MAY 14, 2016: RWANDA DAY 1-ARRIVAL IN PARADISE
It’s
2 am.
Mouhdi greets us at the Murugu Hostel
with a continent-wide smile that burns away the brain and body sludge of our 3
plane, 4 take-offs, 4 landings, 4 country aerial yo-yo bounce across East
Africa from Djibouti. We don’t notice the mile in elevation we’ve gained, but
are just short of geriatric cartwheels over the 35 degrees we’ve lost on the
thermometer.
Whatever else Rwanda has to offer
during the next two weeks, the climate gets our vote. So does the bed.
We wake up in paradise.
At least here. And now.
In 1994 over a million people, over
one tenth of the population, were murdered here in a genocidal rampage. Fueled
by a Belgian colonial administration that had emphasized differences over
commonalities and then by an egotistical megalomaniac who preached ‘ethnic
cleansing’, getting rid of anyone different and making Rwanda pure…and
‘great’…again, the rampage lasted 100 days, the majority Hutu military and
civilians attacking their minority Tutsi neighbors. That’s 10,000 men, women,
and children a day shot, hacked, incinerated their bodies left to rot in the
hot sun. Mass rape of Tutsi women was standard policy.
65 percent of Hutu and Tutsi are
Christian, predominantly Catholic. Sectarian differences among Christian groups
added fuel. 25 percent are of various tribal religions, some admixed with
Christian elements. 10 percent are Muslims.
The rest of the world ignored it after
10 Belgian soldiers were killed.
There’s a monument to the 10, and a
memorial museum for the 1,000,000.
The years afterwards were bumpy,
including a disastrous war with Uganda, and reabsorbing and resettling the
millions of returning refugees who had fled the genocide, but Rwanda is now an
impressively safe and secure place.
Reconciliation includes ignoring Hutu
and Tutsi identities and creating one Rwandan identity.
The country has an impressive
infrastructure, much of it provided by the embarrassed international community.
Kigali is recognized as the loveliest, safest and most livable city in East
Africa, if not the whole continent. It is certainly lovely, spreading out over
green hills into mists, filled with trees and flowers, the air warmish, with a
cool edge.
Rwanda is called ‘Le Pays des Milles
Collines’, Land of a Thousand Hills, and most of them are rippling away from
the porch of our hostel. Getting around town is urban trekking…or so we’ve
heard. That’s for tomorrow.
Today we chill, and veg, and get to
know Mouhdi, Guy in Charge, and Evode, New Guy, drink cold citron and plan the
next two weeks.
MAY 15, 2016-RWANDA DAY
2-GENOCIDE MUSEUM
‘I told the
man. You are my neighbor, why are you killing me. He hit me with his machete,
then stuck pieces of wood into my face. Then he thought I was dead and went
away.’
Boy, age 9
Today we rode as passengers on the
backs of motorcycles through the beautiful peaceful streets of Kigali to the
Genocide Memorial.
The Memorial gives unbearable details
of the bloody apocalypse of April, 1994. Some stick, indelible.
The genocide had deep roots. It
festered in the racist policies of the colonial powers, and grew rancid in the
stench of the colonial government policies to ‘divide and conquer’ by
encouraging antagonism against the educated Tutsi minority.
By the 1990’s, in independent Rwanda,
the government’s plan was complete eradication of the Tutsi. Hutu troops were
given permission to effect a ‘final solution’ and kill all Tutsi. Ordinary Hutu
joined in the blood frenzy, killing their neighbors.
Hutu men who were HIV positive were
recruited by the government to gang rape Tutsi women and infect them. Hutu who
had married Tutsi, and there were many, were also killed, as were their
children. Hutu who protected or hid their Tutsi friends and neighbors were also
killed.
There were acts of supreme bravery.
The film Hotel Rwanda shows one. There were many others. A Moslem man defied
the troops and hid Tutsi in his house. A Hutu man hid neighbors in a trench in
his garden and fed them with food he stole.
Many Tutsi took refuge in churches.
The government troops locked them in, then torched or bombed the churches.
At the war crimes trials only a
handful of convictions were handed down. Two Catholic nuns were found guilty of
crimes against humanity.
