Leah’s Travel Page

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!

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 2nd, 2006 at 5:54 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.