Rwanda

July 21st cont.

So we crossed the border and immediately forgot that we were now meant to be driving on the other side of road.  There is no sign or anything to warn you - it's a bit odd in this health and safety obsessed world.  Oh, we're in Africa which ain't so obsessed.  It did give me an excuse for driving past about twenty trucks who were queueing to get clearance to leave the border post though.  Rwanda is beautiful.  It was another of those occasions when you cross the border and everything changes.  It's not just things that people have an influence on like the language, architecture and farming but also the very look and shape of the land and less tangible things like the mood, too.  Rwanda is far more hilly and curvy than Tanzania, its has a different nose to it.  It was about 150km to Kigali which took us a couple of hours over narrow but good tarred roads with no roadblocks and no speed bumps.  The lack of roadblocks may be accounted for by the fact that they were so effectively used as an instrument of the genocide.  It was just fifteen years ago that more than 800,000 people were killed.

We got to Kigali and whilst you wouldn't call it pretty - it's an African dust bowl city perched on several hills - it could certainly be described as charming perhaps even handsome.  It's busy, bustling and has a really cool atmosphere to it.   There are loads of restaurants and bars and the food has been really good - very French in flavour.

I'd been driving for more than nine hours by the time we got to our hotel.  Well the only half respectable looking hotel that we could find.  There might have been an argument or two about navigation.  So we checked into the big nasty chain hotel and went out to a local restaurant to eat.  We order some saucisson and cheese as a amuse bouche that turned out to be huge and then wondering what fondue meant plumped for that.  Turns out it was a traditional meat fondue which was as ever really good fun - I hadn't had one in years.  It's nice attempting to speak French for the first time in years as well.  I haven't been to a French speaking country in probably ten years.

Went to bed.

July 22nd

Kigali rocks.  Have I said that yet?  We checked out of the hotel and drove around looking for shops and bits and pieces which we generally failed at.  There is a vibrancy to Kigali that makes it hard to believe it was at war relatively recently.  There's loads of construction going on, plenty of nice cars driving around and whilst much of this than be put down to the massive amounts of guilty aid that have been plowed in to the country the people have much to do with it as well.  There is hardly a minibus taxi to be seen in town either.  Everyone uses little motorbikes.  There are hundreds of green helmeted riders and if you want to get somewhere you just wave him down and hop on.  Everyone young and old uses them - you see businessmen reading the paper on the back and young people texting.  It's hilarious.  After some lunch and general spannering around we went to the only campsite in town that has camping where it turned out we couldn't park Rhubarb so we stayed in a room instead.  It was ghastly.  I don't want to know why the floor had been bricked up so that the floor was halfway up the level of the lower windows.  It was damp and cold too.  That evening we got a couple of the little motorbikes to a restaurant around the corner that was recommended.  I had lapin aux pommes avec croquettes or something very nice it was too.  We negotiated with the owner to stay there a couple of night as long as we got a big discount and a free laundry service.  Poor woman has no idea how much laundry we have.

Kigali is the south central African L.A.

July 23rd

We drove around town a bit more considering whether or not to stay in greek ladies place or not.  Since we couldn't find the other place after two hours of driving and I might have been getting a bit irritable we went there.  It's pretty plain rooms but there's a nice view of the city.  We went out to a Thai place 'round the corner for dinner. I had some dirty bastard escargot in a sort of béarnaise sauce which was very good.  Jo ordered steak and got chicken.  Then we ended up getting $30 worth of brandy free at the end of the meal.  I think the owner thought I was someone else because when I told him I didn't live here in Kigali he seemed a bit perturbed.  There hasn't been such consistently good food anywhere since Maputo it's been great.

July 24th 

We visited the Libyan Embassy (Closed 'til Sunday) and the Egyptian one (Come back on Monday with the right papers.  Our plan is to get our Egyptian visa here just so we can try and blag our carnet for taking Rhubarb into Egypt without paying/waiting stupid amounts money/time.  We're visiting Wacky's Embassy to see if we can get a transit visa to cross Libya without waiting 2-4 weeks in Egypt.  We need to do this as it turns out that there are now no boats running between Egypt and the European mainland.  If we shoot across Libya into Tunisia then there's a quick modern service to Italy.  The alternative is driving 'round Jordan, Syria, Turkey then masses of other European dives.  Our thinking is get as many visas done here, where it's quiet and efficient rather than have to mess around in Nairobi or Addis. 