The genocide killed 1,000,000 of the
then 7,000,000 Rwandans. 250,000 are buried at the Memorial. 2,000,000 more
became refugees. The killing left 300,000 orphans, most of whom had seen their
families hacked to pieces by people they knew. Many of the raped women bore
children conceived as their husbands and children were murdered in front of
them.
Mouhdi, our sweet, gentle, soft-spoken
Go to Guy at the hostel is 26. He was 4 during the genocide. I don’t know if he
is Hutu or Tutsi. I will not ask him.
The Genocide Memorial does not ignore
other genocides: the Turks against the Armenians, the Germans against the
Namibians, the Serbs against the Bosnian Moslems, the Khmer Rouge Cambodians
against other Cambodians, the Nazis against the Jew, Poles, gays, Gypsies.
There are others, including the
forceful removal of people against their will. I think of what Europeans, then
Americans, did to the native peoples of the Western Hemisphere and the
Europeans to the Tasmanians, and the slave trade to the Americas, perpetrated
by Americans, Europeans, the Arabs, and by Africans against themselves.
No people on our planet are free of
that taint. We walk through the Memorial ashamed that our species is capable of
such horrors. It seems that we can be lead into atrocity too easily by the call
to hate those who are different.
The Rwandans want more than the memory
of the hate. The Memorial leads us from horror to reconciliation. Kigali,
almost demolished and its streets filled with rotting corpses in April,1994, is
today a beautiful, thriving, safe, modern city, its people neither Hutu nor
Tutsi, but Rwandans.
The woman speaks into the camera:
‘I
spoke to the man who killed my six children. He told me where two of them were
buried, so I could bury them. I forgive him because he told me the truth.’
She humbles me.
MAY 16, 2016-RWANDA DAY
3-VOLCANO IN MY MOUTH
The
volcano erupts in my mouth. The wad of fuzzy leaves and salt leaches massive
floods of saliva from every part of my burning maw. It’s no use. The liquid is
lava.
Its target is the collection of
microbes keeping my throat ‘iffy’ and my cough always on call.
‘This always works’, says David,
our charming host at lovely Murugo Hostel, or ‘Doctor David’, dispenser of
mouth and throat Armageddon.
He’s right. This is my second
treatment and after each I do feel better, to the extent that I feel anything
at all. Lava tends to deaden. The same remedy is applied to bleeding wounds, so
cauterization might be the active principle here. This is David’s 82-year-old
mother’s recipe, and David and his 8 siblings have survived multiple doses, so
I figure…what the hell!
My experiment with Rwandan folk
medicine adds er, uh, piquancy, yes piquancy to an otherwise flattish, lazy day
on the lanai overlooking the hills of Kigali. Surrounded by maps and pages
copied from the Lonely Planet guide to Rwanda I’m in charge of figuring out
bus, boat, and lodgings for our nine days, self-propelled excursion around
Rwanda.
The country is small, with good roads,
and good, cheap, busses. Our furthest destination is only a 6-hour trip, though
we will have one 9-hour day. All the others are 2 to 3-hour bus rides….and one
longer, slow boat trip on Lake Kivu, described as one of the most beautiful
places in all Africa. And, yes, African Queen has crossed our minds.
The goal is 4 days of La Dolce Vita in
Kibuye, overlooking that beautiful Lake, the 5 smoking Virunga Volcanoes (made
famous in the film ‘Gorillas in the Mist’, and the so near, yet so far, cloud
wrapped landscapes of the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire) on the
other side of the lake.
We’ll travel through a landscape in
part densely populated and farmed and in part the last stretches of unspoiled
virgin (except for the intruding road) African forest. It’s a landscape with
place names singing the soft consonants of Africa: Musanze, Gisenyi, Kibuye,
and my favorite, here, in its euphonious completeness, Cyangugu, Rwanda, the Cy
pronounced as ‘Sh’.
But, that starts tomorrow. My third
dose of Doctor David’s Lava Leaf Remedy comes first.
Pray for me.
