Blogs from Rwanda, Africa - page 8

It's a bum-numbing 5 hour bus ride from Kigali to Gisakura, on the edge of the Nyungwe Forest with only a single stop 2.5 hours in at Nyanza, so it's a test of bladder control. In fact we had to stop for roadworks in the forest and most of the passengers mutineed and headed for the trees looking much relieved when they returned. We saw a couple of Forest Monkeys and a Civet Cat on the road edge throught the forest. Gisakura is a very peaceful spot after the hurly-burly of Kigali and around 10c cooler than Kigali. The Guest Lodge is really nice and set in beautiful gardens with tiny sunbirds flitting everywhere. The accommodation is good, I've got a big double bed with mosquito netting and best of all the showers are hot. Having ... read more

It's an awful long flight from Auckland to Kigali but it all passed without incident and I landed about 11.00am this morning. Kigali airport is small, almost quaint, but it all runs well. My pack had been checked right through from Auckland and it came trundling off the conveyor like it hadn't been gone more than a minute. I grabbed some Rwandan francs from an ATM at the airport but after 25 hours in transit my brain wasn't up to much so got 30,000 RwF. sounds like a lot, but is only about US$60. Got a taxi from the stand outside the gate for the standard fare of 10,000 Rwf. The guy drove like an absolute lunatic but so does everyone else around here so got his number so he can take me out to the ... read more

The bus down to Butare from Kigali was fairly eventful, especially by Rwandan standards. In Rwanda, unlike most other countries in the region, buses run to a timetable, irrespective of how many people are on board. Another unique feature is the traffic police, who are there to uphold the rules of the road, as opposed to other countries where the sole purpose is to eke out some sort of bribe. So as our driver sped through the mountain passes on the way to Butare, we were stopped by some traffic police for quite some time, where the driver was eventually let off with a warning. About 10 minutes later, we came to a sudden halt as we sped through some town. I looked out the window and saw some guy stumble over after being clipped. He ... read more

They call Rwanda the land of a Thousand hills, but as I travelled from the border to Kigali, I couldn’t help but think about the hundreds of thousands who had been brutally hacked to death on these very roads only 18 years previously. Rwanda will evoke memories of some sort of atrocity in most peoples’ minds, but a lot don’t realise that atrocity doesn’t even begin to explain what occurred between April and June 1994 in this country. The exact number of people killed will never be known, but it is estimated that 1.2 million were massacred, mostly by machetes. Many were tortured, raped or had limbs amputated before death. Neither women nor children were spared, no infant too young to be hacked to death. To put it into some kind of perspective, approximately 3 times ... read more

Bonjour J We visited Rwanda for 3 days, so I could trek the endangered mountain gorillas in the Parc National Des Volcans (where Dian Fossey famously researched them) and to visit the Kigali Genocide Memorial Centre, which remembers those impacted by the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and aims to educate so that it never happens again. It was a visit of extreme happiness (the gorillas) and extreme sadness (the genocide), a visit where we learned and were inspired. I had been looking for months for a tour including both gorilla trekking in Rwanda (the other options are Uganda - where the trek is more strenuous and you’re less likely to see gorillas as they move around more - or the Democratic Republic of Congo - which I felt was too volatile) and a visit to the ... read more