Travel log 15 – Rwanda; Kigali, Gisenyi, Kibuye, Cyangugu, Butare & Burundi; Bujumbura

12/07/08
Kigali
The Swiss man on Banda Island said we would encounter a landscape like that of his home.

The European theme continued as the driver played Abba on his tape deck, putting a strange spin on the film of children waving, which played through the car window.

King Dom helpfully pointed out that if we got on a bus one in ten of the passengers was likely to be a murderer. Other than genocide, Rwanda is known for its gorillas and we did not have the budget for them, so it was with a wariness of seeing everything with ghoulish hue that we entered Kigali.

Somewhere between the border and the hotel Stuart’s second camera went walkabout – hence the lack of photos.

The city spread over the surrounding hills, a hotchpotch of mostly new construction linked by wide tarmaced roads, the likes of which we had not seen since Tripoli. It was even greener than Tripoli, although in Kigali’s case the green came from papyrus, banana and other trees and bushes that lined the roads, not patriotic fervour.

And as odd as it may have been for such a picturesque city, it was the Kigali Memorial Centre that it was known for. It tracked the run up to, and the results of, the genocide graphically and effectively. In 100 days more than 1,000,000 people were murdered for their ethnicity, which was actually more based on a class system created by Belgian colonials. It was valuable to learn about the events but we do not want this to be the focus of our description of Rwanda. If you want to know more about it we recommend that you visit www.kigalimemorialcentre.org.


However, when we ate great Italian food in Papyrus, listened to good jazz in Republica and pulled shapes in Planet, images from the Memorial Centre lingered. There were moments of forgetting but those simple questions we wanted to ask in order to make standard conversation with locals in our stilted French sounded loaded. For ‘Where are you from?’ and ‘What is your name?’ read ‘Which tribe are you?’

Between the hilltops, clustered with red-roofed buildings which looked distinctly Mediterranean from a distance, were papyrus swamps and huge swathes of banana palms. People left the wide boulevards, patrolled by bent-back women with grass brooms, onto dirt tracks to their homes. As a whole, the city just seemed better organised than other capitals we had visited. When we got on the back of a bodaboda in the city, not only did they have crash helmets, they insisted that the passenger wore one, and in some cases made sure it was properly done up. What caused this difference is difficult to speculate about.


Gisenyi
15/07/08
The four-hour bus journey sharing Bombay mix with an Indian gentlemen working for the UN in DRC validated Rwanda’s pseudonym, Pays des Mille Collines (Land of a Thousand Hills).

We passed through some of the most tenderly beautiful country either of us had ever seen. Steep, terraced hills and valleys cupping lakes of tea of a green so potent, as if every leaf were a perfect little prism. Then there were the banana palms heaving with lascivious deep bruise-purple flowers and the little villages of cottages with terracotta tile roofs, tucked away in the jungle with their front gardens bright with flowers.


We took our time ambling down to Lake Kivu along the Rwandan Riviera. The imposing buildings looked down onto the sandy beach and the calm waters, then onto the double horizon of the ironically named, Democratic Republic of Congo with its two ominous mountain chains, those in the background as light as clouds but impossibly massive. They spoke of a mysterious and fearsome country of cannibals and diamond cartels, and what was, in the eighties, the world’s largest consumer of Champagne.


Kibuye
16/07/08
The road from Gisenyi was terrible and the minibus was useless so we spent eight hours in a state of mild agony covering a distance of 86km (52 miles).

The town was in two parts – that on the top of the hill was a generic, dusty collection of brightly painted shacks selling staples and Chinese tat. At the base of the hill stood the mainly church-funded hotels, which looked out onto Lake Kivu and the outcrops of jungle that cut into it.


Riding pillion on a motorbike taxi, heavy with our luggage between the driver’s legs we coasted down the high hill with the engine off. It was the perfect way to see Lake Kivu sparkle in the early evening.

Our hotel offered us the first salad since Uganda and the evening’s excitement was a wet dog on the beach putting its stink on Stuart’s hands.

In the morning we scrabbled down a track between the tumbledown houses and their prerequisite wide-eyed children holding the younger siblings up against their hips and on to the bus station.


Cyangugu
17/07/08
The exotically named Cyangugu was on the road to the unfortunately named Bugarama.

