A lull in blog posting.

So, it's been a while since I updated. This is partly because I'm fully ensconced in a routine that doesn't provide for many interesting anecdotes, but it's mostly because we never have any electricity in my flat when I'm home. In light of the fact that my battery life on this laptop is approximately three minutes, that means no internet when the power is out. And it's literally out for hours every night. At first, it would shut off around 6pm and come back on after an hour or two; these days, it's off when I get home even at 5:20pm, and it stays off until 11pm or midnight (or sometimes later). It has made eating dinner sort of a problem, as we only have an electric stove -- no electricity, no heat, no food. And above all, it's just boring to sit in the dark for hours.

I really don't have too much to report. I've been in Kampala the past few weekends, despite a few failed attempts at getting out of the city. Work is starting to wind down, especially this week. They don't want to give me anything that I won't be able to wrap up during my last days, which is totally understandable and also really boring. The highlight of my day these days is my ride home with Sam, who has become a really good friend. Every once in a while, he stays after we get to my apartment complex, which makes the interminable hours between 5pm and 7 or 8pm (when my other flatmates get home) much less mind-numbing.

And the power just went out (5:19pm), so this entry will have to do for now. More later!

A waterfall and a safari.

I have been so busy with work this week that I haven't even blogged about my safari outing last weekend. But fear not, I am alone in a puppy-stinkified apartment this afternoon, and so I have nothing to do but blog.

When I got back from Rwanda last week, I had two days off from work before I left for my safari. I wasted one of these days spectacularly, but had some adventures on Friday. I finally made it to the Baha'i temple in Kampala, which happens to be approximately 5 minutes away from where I live. The temple has acres and acres of gardens, and it's up on a hill so it has nice views of Kampala. I wasn't allowed to take pictures inside the temple itself -- and besides, they had a guy up in the rafters cleaning the ceiling -- but it was very pretty on the outside.

On Saturday morning, I got a special hire to take me out to Red Chilli Backpackers in Bugolobi, where I was meeting my travel buddies and our driver to head up to Murchison Falls. I got there early and almost fell asleep waiting for everyone else, but they arrived eventually. There was immediately drama: Irena's travel agent friend had told us we would be doing a game drive on Saturday and on Sunday, and the driver insisted that there wouldn't be time to do a game drive that day. He had a pretty bad attitude about it, which did not bode well for the rest of the trip. In fact, his bad attitude came and went. By the end of the trip, some of the people in our group loved him, but I was still fairly ambivalent.

In any case. We set out a bit late, at around 7:30, and our driver informed us that we would need our passports to get into the park. Well, no one had told us that. Most of the group had their passports, but Sona and I did not. As it happened, we drove right near my neighbourhood, so I asked the driver to swing by my flat so I could get my passport. Problem solved.

We made a stop early on for snacks and water, and then I passed out for the next 4 hours or so. I woke up in time to see some of rural Uganda, which is really green. We stopped in Masindi for lunch at a place called "Traveler's Corner" and was full of mzungus... Red Chilli was running its own trip to Murchison Falls that weekend, and we kept bumping into their group of 20+ tourists along our way. The food was all right... I got a cheese sandwich that was mostly toasted bread, but it did the trick.

After lunch, we drove another two hours or so to get to the top of the falls themselves. Along the way, I got to know my travel companions. I already knew Sonakshi and Irena, but Cary and Loida were new. Cary is getting his masters in international development policy at Duke and did Peace Corps in the Ukraine, while Loida just finished her masters in public health at Emory with a focus on infectious disease. Everyone on the trip except me was working at UNICEF in Kampala, mostly in the Technology for Development program.

We eventually got to the falls. Murchison Falls is a spot on the Nile in central Uganda where the entire river squeezes through a spot that's about 6 meters across. It apparently has gotten wider over the years due to erosion, but it's still fairly impressive. I'm a bit spoiled for waterfalls, as I've been to Victoria Falls on the Zambia/Zimbabwe border -- and Murchison pales in comparison to Victoria Falls. But it was a nice spot with some nice views.

