Tanzania seems like a million years ago, I made friends with an immigration officer and a conservationist for the Jane Goodall Foundation (her park was right near by but with exorbitant entry fees) and stayed in a guest house populated mainly by congolese refugees. I ate at a restaurant decorated like "Mexico" for no apparent reason (they made no pretense to offering Mexican food). Having been kicked out of my guesthouse for staying past checkout time I lolled the afternoon away on the open "Mexican" patio. I had been told the previous day that a boat would leave at 18 [View Full Entry]

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Settled into my old room at Auberge la Caverne, sipping cappuccino at the Bourbon Coffee - Kigali, green and rolling, brushed by plump tufts of cumulus, receding like waves in the distance - I feel buoyed, at peace. New York is a memory, Vermont is a memory, the great emotional upheaval I’d dreaded these past few weeks little more than a slight murmur of unease. The apartment hunt is on, and the thought of making a home of this small, energetic city for the next few months is already growing on me. You feel something in Kigali these days. You see [View Full Entry]

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It's just a short taxi ride to the border with Rwanda and, after a delay due to Ugandan immigration being on a tea break, I'm soon in my sixth country of this trip. The first time in my life I heard of Rwanda was due to the horrific genocide that took place in 1994, but everything I've heard in the last few months has been indicative of a country with an eye to the future. Travellers have told of tarmac roads, scheduled buses with only one person per seat, and a ban on plastic bags. There have also been tales of [View Full Entry]

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5th April Today I wanted to leave Kigali so I got a motor taxi to the bus station and got on a mini bus to Gisenyi on lake kivu. The drive was ok the roads are usually in a good shape, it took about 2 hours via Ruhengeri. When I arrived I got another motor taxi to the a hotel on the lake shore when we got there it was closed which im sure he knew so he took me to the only other place that I know in Gisenyi which turned out to be across the road from where the [View Full Entry]

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Dwa dni nie pisalam, wiec bedzie dlugo; ale a teraz mam francuska klawiature, na ktorej sa pomieszane literki, wiec tez nie jest latwo. Jest wigilia i zamiast lepic uszka albo smazyc karpia, wlasnie skonczylam sie opalac nad jeziorem kivu - na drugi, brzegu widac kongo, dokola palmy, przejrzysta woda,moznaby pomyslec, ze to lago di garda, gdyby nie to, ze nikt po wlosku nie mowi… Obiecalam sobie, ze dzis o Rwandzie bede pisac tylko dobrze. Bo i trudno pisac inaczej - sa bajkowe krajobrazy, mili ludzie, dobre jedzenie. Jest tez straszna bieda i pomniki ludobojstwa co krok. Przedwcz [View Full Entry]

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"Good luck...I would tell you to be safe but that seems pointless being that you are in the middle of Africa heading toward (instead of away) from rebel fighting and war.... " - Big Sturms, via email I have made my way now from Kigali in central Rwanda over way west to the town of Gisenyi. Gisenyi is rather nondescript and sits on the Rwanda/Democratic Republic of Congo border at the northernmost part of Lake Kivu, opposite the border from its DRC counterpart, the village of Goma which serves as the UN base for the war in the Congo. I come [View Full Entry]

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Apologies for the long absence, I was in the DRC for the past 5 days and the internet there is abysmally slow and the charger for the laptop stopped working. Last Thursday was Yom Kippur and seeing as there are no synagogues in Kigali, I thought that going to the genocide museum would be a good place for reflection etc. The museum is really amazing and incredibly moving. It is split into three sections inside and then there are gardens outside and mass graves of about 250,000 people that overlook the city. The downstairs of the museum documents the history of [View Full Entry]

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