We visited the Genocide Memorial which was pretty tragic.  It finishes with lots of personal effects from mass graves and skulls and bones from unknown victims.  It's pretty hardcore but the thinking behind that aspect of the display was that no one can ever deny a genocide where the bones and stuff can be viewed by all.

It left me in awe of how well the country has re-intergrated itself.  I keep looking around at people my age thinking they would have been school leaving age when it happened.  10% of the population was killed and you can throw in another 10-20% who were affected directly - injured, raped whatever so that means that everyone would know someone seriously affected by it and yet there seems to be no trace of it, no ill will remains, on the surface at least.  But then no one talks about it either.  I met a four guys in a bar last night, a Belgian, a German, a Greek and a Frenchman.  They had all lived here for most of their lives, a couple were born here.  I wanted to ask where they'd been fifteen years ago but it just didn't seem appropriate.  There's a talk by a survivor at the memorial tomorrow so maybe    I'll go check that out.  Plan is to head out of Kigali on Monday and go camp at last.  I found merguez sausages in a shop that I plan on cramming my cake 'ole with soon.  

Offended some pump action shot gunning wielding copper trying to take this and had to return a day later.  Where were this lot fifteen years ago? 

So Rwanda on the surface has seemed so calm and peaceful it has been impossible to imagine how two ethnic groups could have been killing each other just a few years ago.  Therefore, with my typical subtlety and discretion I've set about trying to engineer situations when I could ask the un-askable.  Bearing in mind this is a country where to announce your tribal background is a crime.  On my way to the casino last night after dinner I got talking to my taxi driver.

He was a funny guy.  First off I asked him why African Rwandi's would speak French to each other and not the local language.  This is in total contrast to Xhorsa or Zulu group which would always speak their local language when not in company.  He explained that French is the language of business but despite this it is a dying language.  So if the discussion is concerning business in any way the language used is always French as it has the vocabulary for it - as soon as the same group switch to social matters the spoken language would be Kinyarwanda.  However, the fastest growing language in Rwanda is English and a couple of locals I've spoken to about it have said that there is deliberate move towards this as Rwanda tries to position itself as the' Singapore' of Africa.  There is massive investment in telco infrastructure for one - the President received an award from a big technology summit in the U.S.  Anyway we're chatting away and I ask him how old he was - 34 similar to me.

–  I'm 31, so fifteen years ago you were what 18, 19?

–  Ah, you're so young man, too young

–  The same age as you dude.

–  No you are too young, look at you 

('Too' often means 'very' when spoken by someone who is primarily a Bantu speaker)

–  Yeah it's my healthy living - but so, fifteen years ago it must have been very hard as a young man.  Sorry for asking, please don't –

–  Yes it was very hard.  I was too young.  Both of my parents were killed.  They died.

At this point he got the saddest look in his eyes as you might expect and clammed up.  Whilst I felt ashamed to have asked I also felt if I hadn't, I'd leave without a sense of the real Kigali.  The genocide is still so close to the surface that it is simply remarkable that the country has achieved what it has.  It wasn't ever a war or even a civil war.  There were no armies.  There were no troops.  There were just friends, colleagues and neighbours violently killing each other.  Not a clean deaths but most often in a way contrived to be as malicious as possible.  

–  Kill your wife or I will rape her, then kill her.  Good it is done.  Now I kill you. 

Went and played poker lost $150 when a guy hit a straight flush on the river to my full house.  I probably deserved it.

July 25th 

Went for lunch and watched the rugby.

When we got back the owner of the place we're staying (Greek Rwandan) and another guy (Belgian Ugandan) were having some drinks and we got talking.  Nicolas (Greek) has said he'd owned the place for nearly twenty years so predictably the question came,

–  What was it like during the genocide, were you here?