At first, we were the only people up there. After a while, though, a big group of Ugandans showed up... and a lot of the men had beers, which made me really nervous. The last thing I need to see is a drunk man falling into a giant waterfall. Our driver told us about how, even if you somehow miraculously survived the waterfall itself, you'd end up getting eaten by the crocodiles at the bottom of the falls. Nice of him to put that image in our heads. Like I said, he was sort of a strange guy. One of the Ugandan tourists was blatantly taking photos of Sonakshi and me with her cell phone camera. She wasn't even being subtle -- we were staring right at her as she pointed her phone at us. Weird.

Cary, Loida, me and Irena

After hanging out at the top of the falls for a while, we started the fairly long drive back to our lodging for the night. We couldn't find any spots inside the park itself, so we had to go back through the gate to this women's cooperative full of bandas (huts). We took very cold showers and then Irena, Loida and I went out for a "community walk." Since the lodge site is within the community, I guess they have members of the community take tourists around to see the village. I didn't catch our guide's name, but his English was very good.

Apparently, the village is actually made up of people from 8 different tribes, including migrants from DRC. Since they all speak different native languages, they use Swahili to communicate with one another. Our first stop was a tobacco farmers' homestead, where he had a giant structure with drying tobacco leaves inside. He told us (through our guide's interpretation) about the process for cultivating tobacco, which apparently takes almost an entire year for one season -- from planting to selling. He said it's good money, but it takes patience and a bit of risk-taking, because the structure that the tobacco dries in is really flammable and so it can be dangerous to light the fires inside. His grandkids were hanging around too, and they followed us around for a while.

We went from place to place, meeting with people and hearing their (very rehearsed) stories about life in the village. There was a party going on at a bar (if you could call it a bar) in the middle of town, and we tasted their "local brew," a sort of maize-based beer. We learned all about the different crops as we walked through fields of them, identifying sorghum and potatoes and cassava. We finally ended up at a man's homestead where he told us about childbirth (???) and the ceremony surrounding it. At that point, it was getting dark, so we headed back to the lodging for dinner. The food was so good... they had said they were making goat, which I was a bit worried about, but everything was in separate pots so I could easily avoid the goat. There was rice and beans and potatoes and cabbage, and it was probably the best Ugandan food I've had so far.

There was a generator running the campsite, which was nice because otherwise it would have been pitch black. We all got ready for bed, which was quite the ordeal. The beds in the bandas had mosquito nets, but there were SO many bugs and mosquitoes inside the bandas (and outside the nets). Loida and I got a bit hysterical, considering leaving the light on so we could "see the enemy." The generator shut off at one point, so Loida and I lay in the pitch black dark and laughed hysterically about how dark it was. But we made it through the night no worse for the wear.

We had hoped to get up really early to get a good start on our morning game drive, but the gate to the park only opened at 7am. Our driver tried to bribe the gatekeeper, but to no avail. So we entered the park at 7, and drove the hour and a half or so to the ferry site to be there for the 9am ferry. The game park area was on the other side of the Nile.

Cary, Sona and Loida

The ferry ride only took about 5 minutes, and then we got back into the van and drove into the game park. Our van had a "sunroof" that popped up, so that we could stand up and see around us and to look at the animals. 

And then the game drive started. We saw loads of animals (although no leopard -- I still haven't ever seen one!) -- Ugandan kob, Jackson's Hartebeast, elephants, one really bedraggled lion, huge herds of giraffes, and water buffalo.

 

After a few hours, we headed to the Red Chilli site inside the park for lunch. The restaurant was REALLY busy, and it took us over an hour to get our food. We grabbed the food and ran, because we were supposed to be on a boat ride down the Nile to view the falls. Apparently 5 other people hopped onto our boat, and they were like, "okay, 5 people, let's go!" and left without us. So we arrived at the river and there was no boat. Our driver freaked out a little bit, but eventually this privately hired boat agreed to let us on. It turns out the boat was hired by an Indian couple whose families had been expelled from Uganda under Idi Amin, and this was the wife's first trip back to the country since her childhood.