MAY 17, 2016-RWANDA DAY 4-TO CYANGUGU
This
is not our year for buses. 30 minutes after leaving Kigali on the 9am Impala
Bus for the 6-hour trip to Cyangugu and halfway up a hill near Gihinga and
Gacurabwenge the bus pulls over. We look for on-loading passengers. What we see
is an off-loading driver, phone in hand, inspecting first one wheel than
another. And we know.
A few hours earlier we begin the day
with a semi farewell to the guys at the hostel; we’ll see them in 9 days. The
motorcycle ride thru morning traffic to the bus station is careening, carefully
driven, fun.
The bus station—Nyabugogo---is pure
Africa, ablaze with colors, peddlers, and chaos. The peddlers stop at our bus
window offering fruit, drinks, samosas, French magazines, the English version
of the current issue of Time Magazine, an English-Swahili phrase book,
earphones, phone cables memory chips, hair picks, shampoo, jewelry, underwear.
It’s a Drive in, Walk-up Jumble Sale, a Sidewalk Anti-Walmart, strewn with the
unpackaged color of Africa.
We are assigned Seats 18 and 19 on the
9am bus. They turn out to be right behind the driver, a spot seemingly
nature-made for 1 and 2. Go figure.
The bus is comfortable, one passenger
per assigned seat, Laws of Physics observed. We leave promptly at 9, get as far
as…here. The spot is lovely. The yellow haze buzzing across the hillside wraps
around fields of fluttering banana pendants. It’s made of bushes covered with
bright sunflowers, 4 to 5 inches across, baby chick yellow, and equally fuzzy.
Rwanda is all hills and densely
populated. The landscape is cultivated and humanized by small plots of
different crops, stands of trees, and small houses. Everywhere is green. In
places it looks like tropical Costa Rica and Guatemala. In others, the terra
cotta barrel tile roofs and earth walled houses remind me of the villages of
Taiwan. Farther away, the hilltops with tall columns of trees silhouetted
against the clouds, are a stand in for Tuscany. With bananas.
Across the road, a boy about 8 and his
mother are harvesting fruit into sacks. He waves and smiles. She picks and
packs.
While muzungu (farangi, white people)
are not unusual in Kigali, we’re almost certainly a rarity standing on the road
near Gihinga. We do our bit to entertain our hosts, but the show is
short-lived. Just about 40 minutes from the breakdown of Bus Number 1, an empty
Impala bus, Number 2 (so far), pulls up. People still in Number 1 pass our tiny
day packs out, and we all take the same numbered seats we had in Number 1 in
Number 2. And we’re off. I’m impressed.
We’ve stretched our legs, gotten a
taste of the efficiency that makes Rwanda an easy place to visit, and a chance
to slow-watch life in the fields. It’s a 40-minute mini-adventure, texture
added and appreciated.
At noon we stop for a 15-minute
bathroom and food break. The buffet (a common meal solution here) is huge,
looks good, and is cheap at about $3, but most people buy take-away sticks of
beef kebab. A twenty-five cent cob of roasted sweet corn does me just fine, the
slight char on the big kernels crunching into the softer sweetness inside.
The paths along the road fill with
uniformed school kids (light blue above, dark blue below is a popular combo),
books in hand or back packed. One little boy runs, balancing a 1-liter bottle
of water, standing straight up, on his head. Velcro?
We tunnel briefly through a forest of
bamboo fingers, all pointing skyward, then into another patch, canopied into
shadow by hugely arching, almost linked, leafy arms reaching out from both
sides of the road. Then the road opens into wide, cropped tea plantations,
bright green and crew-cut for morning brew. Pickers, just torsos and arms and baskets
above the tightly tamed shag, are solitary spots of color in the green.
We ascend into the highest mountains,
drizzle of the clouds spotting the windshield. Except for the road and signs
warning of ‘animals crossing’ (with the logo of a chimpanzee), evidence of
human intervention in this landscape is swallowed by the solid, immense silence
of the Nyungwe rainforest, primal, untouched Africa, remnant of its morning.
There are monkeys by the side of the road and tongues of rock and mud where
land has slid from the steep slopes, both reclaiming the landscape wounded by
the road.
