Land of a Thousand Hills

To be sure that the new year starts on a high note, a friend and I planned a trip down to Rwanda to encounter the mountain gorillas. You may have never heard of this, but if you are a muzungu living in East Africa, you hear about it all the time—one of those amazing, life changing experiences you must do. But you’ll also have to pay for it, with a long travel and a hefty price tag—but it is still supposedly worth it. With these hopes, and the added bonus of trekking in Rwanda as an excuse to explore another new country, we headed back for yet another attempt at an overnight bus.

Our bus misfortunes of Tuesday night may have turned out for the better. I went home got a good night’s sleep to recover from New Year’s, and woke up to what has to be considered a very productive day in Kampala: applied to yet another business school and reserved my plane ticket outta here for Monday, January 14th (eeek!). Ariella and I boarded the 1am bus that was due to arrive in Kigali 10 hours later at 9am local time, because Rwanda is one hour ahead of Uganda, and settled in the back of the bus next to some other muzungus who were visiting their peace corps brother and his friend. We had three seats for the two of us and were feeling pretty good about the coming ride, especially following our luck in Sipi Falls.

Nevertheless, we barely slept a wink—well, I of course slept some, because frankly I sleep anywhere anyhow, but it was definitely rough going. The roads may have been paved, but that is often not preferable to dirt roads considering potholes that are magnified in the back of the bus. But it was that of lose our “spacious” seating and move up to a more unpleasant smelling section of the bus. Then there was the immigration point. At 6:30, we rolled up to the Uganda-Rwanda border and made to get off the bus in the misty cool morning air to stand in line at the small concrete immigration office. Just one catch though: It didn’t open until 7am. This would of course been too much too coordinate--good think we had been driving along the roads at wild, breakneck speed!
The office finally opened around 7:15am and after trying to sneak some photos of our lovely surroundings, we were checked through to the Rwanda side! We walked along a dusty nomansland for about half a kilometer and then arrived at the Rwanda side where we were asked if we knew about the Ebola problem of recent in Uganda (how could we not) and check through. Check one more stamp in the passport!!

The bus resumed its crazed pace and we wound through the brilliant green hills towards Kigali, just one and a half hours south of the border. Upon arrival we walked up the very long slope up to the city center as we had no Rwanda francs yet in our possession. We checked into a cheap hotel after bargaining it to half the price and then headed to the ORTPN (Rwanda Office of National Parks) and our travel agency to check on our gorilla permits and see if we could move the date of our intended gorilla trekking from Monday to an earlier date. Friday, Saturday, and Sunday were all fully booked, so we resigned ourselves to having a few extra days to tour Rwanda, and went over to our tour company to complain about their poor customer service and try to get back our commission on the gorilla permits that should have been booked for a sooner date. (We succeeded--the bargaining and bartering thing really gets easier with practice!) and then set off to enjoy a lunch of bread, cheese, and croissants. One of the good things the French left behind here.

However, in the afternoon, upon a visit to the very somber yet tastefully done Genocide Memorial Museum, we were faced with many of the horrors that the French and Whites in general had helped to perpetrate or at least stand back and allowed to happen. There is a downstairs room down in the round with detailed history taking the visitor through the history of the genocide and its deep-seated origins rooted in events long before event of 1994. There were also rooms within the outside history walk—one with glass cases filled with skulls and femur bones of a few victims, one room lined with faded family photos of the victims that loved ones had left clipped up as a memorial to their lost lives. Upstairs was an exhibit on other genocides of recent history—the Holocaust, Bosnia, and others. So many thousands of numbers killed in each, it was hard not to become numb to the figures.

The last wing of the exhibit revisited the individual grief and sorrow and incomprehensible tragedy of the genocide. Several rooms contained large portraits of child victims of the genocide, with just a few facts below their name and age: their personality, favorite food, best friends, how they died, last word to their mother. Utterly heartbreaking. Outside, mass graves of unknown victims are lined with landscaped gardens.

After a worthwhile but tough afternoon, we met some friends for some beers (Primus, the Rwanda beer of choice) and some pizza at a restaurant overlooking the night skyline of Kigali, and were practically sleeping in our pizzas by 9pm! The highlight of the evening was actually our journey to dinner. We ran into the muzungus from the bus who were also looking for bodas to head to the same restaurant—ha, Lonely Planet followers! So we hailed six bodas with some effort, and cruised through the city—until they all got lost min you. Hilarious, so all six of us had to pull over while they asked directions from some passerbys, and even started bickering a bit. Quite a sight I think we were!

The next day, we hired a taxi to take us to see the churches of Nyamata and Ntarama, two of the nearby towns that were completely devastated by the genocide. They have been left as rough memorials to the thousand of victims who perished there after seeking refuge in a place of God. I felt particularly drawn to these churches because I have been reading a very powerful journalistic record of survivors' accounts in a book called Into the Quick of Life, which details these two villages and the killings that happened there. These churches were much rawer than the Genocide Museum, with no history outlined (save the brief information from the local guides)but many grenade holes, bloodied old clothing and heaps of skulls, pelvises, leg bones laid out in cases in areas below the church floor or in makeshift brick red coffins—120 so far filled with the remains of thirty people each. Staggering figures: 5,000 killed in one church in one day, 10,000 in the other. The brutality of the killers is seen in the bullet holes in the tin roof of the Ntarama church, that upon first viewing in the sunlight look like stars in a night sky. The rough wooden benches line the churches where so many died. There really are no words.

We had our driver, Bosco, take us to catch our bus to Gisenyi, a resort town on the north of Lake Kivu that was about a 3 hour drive from Kigali.
We had to get out of Kigali as it was just too expensive! I know this is the New York girl talking, but after Uganda, Rwanda was a real blow—different currency and not in a good way. However, in a most unlike Uganda move, the 1pm bus was full! People planning ahead—unheard of! And as we are now Uganda locals, we don’t feel we should need to either. But apparently in Rwanda you do! So we booked ourselves on a four o’clock mini bus and made way for the Hotel Mille Collines—the hotel in central Kigali that is featured in the movie, Hotel Rwanda. We had some coffee and more Primus poolside and then headed back to board our bus. We were pleasantly surprised by a newish mini bus that had spacious headroom (not to be taken for granted, my friend!) and then took in the spectacular winding views at the bus left the city behind and entered the thousand hills with a tapestry of various green farmland terracing the hills.

We arrived just after dark to find our planned budget accommodation booked! So much for planning ahead, clearly a theme! But we found a clean Spartan room in a Presbyterian Church! We’re here for two nights to relax before heading to Ruhengeri just an hour or so east to gorilla trek on Monday!

Oh, I also fell in a ditch last night—seriously. We had just gotten off the bus on the main street in Gisenyi and were walking down the dirty road searching for the auberge (that was then fully booked) in the pitch black that’s that overtakes all small towns in East Africa within 15 minutes of sunset, save the gleaming distant light of the Kobil gas station. And then next thing I know, I was in a ditch, scrambling, sputtering, cursing, reaching up for Ari’s hand and a kind gentleman who stopped to help pull me up and out. Thing is I clearly was just looking straight ahead, not down as one absolutely must. Apparently according to Ari I even paused for a moment searching the ground just ahead of me before I stepped forward and down! I was definitely shaken—although I think I gave the whole town a laugh (“did you see the muzungu fall in a ditch?!), but it certainly added some excitement to an otherwise very quiet night.