It was interesting to talk to them, and we saw even more animals from the boat -- like about a million hippos, which was terrifying, and a couple of really huge crocodiles. We also saw some elephants on the shore, and one big bull elephant who had probably been expelled from his herd hanging out in the middle of the river. True fact: hippos kill more people every year than any other animal in Africa. They're incredibly aggressive, and while they won't eat you the way a crocodile will, they will snap you in half with their jaws just for the fun of it. (I am really afraid of hippos.)

It took us about 2 hours to get to the falls, and when we got there, the view wasn't all that impressive or different from the top of the falls. But the boat ride was nice in its own right, so I guess it was okay.

It took about an hour and a half to get back, and then we went back to the Red Chilli campsite. We weren't staying at Red Chilli itself, but rather at at Ugandan Wildlife Authority guest house inside the campsite. This meant we had our own rooms and a little house to sleep in. But we used the Red Chilli showers (one of the best showers of my life), and we got dinner at the Red Chilli restaurant again. After dinner, we bought a deck of cards and Cary and I taught Sona and Loida to play hearts.... which I handily won, despite Cary's trash talking.

We had an early start the next day, so we all turned in at around 11pm. The generator had been shut off, so we got ready for bed in the dark. The mosquito nets were all sort of sadly hung, and we found a huge spider in the house that Cary had to get rid of for us. It wasn't the greatest accommodation in the world, but it worked.

We left by 6am the next day, and the drive back was uneventful. I got dropped off near the bypass and walked back to my flat, where I changed and went into work. It was the beginning of a truly crazy week at work, which is now over. My supervisor and I were working on a report on women, adultery and customary law in South Sudan -- it's really interesting stuff, and has involved some actual statutory and legal analysis, which I've really enjoyed doing.

Rwanda: Days 3 and 4

So, the morning of my third day in Rwanda, I woke up at 5:30am. Becky had invited me to visit her favorite of the two schools she works at: one is just a normal primary school, but the other serves deaf children and provides vocational training for children who are the heads of their households. The school is about an hour and a half outside of Musanze, so we had to meet at 6am to get there in time for the beginning of the school day.

The walk was uneventful. It was cold, and my legs were really sore from the hike the day before, and I gave myself a horrible blister. But other than that, uneventful. We made it to the school by 7:30, and we were greeted by the kids. The deaf kids are all younger than the CHH (child-headed household) participants, and they mostly greeted us by shaking our hands and then hugging us. They asked Becky in sign language what my name was, and I was thrilled that I could answer myself. My summer camp sign language classes were useful after all!

 

The kids all lined up and sang/signed the national anthem together. There's one deaf child there who Becky thinks is also autistic, and the school just lets him sort of do his own thing. He attached himself to me during the national anthem, holding my hands and not letting go for most of it. But he can apparently sign the entire national anthem, and I saw him doing part of it.

After the national anthem, the deaf kids and the CHH participants split up. The CHH participants go for morning prayer -- they sang some songs, prayed in Kinyarwanda, and then it was over. It only lasted about 20 minutes, although Becky said sometimes it can last an hour or more. After the morning prayers, the CHH participants split into their "modules": some are learning to weave baskets, some are learning to sew, some are learning electrical repair, etc. I ultimately joined the basket-weaving group, and they showed me how to wrap the colored raffia around the stronger material that makes up the core of the basket. I was pretty bad at it, and they definitely laughed at me. After a while, I asked if it was okay to take out my camera, and they said it was. I took some pictures, but then they wanted to see the camera, but they couldn't quite figure out how to work it. They got the hang of it eventually.

As the time neared when I had to leave, Becky took me to a little shop that sells the products the kids make. I bought a few things, including a basket made by a woman in a related widows' cooperative.

I said goodbye to the kids and went out onto the road to try to catch a bus back to Musanze. All the buses that went by were full and refused to stop -- we waited for an hour before I finally gave up and called Greg to ask him to tell Pascal to come pick me up at the school. Pascal did indeed come out to pick me up, then we swung back by the guest house to pick up my stuff and set off for Kigali.