Tea plantations appear again, matching
manicured parentheses to those on the other side of the forest, containing the
wildness. And slowly encroaching on it.
The horizon brightens with reflections
from Lake Kivu, another deep, wet gift of the process ripping Africa in two.
Beyond the lake is the Democratic Republic of Congo, DRC to friends, formerly
Zaire, beautiful, tempting, but off limits.
Seven hours after leaving Kigali we’re
at the end of Rwanda as Bus Number 2 stops briefly in Rusizi. I recover my day
pack from my ill neighbor who has been using as a pillow. She nods thanks,
leaves. The bus winds down to the lake shore, finally in Cyangugu, ‘la
frontière’ with the DRC. Bus greeters point out our hotel, a short walk up the
hill behind us.
Rooms at the budget Hotel des Chutes
all have balconies overlooking the lake, the bridge across the narrow slip of
water to the DRC, and a spectacular mountain landscape. Ours will do. Definitely.
Especially when they get the water running.
In the meantime, there are charming
and helpful Redemptos (‘it’s Latin, means Redemption’) to welcome us, and slightly
sullen, but gorgeous, Olive to bring us cold beers, and the view. We have
arrived.
MAY 18,
2016-RWANDA DAY 5-CYANGUGU – GHOSTS 5
Carmen
Miranda and Josephine Baker eat your hearts out. Hats of flowers? Fruits? Mere
bagatelles!
I see a guy wearing a flock of
chickens on his head, barnyard beauties all, perky and facing all around, a
beak or two at each hour, him the owner of a 24-hour cluck. One that lays eggs.
(Later, Redemptus tells us that chickens are a big seller in Congo, where food
is expensive. I take it chickens don’t need a visa. For them, it’s all part of
a day’s work. They just cluck in.)
I’m on an early morning walk around
Cyangugu, Rwanda’s southwestern last gasp before the landscape belongs to
Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC, or Congo) or Burundi. The setting is
stunning, right on Lake Kivu, and facing the misted green mountains of the
Congo. Right here at ‘la frontière’ the watery gap separating the two is a few
dozen feet wide.
Inevitably, it’s a border crossing.
Everywhere in the world these are odd places. One minute you are ‘home’, a
native, in your place, under your rules. The next you are a ‘foreigner’, and
under sufferance of a visa stamp. Opposite you in the line are people reversing
the process, both of you gaining and losing who you are. Everyone is a kind of
ghost, temporary, no one. It’s not a place for smiles, Cyangugu, and there
aren’t many, at least not towards a sole wandering muzungu.
The biggest businesses seem to be
petrol (gas, to the rest of us) stations, stores selling wildly colored plastic
bins (a great profit maker in Congo), money exchanges, and guys on MotoTaxis,
extra helmet in hand, ready to putt-putt back up the mountain to the real town,
Rusizi. There are several ugly blocky hotels down by the watery frontière, in
the thick of things, such as they are. None are so appealing as our Hotel des
Chutes sitting up on the hill in the quiet, under its not-yet-in-flower
jacarandas and flamingly flowered Red Flowering African Tulip Tree.
Cyangugu is not a pretty place, the
setting aside. Depend on the women to add color. If the women of Ethiopia,
especially Harar, are geniuses of pattern mixing, the women of Rwanda pick one
astounding fabric and use it over and over again from toe to wild head dress.
Some simply wrap their hips in it, then top it with a solid colored tee shirt
or blouse. Some tailor it into tight floor length skirt and matching blouse.
It’s the head scarves where their
genius erupts. The simple ones, Head Scarves 101, are tied, knotted in back,
best as a base for a coiled cloth pad for things balanced atop, working gear.
The knots grow more complicated by 102 or 103. Folds appear at the junior
level. By graduate level the head dresses are millinery masterpieces, sprouting
wings, impractical for head work, but heady birds of paradise flown out only
for special occasions to be seen and admired.
I hear scratching near my perch on a
rock wall, look up from this screen to a smile. She’s a street sweeper and her
twig broom is about to sweep my feet. Most roadsides in places we have visited
in Africa have hosted a plague of explosions in local plastics factories.
