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.