The drive to Kigali was -- again -- uneventful. Pascal and I chatted for a while, and we listened to his music, and we drove in silence for part of the way. It took a lot longer when he drove it (2.5 hours) than when Greg did, because Pascal wasn't driving like a maniac. As we approached Kigali, we had some beautiful views of the city, so Pascal pulled over and we got out and took pictures.

When we got into Kigali, we went straight to the Genocide Memorial Centre. Pascal didn't come in with me, and understandably so. The exhibit didn't have any information I didn't already know, really. I did learn that the Hutu/Tutsi distinction is completely artificial in origin -- the colonial powers originally said that if your family had more than 10 cows, you were Tutsi, and if you had fewer than 10 cows, you were Hutu. (It might have been vice-versa, I wouldn't swear to this.) For a while, it was even malleable; as you gained or lost cows, you changed from being Hutu to Tutsi and back again. It's so frustrating to see the damage that such a thoughtless act of European arrogance can bring. You kind of want to go back in time and shout at people -- a million people in 90 days, you idiots, that is the price of what you're about to do.

I also learned that HIV-infected genocidaires would deliberately rape women and then leave them alive to deal with the consequences -- there is a whole wave of Rwandan women who were deliberately infected with HIV during the genocide and who are still dying today.

I couldn't help do a bit of comparing genocides, Rwanda's with the Holocaust. I guess it's inevitable that my brain would go there, although it seems so tacky to compare and contrast. The really remarkable thing about the Rwandan genocide is that it happened out in the open -- people were dragged into the streets and had machetes put through their skulls. This was a messy, violent genocide. It wasn't tucked away and done systematically in camps; people were taken from their hiding places and beaten, raped, and publicly executed. I don't know whether the degree of precision makes the Holocaust more or less horrifying. I think it's a judgment call that's impossible to make.

The really impressive part of the Memorial Centre is two circular rooms in the middle of the first floor. In one, the room is dark, and there are back-lit cases of skulls and bones from victims of the genocide; a woman's voice reads out the names of victims. It wasn't quite as awe-inspiring as I imagine the churches are in Kigali that are full of skulls (I didn't realize these were in Kigali until it was too late, or else I would have gone), but it was still quite sobering to think that every skull in the case was a person with a family and a story.

The other circular room in the center of the building had photos of victims lining the walls, with a video running of Rwandans talking about their lost loved ones. I sat and watched the video from beginning to end... it showed grieving fathers, sons and daughters, talking about their memories from before and during the genocide.

In the back of the building, there were mass graves, full of victims of the genocide. I think the closest I came to being overwhelmed was when I decided to try to put a stone on each of the slabs covering a mass grave. Even with dozens of bodies in each grave, there were too many for me to realistically place a stone on each one.

I went back to find Pascal waiting for me after I finished. He asked how it was, and we got into a conversation about his own experience during the genocide. He was 16 and living in the Western Province. His two sisters, mother and grandmother were all killed in the genocide; they had tried to hide under a bypass, but were discovered and killed early in the genocide. (He remembered the date: 15 April 1994, nine days after the genocide began.) Pascal's brother and father were smuggled into the DRC by Hutu friends, and Pascal himself stayed for two months with an elderly Hutu woman who lived in his neighborhood.

The other activity I had planned for Kigali was going to a craft market, although I admittedly didn't feel much like shopping after the genocide memorial. I went anyway, though, and it was a bit of superficial retail therapy -- I bought lots of things in a very short span of time, and then I had to stop because I was running out of Rwandan francs.

Pascal and I decided to do a driving city tour. We drove around Kigali and through the hills, but it was mostly looking and not a lot of "touring." Pascal ended up taking me to another genocide memorial, one he had never been to -- it's funded by the Belgian government, in memory of the 10 Belgian UN soldiers who were executed by the Rwandan army on the second day of the genocide, because they had been protecting the prime minister. After the President's plane was shot down on 6 April, the prime minister became the titular head of state. The Hutu militia executed her and her husband on 7 April, along with the 10 UN soldiers who were protecting her. The memorial is at the site where they were murdered, a former army barracks. One of the soldiers somehow had a gun with him and fought back, and you can still see all the bullet holes in the side of the building from the military shooting to kill him. The remaining 9 soldiers were chained together, put inside one of the buildings, and left with a grenade.