Rwanda is litter free. There are no blizzards of plastic bags blowing around
heaps of plastic bottles, cans, paper, refuse. On the last Saturday of every
month everyone in the country must work on some public project. I don’t know
how it is organized or monitored, but street pick up must be involved. Maybe
knowing they’ll have to pick it up on that last Saturday inspires people to not
litter the rest of the month. Urban or rural, the roadsides are spotless…and
we’re three weeks after the last cleanup. The street sweeper cleans the dust
path along the road, even of the red flowers of the tulip tree.
Breakfast on the balcony overlooking
all the above is luxuriously fruited. Tiny ‘finger bananas’, aptly named, are
sweet with a wisp of other fruit, apple maybe. The pineapple is beyond sweet,
definitely carrying hints of coconut. The purple-skinned passion fruit comes as
seedy fruit and as juice, both delicious, tangy, earthy. The other fruit looks
like a yellowish passion cousin, and is new to us. It’s very good. Ditto the omelet
with red and green poivre, oignon, and tomate. The coffee is ersatz.
A few minutes after our last sip of
that dark brown stuff, loud sheets of rain plummet onto the porch, just missing
us. It’s rainy season, food for the deep greenness. We sit on our balcony and
watch the hills of the Congo fade behind the liquid scrim. Few people crossing
the bridge in either direction have umbrellas. Kids run through the drops.
Adults just keep walking. Almost all are balancing something on their heads,
bags, baskets, packages. Closer in, the rain seems to wash a brighter red into
the flowers of the tulip trees.
Rainy season rains here are like ours
in Florida, committed to a soaking downpour, but just passing through and gone
within the hour. The clouds sail on and blue returns to the sky, the air
cleansed, and the flowers brighter. Clarity does not flatter Cyangugu.
A five-minute walk exhausts downtown
and we turn past ‘Salon La Merveille’, Marvelous Salon barber shop, and its
saffron front decorated with painted images of a hair clipper and two current
hair styles for Cyangugu’s men about town.
Our feet are in reddish black volcanic
soil, but we are engulfed by a tunnel of green so intense it wipes out all
other colors. On the lakeside the road drops off into banana and irrigated
fields then to the lake, its islands, and the mountains of Congo. It’s a
spectacular view only slightly marred by angled glimpses of the town. People
stop to watch us take pictures of nothing, confirming that muzungu are both
entertaining and unfathomable.
Mountainside is an almost vertical
wall of green wildness. Thirty feet straight up a house clutches at the
vegetation. Four men wave from its narrow porch. ‘Allo’ shouts one as he
plummet-walks down to shake our hands. ‘Welcome to Rwanda. I am Alpha. When you
pass here again, say hello. I am always here. I have no job.’ We promise and he
waves us off on our walk through the green tunnel, now tilting upward to meet
the paved road.
The further we get from the ghosts at
la frontière, the more people respond to our greetings and smiles. Kids
practice their school English, clustering for courage.
Between us and the gate of the hotel
is a narrow, steep, muddy, slippery slash in the mountainside. At the bottom a
flock of guys with the unmistakable universal stamp of ‘street punk’ watch for
a Memorable Muzungu Moment, but we disappoint them, descending without
incident…or grace, or style. They seem satisfied with that and to laugh and
throw phrases in Swahili in our direction as we wave and pass by them into the
gate.
Our
walk has given Cyangugu a face. Not everyone here is a ghost.
MAY 19, 2016-RWANDA DAY 6
– TO MUSANZE
On
one day in 1994 Hutu troops murdered 50,000 Tutsi in this spot. 50,000. On one
day. There’s a memorial, famously graphic, but we continue past in our bus.
Below us, the ruffled valleys of the
forest are green-black cups for clouds, released by the morning sunlight and
wisping away, their exit undeterred by the red lights of the tulip tree. The
heaped ranges of mountains fade into shades of greyed green, leaves sequined by
sunlight on dew, behind morning mists, a dappled scrim.
The early morning landscape is so
beautiful I want it to deny the possibility of such evil. It cannot and does
not. We travel on.
The evil lingers. I look around our
bus. Anyone over 22 lived through the genocide. I wonder what they saw. Or did.