They told us that all the mzungu left by about April 1994.  It had become too dangerous, too lawless.  The Hutu groups were very often just lawless, looting criminals.  Nicolas three or four times and gangs turn up to the restaurant with guns and take all of his takings for the night - anything they could take he gave them.  Eventually when thing became too dangerous he left for Burundi where his brother lived, taking what he could and left the place locked up.

He returned three months later when the Tutsi's had secured Kigali.  As soon as he could he returned,

–  It is my home.  I had to return and when I did I found it was safe.

–  What did you find when you got back - I mean was the property O.K?

–  Hah!  It was here.  It was the only thing here, everything else was gone, stripped.  Only the bodies.

–  Bodies?

–  Bodies everywhere, this place was a grave.  Bodies everywhere.  This place here! (points at ground) bodies!  

–  Of who?

–  All of my staff.  Their families.

It was brutal stuff.  Jan the Belgian went on to tell us that his wife is Rwandi and her own family turned on each other.  Hutus and Tutsis are so interwoven many families have both groups amongst them.  They live in Uganda now and she has never returned.  She keeps saying she will but never does.

Nicolas and Jan's wrath though was reserved for the Kofi Annan and the NGO's.  He is seen as having been if not complicit certainly incompetent.  The NGO's are seen as parasites who suck funding through the misery of others.  Have you ever seen a poor NGO worker in Africa was their question.  It was powerfully articulated stuff.

Yet, when I was taking one of my late night mototaxi rides around the city late last night I got to a shopping mall to get some cash.  At midnight a mass of people arrived with mops and brushes and buckets of water.  The last saturday of every month is Umuganda.  It is a communal cleaning day.  Everyone (mzungu's excepted) is expected to clean the city, town or village.  The roads are closed until midday so they can be swept.  It is a remarkable community event in a country where the community so recently turned on it's own.

If you wish to attend university or work in the civil service you must attend an education course.  Jan called it 'brainwashing' and he may well be right.  He's advising the Justice Department so he'd know.  It is to socially train you on the wrongs of ethnic policies and your social responsibilities as a Rwandi.  He said it was brainwashing but he said it works.

I guess that's the most important thing.    

July 26th

Watched the F1 in a little bar and did some internet stuff.  Wow, exciting life of an overland trip, eh?  Good race though.  Went out for a really rather palatable Chinese meal.  Or, a slap up chinky chop as Jo put it.  Kigali or chig-ali as you should really pronounce it has probably had the best food of the trip.  I slapped a ban on Jo drinking anymore bottles of wine as they were around $50 a throw.  I'm boring myself writing this so I'll stop.

July 27th

We decided to leave the boring visa stuff 'til Kampala and head up country to do some camping 'cause we're lazy.  Did some shopping in the bright shiny supermarket.  Banned Jo from buying Vache Quiri (Dairy Lea) cheese as it was tenfuckingdollars and headed out of town.  It was beautiful.  

About a hundred and something km's north we were up close to the parc de volcanoes or something where Dian Fossey gorilla lady lived and died.  We were thinking of going to see them but there were three problems.  In order of importance.  

1.  It entails several hours of trekking up a mountain.  

2.  It costs $500 per person.  

3.  They were fully booked for a month.

Maybe you can reverse that order.  Apparently Rwanda is far better to see the cheeky monkeys than Uganda as there are more groups. Two groups have emigrated from Uganda in recent years.  The DRC is meant to be better then Uganda too as it's just reopened and is $100 less.  Saying that by the time border charges from Uganda have been factored in it's the same.

We turned up at a place our guide had said was new and had camping to find there was no camping and it was €500 per person per night.  It didn't even seem particularly wow.  On the subject of, 'per person per night' stop it.  Really, it's very stupid.

–  I'd like a double room please.

–  That'll be $x per person.

–  Wanker.

It's not as stupid as the first hotel in Kigali we stayed in where there wasn't a single room supplement but a 25% double occupancy supplement.

Anyway we were a bit pissed off and nowhere really to stay for reasonable money/value and the border was only 10km down the road so we offed to Uganda.