Thoroughly depressed again, we tried to find an internet cafe so I could get online for the first time in four days. We failed, so we ended up just going to the Step Motel, where Pascal helped me carry my things upstairs and then left me. I was seriously bummed out that my camera battery had died at the Belgian memorial, because the motel had beautiful views of the city.

That's really the end of my adventures. I called my dad and told him about my trip. I ordered dinner in the motel, and I had a long, involved conversation with John, who runs the motel, about different American accents. I watched CNN for a while, including catching the live verdict in the Casey Anthony trial -- that was cool/good timing. But then I just went to bed. I had gotten up so early the previous two mornings, I was exhausted.

I had breakfast the next morning and John drove me to the airport. The flight was uneventful, and I got back into Kampala without a problem. Thus ended my Rwandan saga...

Rwanda: Days 1 and 2 (continued)

That last entry was getting really long, so I decided to break Monday into two separate entries. The gorillas weren't my only adventure that day!

My driver dropped me off at the guest house, and I called Greg to find out what the itinerary was for the rest of the day. He told me someone would come to pick me up at 2pm to go see Lake Burera. I decided to call Becky to see what she was up to, as she had the day off from work; July 4 is Liberation Day in Rwanda and marks the end of the 1994 genocide, so her schools were closed. She said she would come into town and take me to one of her favorite cafes, but when we got there, it was closed because of the holiday. She had just had lunch at her house where she stays with a Rwandan family, so we got boda bodas (called "moto taxis" in Rwanda) to her house. In Rwanda, all the drivers have to wear helmets, they have to have their passengers wear helmets, and they're only allowed to have one passenger at a time. Will wonders never cease... so we got moto taxis to the Musanze genocide memorial, which she lives right next to, and I ate lunch there. It was the same kind of food I eat in Uganda -- rice, beans, cabbage and potatoes. Random observation: Rwandan potatoes are better than Ugandan potatoes. I had potatoes a couple of times, and I also had a conversation about potatoes, and apparently Rwandans are very proud that theirs are better than everyone else's.

We went back to the guest house to meet Pascal, who drove me around for the next day and a half. He was happy to take Becky along with us to the lake, so off we went. It took about 30 minutes to drive there, and when we got there, it was absolutely beautiful. There were Rwandans at the lake, which was nice to see, and there was a breeze and it was lovely and quiet. Becky's guide book said there was a waterfall that can be seen from a boat, and Pascal said hiring a boat cost 50,000 Rwandan francs. If I had realized how much that actually is (about $80), I would have refused to do it, but we did the conversion wrong and somehow figured out that it was around $10 instead. Oops. So after we hung around the lake for a little bit, we hired a boat to go find the waterfall.

We put on our (really attractive) life vests and set out in the boat. It was so nice out on the water... it was a motorized boat, but other than that, it was really quiet, and the hills were so beautiful. We could see the volcanoes around the lake, which Becky said was unusual; apparently, the past two weeks had been so misty and rainy that she hadn't seen the volcanoes at all yet.

I knew there would be trouble when the boat driver had to stop another boat and ask for directions to the waterfall. That was my first inkling that maybe this had been a typical case of Africans being agreeable -- even if they don't know where something is, they'll say, "Yes, I know it," to get your business. It happens to me in Kampala with boda boda drivers all the time.

Still, it was so pretty that I wasn't too worried. It was when we had to stop the second time to get directions that I started to get doubtful. But the people in the other boat said that it was about a 20 minute hike to the waterfall. There was a building up on the top of one of the hills, and it really didn't look all that far away, so we decided to go for it and make the hike. The boat pulled up to stop at a somewhat random spot, and we got out to head for the waterfall.

