Getting from Mbeya to the Malawian border was comparatively painless, even if we did stop less than hour away to wait for the minibus to fill back up. I even saw and got to speak to the first white people I had seen in days. After getting over the border, I took a shared taxi to Karonga and from there, a bus to Chitimba. The journey was a measly 6 hours. Chitimba is one of the first towns going south on Lake Malawi. Nearby there are a couple of campsites, where I checked into the Chitimba Campsite and immediately went for a swim in the lake. Chitimba is an idyllic spot, with a big sandy beach. It is overlooked by a couple of mountains and I spent the rest of the afternoon there by the water. ... read more

Bujumbura and Kigoma, Tanzania are only 170km apart and I naively hoped that this would be a straightforward and relatively short trip. I got to the bus station in Bujumbura early enough, only to find that the only bus going direct to Kigoma had gone at 6.30 a.m. I had to get a taxi to Kinido district and find a minibus going to Mabanda, near the border and hope to connect to Kigoma there. This minibus took about an hour to fill up, but I got quite lucky with a seat in the front. This minibus was well and truly packed like a tin of sardines by the time we got going. The drive was painfully slow as we stopped every half kilometre, or so it seemed, to let people in and out. However, it was ... 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

I decided to leave Kabale on a Sunday, which is never a good day to travel on, as the transport options are limited. I was heading towards Kisoro, as I wanted to climb Mt. Sabyinyo in the nearby Mgahinga National Park. The only transport option to travel the short 68 km to Kisoro, was a shared taxi. This was a saloon style car, which I had to wait an hour to fill up before we got going. There was 10 of us packed in as we got going, but we still stopped and picked up anyone who needed a lift. The highest passenger count we had was 14 adults, a child and a baby, who of course was being breast fed inches from my face. The scenery on the drive was beautiful as we wound around ... read more