Gisenyi, Rwanda

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We drove around 2 and a half hours to Gisenyi, a town on the north shore of Lake Kivu. When we arrived, we met some friends for lunch and then relaxed on the beach. Most lakes in Rwanda have the parasite shistosomiasis, but Kivu is rumored to have less due to the methane pockets and depth. Around five, we met up with some other friends and walked to the Goma border crossing with the Democratic Republic of Congo. Along the way, we saw old mansions from the 1920s and 30s when Gisenyi was a colonial resort town. On the way back, as a reward for our 20 minute walk, we stopped at a hotel bar to watch the sunset (this took an hour to wait for a single round).

In the middle of the night, Jenn awoke feeling really hot and asked Alex why he had turned off the air conditioner as she turned it back on. He yelled and jumped up that it was because the air conditioner had been spraying him with water. The hotel did not have mosquito netting, so we couldn’t open the balcony door, but it was so hot that we had to do something. Alex found a spoon from the coffee pot station and stood up on the desk chair so he could chip out the ice from inside the air conditioner. Then we hooked a towel to the top of it so that water would hit the towel instead of spraying Alex. By the way, this was at the nicest hotel in town.

The next day, we had an “Anglo-American” breakfast buffet while watching the lake from the hotel’s balcony. We chartered a small motorboat to take us out to the methane recovery plant about a mile or two offshore. After returning to the hotel, we drove through the town and stopped at a doll making cooperative. They had some very fresh baskets which caused Alex to have an allergy attack, so we hit the road.

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Comments

[Willy]

3rd World
Glad to see y'all are taking your 3rd World experience in an adventurous frame of mind. I always took my own alcoholic potables with me whenever I ventured away from the city of Ubon ... one can never be TOO PREPARED.