Our hotel was next to the DRC border post on a small bridge across the water. Toby asked the man in the shed-sized office how much it would cost to cross over for the afternoon. ‘You cannot take photographs’ he replied without eye contact. ‘But how much will it cost?’ ‘It is impossible’ he replied. Presumably this was the point at which some monetary persuasion was expected but it hardly seemed worth the effort. It was probably the vain part of bravado tempting us over the bridge anyway.

In an attempt to change some dollars we came across a building with ‘Bureau de Change’ in large red letters above the door. Inside sat a group of women going through sacks of dried beans, giggling at our confusion.

The next morning we were bundled into a minibus by wily teenagers who spoke their French with a devil may care drawl. The individual who joked about the beggar leaning against his home made crutch, who was pleading with us for money, was wearing women’s Nike trainers.


Butare
18/07/08
The bus to Butare took us through an extraordinary forest, home to a large number of chimpanzees.

Either side of the road was thick with ferns and creepers and vast old trees stretching out for miles that became, in the distance, a uniform swathe of dark green with the contours of a ruffled tablecloth.

The limited amount of time we had in the town of Butare perhaps unfairly gave us the impression of yet another unpaved, dust bowl on the way to somewhere else, which for us would be Burundi the following morning.


A boy in the town who showed us around in exchange for our email addresses took us to a bureau de change. We were taken down an alley where an ancient man was sewing with an ancient Singer. We were introduced to a Muslim lady who gave us a good rate but managed to make the whole thing seem quite sordid.

On our walk back to the town centre our guide told us that his mother was a Burundian and that he regularly visited her in Bujumbura, the capital. When asked his opinion on the place he replied, ‘Rwanda is more nice because the security is one hundred per cent’. On one hand, Nairobi was painted for us as an anarchic hellhole and it turned out to be fine. On the other, it was only a few weeks ago that the Hutu rebels signed a peace agreement in Bujumbura. We researched the place as best we could, but there was still a very big element of the unknown which we were both avoiding talking about in the hope that our motivation was not the bad Congo bravado.


Burundi
Bujumbura
19/07/08
It was a relatively simple process getting into Burundi except for the fact we were only allowed three days at the border and were told we would have to get an extension in Bujumbura.

As it was already Saturday afternoon and we were a few hours from ‘Buj’ we had a matter of hours to get our visas extended or find transport to Tanzania. In the end we left it and got the extension.

The waves of the children we had seen in Rwanda were inverted to calls for alms. Did they expect us to stop the public bus in order to give them money? Burundi was clearly far poorer than Rwanda, partly because its political situation was far less stable. Rebel groups have only recently signed the ceasefire so were not long ago still wreaking havoc in large parts of the country, including those we were travelling through and on the outskirts of Buj.

As we passed through one of the countless valleys we were confronted by a large swathe of land divided up into small allotments which were being worked by entire families. Up the next hill a brook poured from the mountainside next to the road. Women sat with the fruits and vegetables which were being continually splashed with water, glistening appealingly in the harsh sunlight.

We were welcomed into the city by the painted concrete remnants of a monument on a roundabout. Along the sides of the long road into the city were unkempt shacks with their living room, kitchen and bar as the street corner. It was a distilled version of what we had seen in so many other scenes of urban poverty. However, the context here was different. Underneath it all there was a decent infrastructure.


As we got off the bus a man speaking crazed French asked us if we needed help getting to our hotel. He tried to get into a taxi with us. We passed through the alien streets. It was hard to put a finger on what exactly the place was and it was unsettling. The Hotel le Doyen was built during the Belgian occupation and it seemed as if the management were expecting them back. Nothing had been changed by any hand but time’s. Great leaves of paint had heaved themselves from the concrete. The bakelite phone in reception was coloured like bone by sunlight, its cord to the wall long since frayed and disconnected. The board of lights which once, in more affluent days, had lit up to alert staff to the whims of guests who needed lobster and champagne at four in the morning, now lay on its side, covered in dust.

Upon moaning about the lack of hot water Toby was granted access to the bathroom of the Presidential suite. In the squat football stadium which it looked over, a second division match took place with enthusiastic support. It sounded eerie from inside the vaulted bathroom with its cracked bath.

