and safe, much more so than any other place I’ve been. Looking at the human and physical landscape, I just can’t rectify the past with the present of the country – I have so much respect for and am so impressed buy the people here. They have overcome so much heartbreak and devastation, and I have absolutely no idea how they’ve done it. There is some evidence of the genocide in the physicality of some people; it breaks my heart to go into a store where the vendor has massive scars on their face, or a pass a fairly young person begging on the street who has no legs…I can’t imagine what they’ve been through. But for the most part, you would simply never know otherwise.

Another thing about Rwanda is how friendly the people are! Some particularly like it that I ca speak French to them, but even others – for example, we have dinner plans tonight with a group of people we met yesterday at the 500FRw buffet (can you tell yet that I’m obsessed with this place?). Yesterday we had lunch with a British guy who’s a student at Oxford in African Studies (Mom, Dad and Adam: he lives at 62 Woodstock Road!!), who just came running up to us on the street to say hi! And when we were at the bank getting our money out (which is almost IMPOSSIBLE to do here – note to any future travellers, get out all your money in Nairobi or Kampala!), we met an expat from Chicago who offered for us to stay in his 8-bedroom house, and a local man who insisted that he drive us to the Memorial because otherwise he was simply not being a good host to these visitors to his country! It’s really awesome how genuine everyone is! Basically, the whole impression of yesterday was that is was just a great day – man I love it here.

This morning we slept in (Well, Zach and Charles didn’t – they went for a walk around and played some pickup basketball with local kids who thought they were hilarious), and then went to spend a relaxing morning at the Hotel des Mille Collines, the name of which you might remember from the movie Hotel Rwanda. Even if you’re not a guest there, you can sit by the pool for free, and go swimming for $3. It was crazy to be at such a remarkably historical site – although it’s not the same building that’s in the movie at all!

Anyways, tomorrow we’re heading south for Butare, which is supposed to have an amazing National Museum. I’ll update you next from there! Bye!