Becky had brought a pair of sneakers with her, because apparently she is clairvoyant. But I only had my flip-flops on, and we were both wearing skirts. It probably wouldn't have been a problem if the hike had actually only been 20 minutes.... but it was not. We were facing the hills in the picture below, and we ended up hiking all the way to the other end of the hills and beyond. We kept thinking we were getting closer to the waterfall, and after a certain point we could even hear it, but there was always one more hill, one more turn, one more thing in our way. We ended up going straight down one side of the hills, during which process I fell twice and actually ended up twisting my left knee my right ankle, though thankfully not very badly. At that point, I decided to just take my shoes off and go barefoot. We were trampling through people's crops and falling all over ourselves -- it was steep!

At one point, we realized we needed to be on the opposite side of the hills. We marched through the mud and reached a "bridge" that had looked a lot more substantial from a distance. It was, in fact, two logs bridging the little stream from the lake. We laughed hysterically when we saw it, although Pascal just walked right across it. Becky shimmied across it in a seated position, and Pascal came back across and walked backwards holding my hands to keep me from falling into the stream.

We had to leap from mound to mound across the mud, and there was a chorus of Rwandan kids who cheered every time we made it -- and cheered even harder the one time I didn't make it, and ended up in the mud. Pascal also may have had to physically haul me up the hills at certain points because it was so slippery and I was barefoot. We reached a point after about 2 hours where I just got frustrated that we were getting nowhere and still couldn't see the waterfall, and the sun was going to set soon. I refused to go any further. Becky and the guy from the boat went a little bit further to see if they could see the waterfall, but we still couldn't, so we turned back. We had hoped the boat could come down the stream and pick us up, but the water was too shallow. We ended up having to ford the stream on the way back (instead of walking all the way back to the "bridge"), but we finally made it back to the boat. It took almost 4 hours round-trip -- for a "20 minute hike." Liars. Still, it was actually a pretty funny/fun experience to have -- especially once we gave up on finding the waterfall and just sort of saw it as a hike through the Rwandan hills. There was a point where I was so tired it wasn't fun anymore, but I recovered enough that the walk back wasn't so bad.

The sun set during our boat ride back, which was beautiful. I originally objected to paying 50,000 francs since the driver had lied to us and said they knew where the waterfall was, but Pascal seemed to disapprove of that. I didn't want to upset anyone, so I just went ahead and paid the full price (Becky paid me back her half the next day).

We got Cokes back on shore, and then we headed back to Musanze. Greg called to say he was back in Musanze for the night and wanted to take me to dinner, so we headed back to the guest house. Greg drove up as soon as Pascal dropped me off, so I hopped in his car without showering or anything. I smelled so gross and was so dirty, but Greg didn't seem to mind. We went and got pizza and I told him about the day, and then he took me home, I showered away the day, and went to bed. I had to get up early the next morning to visit one of Becky's schools -- but that is another blog post.

Rwanda: Days 1 and 2

Okay, so these entries are going to be 1) long and 2) picture-heavy. My trip to Rwanda was absolutely fabulous, so I hope I can do it justice in these blog posts. Here we go.

I had decided to fly to Rwanda instead of taking the 8 hour bus from Kampala to Kigali, since I was already taking off 3 days of work and didn't want to add any time to the trip. The flight was literally 40 minutes and completely uneventful. The Kigali airport is small, and I hadn't checked any luggage. After I went through passport control, I went through the exit and asked for a taxi to the Virguna Express bus station. I was a little bit worried that no one would know where it was, but it's apparently a pretty well-known spot. The taxi driver didn't speak much English, so we just drove in silence. First impression of Kigali was that it's green. Kampala is very dusty and dirty and brown, but Kigali is full of these really beautiful traffic circles with grass and fountains and statues in the middle, and there are trees throughout the city. I had read that it was a really organized, beautiful city -- and it is.

I got to the Virguna bus station, which was total chaos. I managed to buy a ticket to Musanze, but the earliest I could get was a 6pm departure, which would mean an almost 2 hour long wait. I called Greg, the owner of Amahoro tour company, to let him know when my bus would be leaving, and he told me he was in Kigali and leaving for Musanze soon, and that I should get a refund and he would give me a ride. After I got my refund, I saw another mzungu sitting a little bit apart from the chaos, so I went to join her. Her name was Becky, and she works in Musanze with an NGO called Fair Youth Child Foundation, teaching English in some of the local schools. I asked her if she wanted a ride up to Musanze with Greg, and she said yes, so we went and met him nearby.