Buj market was like a Victorian circus with horribly deformed babies on display and their mothers begging beside them. The only thing human in the massive misshapen head of one toddler was her scared little eyes.


Inside there was a vast maze of stalls in a building like an aircraft hanger. Many stalls sold second-hand clothes shipped from the First World in tight bundles and exchanged with ferocious haggling. It was a good opportunity for us to smarten ourselves up a bit, the hand washing and harsh sun leaving much of our clothing in a state.

The food was very tasty – the chips and mayonnaise were Belgian and the legendary one litre brown bottle with the simple white stamp of the Primus beer, washed them down nicely.

On the shores of Lake Tanganyika sat several bars where we could eat. At one a local wedding was taking place for someone evidently quite important. We were privileged enough to hear and see the tribal drumming performance put on for the wedding party’s benefit. Five toddler tall drums topped with animal skins were beaten with crude wooden sticks with an accompaniment of rhythmic chants and yelps. The rhythms were very complex and contained a perfect mix of the unexpected and intuition, making a whole that was trance inducing.

Further down the beach was a classy colonial club named Cirque Nautique, which had beautiful views of the lake and the DRC. However, it did suffer from the irritation of mosquitoes and the incessant ribbiting of randy frogs.

This was incongruous with the huge BINUB (United Nations Integrated Office in Burundi) base – floodlit and encircled with barbed wire and right next to the beach where people were gallivanting about on the sand.


We made friends with a couple of Congolese who took us to infamous Bwazaria bar on the edge of the city. It definitely had an edgier feel to it but even the drunks arguing with their prostitutes were very courteous. The music clearly catered for a hard-core African crowd, the galloping rhythms were a challenge to dance to and the DJ refused our requests.

It was by talking to one of the hotel staff that we got to learn more about the Hutu / Tutsi conflict which afflicts Burundi as it does Rwanda. We had read the Burundian approach to the problem is to discuss it openly, whereas in Rwanda discussing ethnicity is frowned upon. He highlighted the ludicrousness of the situation. Many years ago the Tutsi came south to Burundi with many cattle and because of this were rich. The native Hutu would then end up working for a Tutsi. When the colonials came they decided that everyone should have ID cards, identifying them as either Hutu or Tutsi. With many years of cross breeding they decided the best way to do this was to check the number of cattle owned by each person. This of course meant that it was not done along racial lines really but more class lines because of course some ancestral Hutus then owned many cattle and vice versa. The colonials then essentially used these Tutsi to be the ruling elite, which laid the seeds of resentment that grew into war and genocide. There are certain stereotypes that are supposed to distinguish the two groups. Tutsi are supposed to be tall, slim and have long noses. Hutus short, squat, with flat noses. The ridiculousness of the system was clearly demonstrated by the staff member who was Tutsi and pointing at his flat know said ‘I must be a Hutu’.

Our last view of Burundi was the bus ride to the border with Tanzania at Manyovu. We saw fishing villages against the lake edge, their waters filled with old wooden boats. Coconut palm plantations stretched for miles. There was a general sense of there being a lot to offer amongst the squalor.

Manyovu was grim. As we bartered with a taxi driver to take us the last few miles to the border post we were given an audience of twenty or so, all craning their necks, goggle-eyed. There was clearly not much going on.

We drove through the tall eucalyptus forests on the pot-holed road, dotted with lone figures carrying wood upon their heads. We passed fenced enclaves and squat military posts. With a cloudy sky overhead it all looked very unpromising. These were the Burundian refugees chucked out of Tanzania after the declaration of peace. Tanzania claims they are crossing the border and sacking Tanzanian villages. The Burundians say that they are still unsafe in Burundi. A border official asked us to change money with him, at a very unfavourable rate. We asked the bus driver who would take us to the next town in Tanzania if we could pay him upon entry and he said it would be fine. The border official did his best to disrupt the situation for us. Fixed smiles, loud voices and just getting on the bus did the trick. It was one of the most uncomfortable rides in Africa thus far, quite an achievement. In the small Toyota minibus designed for fourteen passengers there were twenty and two clinging onto the outside. People had to get out as we went up hill. We came to Kigoma in a bad mood.