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they’ve changed there since then is the picture of the president on the wall, so needless to say it felt a little outdated… However, as we were walking along the road to get to the museum just outside of town, there was a road sign that said “Bujumbura – 155km”, and therefore me,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.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 17th, 2006 at 12:30 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.