We were waiting for a third girl, Amber, so Greg took me to the Hotel de Mille Collines -- also known as the hotel from Hotel Rwanda. In 1994, during the genocide in Rwanda, the hotel manager bribed the extremist Hutu Interahamwe militia and managed to provide shelter for about 1,000 Tutsi Rwandans in the hotel. They were under siege for some time. It's still operating as a four-star hotel, and it's really nice on the inside. Becky actually knows the current manager, an Indian guy, and she stayed there for free for 2 nights. There's a pool and a balcony area with really great views of Kigali -- it's really strange to think that this paragon of modern luxury was the site of one of the most famous stand-offs during the Rwandan genocide.

When Amber finally arrived, we all piled into Greg's car and started on the (very windy) road to Musanze. Greg's family fled Rwanda in 1959, when the anti-Tutsi massacres first began, and so he was actually born in a refugee camp in northern Uganda and grew up there. His family returned to Rwanda after the genocide in 1994. He told me he considers himself a "Ugandan/Rwandan" and he was really interested in my views on Mouseveni and Ugandan politics. I tried to tread carefully, as you can never really tell how someone feels about that stuff, but I think he was pretty anti-Mouseveni. The drive took a little under 2 hours, but it was dark by the time we got to Musanze.

Greg dropped me off at Amahoro Guest House and left me in the care of a woman named Sophie with instructions to take me to a supermarket to buy food for lunch the next day. I told her she didn't have to come with me if she didn't want to, and to my surprise, she basically said, "Okay, I won't then." So I was left to wander Musanze alone in the dark. Becky had told me how safe it was, so I wasn't worried -- but I was a little surprised Sophie really didn't come with me. She gave me pretty mediocre directions to "a whole strip of supermarkets," and I got lost pretty promptly. I asked people on the street for help, and a young guy who didn't speak very good English took up my cause. He brought me to a tiny food stand, and I told the people there that I needed something a bit bigger, so I was led to a less tiny (but still very small) "supermarket" of sorts. I bought some samosas and a roll of bread for lunch the next day, and then I had to try to find my way back to the guest house. A guy with pretty good English accompanied me along the way. There was one point where he said he was going to leave me, but then saw that I was still lost and came to my aid again. I had overshot the guest house and was all turned around, and so I thought I had to turn left, and I had a group of about 10 Rwandans telling me I had to go right, and I finally called Sophie to ask for the name of the restaurant across from the guest house to be sure. I had to go right.

A couple of the younger guys walked me all the way to my guest house, and just as I was starting to think how friendly and unassuming Rwandans are, one of them asked me for money. Not a lot, just 500 Rwandan francs (about a dollar), but I still said no at first. But Sophie was taking a while to open the gate to the guest house, and it was awkward, so I ended up giving him 1,000 francs (the smallest denomination I had) and feeling like a total sucker. It wasn't so bad, because he really did help me find the guest house, but I still hate being asked for money. I went to bed shortly thereafter, because I was getting picked up at 6:15am to go see the gorillas.

My driver came the next morning, and we were off to see the gorillas. The driver didn't speak English very well, which made things a bit difficult but not impossible. We arrived at a circular meeting spot with coffee (thank goodness -- there was no coffee with the breakfast at the guest house), and other people waiting to go see the gorillas. Everyone milled about for a bit, and I found the park manager and made my request that I be assigned to the closest group of gorillas. This was partially because I'm lazy, but mostly because of the reaction the travel nurse had when I mentioned altitude and gorilla trekking back in Philadelphia. She had told me that one of the side effects of altitude can be pulmonary edema, and she was worried because of the pulmonary embolism, and I decided it would be better to just take it easy.  The rest of my group was part of a big tour doing East Africa together, and I was the youngest person by about 10 years.

In any case, we all introduced ourselves and then met with our guide Ignatius, who had a family tree of the gorilla family we were going to see (Kwotinda, named after the head silver back). We learned that there are three silver backs in the group (two in addition to Kwotinda himself), and we learned a little bit about the babies in the group, etc. Then we all got back into our cars and drove for about half an hour to the start of the hike. The drive was really bad... the road was basically piles of rocks, and nothing but a study 4x4 could have made it. We drove through some villages, and all the kids came over to the car and held out their hand and said "jamal" (I think). I thought it was the Kinyarwanda word for "money," but I learned later that the word for money is something like "farangi." So I have no idea what the kids wanted. Maybe food? Some of the kids seemed really unhappy, some of them just waved at the car as it went by, and at least one kid seemed to just really want to have his picture taken. It's always a hard call whether to take pictures of kids or not, but when they started running along the road next to the car, I decided to just go for it.

We stopped at a clearing and got out of our cars to hire porters and get walking sticks. I didn't quite see the point in getting a porter, since I really didn't have very much in my bag, but the guide told me it was a way to support the local community and give them a source of income, so I got guilted into it. We set out for the actual forest at that point. It was really pretty, with the volcanoes as a backdrop. The park in Rwanda is called Parc de Volcanoes (Volcanoes National Park), but it's basically the same forest as Bwindi Impenetrable in Uganda and another forest on the DRC side of the border. The gorillas are right at the conjunction of the three countries, and so all three of the parks form a sort of "supra-park" that happens to cut across national borders. It only took about 25 minutes to get to the edge of the forest.

Once we hit the forest, we met up with gorilla trackers, whose job it is to find the gorillas. They also stay with the gorillas all day, even after the tourists leave, to make sure no poachers get in and to take care of any gorilla who gets sick. We walked through pretty dense forest for about 10 minutes, and then the guide told us to leave our bags and sticks, because we were close to the gorillas. And then, out of nowhere, a silver back came trundling out of the forest. It was Kwotinda, the "big boss" himself, and the guide and trackers were making guttural noises to let him know that everything was okay and we weren't there to threaten him. They made those sounds pretty periodically while we were with the gorillas, and sometimes one of the gorillas would make it back.

Kwotinda led us through the forest a little bit to where the rest of the family was hanging out. They came out slowly, one or two at a time, but we saw about 15 gorillas total. Kwotinda himself plonked himself down and just started eating. He didn't care at all that we were there. While we were taking pictures of him, another gorilla came out of the forest behind us and brushed right past me. I almost had a heart attack. There were baby gorillas in the trees, female gorillas hanging out, and we ended up seeing both of the other silver backs as well. The tracker and guide were really good about calling us over to the spots where we could see them the best, and grabbing us out of the way when the gorillas started to move towards us. Kwotinda at one point came right at three of us -- not in a confrontational way, just sort of moving around. It was still terrifying. He climbed up into a tree at one point, and we were all wondering whether the branches would hold him... at which point he snapped off a branch and started eating the leaves from it. Right, this is a silver back gorilla we're talking about. They seemed so placid and gentle, but at the same time, kind of huge and scary.

 

 

  

 

 

After an hour -- which flew by -- we had to take our last pictures and head back. But the tracker led us a way that ran us into more gorillas, including a mother gorilla grooming her baby. Since we hadn't hiked very far into the forest to find the gorillas, it didn't take us very far to get back out. We met back up with the porters, got our bags and walking sticks, and headed back to the cars. When we got to the cars, there were certificates with our names on them confirming that we had seen the gorillas in Rwanda, so we had a little "graduation" ceremony. I got out the food I had packed for lunch. There were two hungry-looking kids hanging out, but they weren't asking for anything. I called them over and gave each of them half of my roll of bread, which they seemed happy about. I got pictures with the tracking team and with our guide, and then we drove back over the terrible rocky road through the villages. I gave another kid the last part of a tube of Pringles, which I saw him share with his friend. Feeding the children of Rwanda, one carbohydrates-heavy foodstuff at a time...

With the trackers.

With Ignatius, our guide.