The road takes over, as happens on
long bus rides. We rise and fall, sway left and right, dip, lurch, beep, pass.
There’s a squiggled sign for “curves ahead’. The road is already twisted into
paper clip tight curves. More curves just won’t fit, and they don’t. Maybe they
just had an extra sign.
Six hours after leaving Cyangugu we
unfold from our Omega Express (definitely the very last word in comfort,
euphemistically speaking) once again into the chaos of Nyabugogo bus station,
and immediately refold into the 1pm Virunga Express to Musanze, 2 hours to the
northeast.
Up there are the 5 Virunga Volcanoes.
We saw one, the smoking one, briefly from Uganda three years ago when morning
clouds blinked open during a trek to visit gorillas. Most people assault the
Virunga slopes to visit the Rwanda gorillas (very expensive) or notch their
hiking sticks. I just want to see the 5 mountains up close, no hairy relatives,
or climbing, involved. Our bank account and my knees agree. If the Cloud Gods
are kind, we’ll see them from our ramble around town. If not, …oh well.
‘Are you sure you made a
reservation?’ is not the question we want to hear after 8 hours on the bus.
Neither is its inevitable cadenza: ‘And the guesthouse is full’.
Resourceful and helpful Onesmus
suggests a tent on the grass in the yard, and, poof, we have our digs in
Musanze.
Our Canvas Condo is tight, the Studio
Model, 6 feet by 6 feet, but luxuriously padded and blanketed, comfy…and
constructed, furnished, and lighted by Onesmus in 20 minutes while we check our
emails. Spotless toilet and hot showers are across the yard. Hot coffee is on
the porch.
MAY 20, 2016-RWANDA DAY 7 –PARTS 1 AND 2
- MUSANZE, TENTS, AND PIZZA
The walls of our tiny Canvas
Condo muffle and baffle the morning sounds of Musanze. Trekkers, up early
and off to visit---uninvited--- our hairy relatives on the slopes of the
Virungas, add chatter and coffee slurps. A hammer pounds on something next
door. Clusters of bird song ride over the occasional mumble of passing
motorbikes.
Under
all is the sound of Africa awakening. Mornings in Africa are filled with the
sounds of life lived in the open. I love them.
It’s
6 am, well past rise and shine (well, semi-shine) time for us Tent People. The
night was well padded, comfortable, warm on the toes, cool on the face,
restful.
Today
we wander Musanze and its markets, hoping for a view of the Virungas above.
Grey clouds make that less likely in the morning. No matter. There are closer
colors.
The
cloth market is just beginning to drape its wares over bamboo poles at 10am.
Some designs are raw and rampant, others soft and subtle, none meant to be
static, but always in motion as skirts, shawls, scarves, wraps on the
undulating grace of Rwandan women.
I
have a purpose. This is our second year of looking for two fabrics spotted on
women in Cameroon, across the continent. On one, peacock-colored, life sized
chickens and roosters fluttered in a deep blue field. Mega-bananas, in singles,
doubles, triples handily filled a green garden on the other. They were
magnificent, and so far non-existent anywhere else in Africa. Still, we visit
every part of the cloth market, hope trampling experience.
Below
each soft wall of color, whirring sewing machines are at the ready to nip,
tuck, tailor to fit any body shape or aspiration.
One
woman of definite and expansive ‘traditional build’ holds up a huge, raucous
pattern that would eat a smaller physique. On her it is a decoration, an
enhancement, a mural, not a master of her shape. I imagine her sailing through
the streets in that pattern, a spectacular galleon of girth, washing the
streets in waves of color. Brava!
Chickens
and bananas still elude me, but I make a find. In the used clothing alley of
the market, Used Clothes Guy glances at our multi-pocketed travel shirts as we
walk by, turns to a 4 foot by 5 foot pile of loose shirts, stacked so only
their rumpled collars show, reaches into the middle of the pile and yanks
out my shirt’s first cousin. In the right size. Perfect.
Friendly
haggling, greased with smiles, gets him a price he’ll accept, and me a shirt I
want, in better shape than its super-annuated and thinning relative I’ve worn
for 4 years of travel. It’s a shirt with a ‘history’, and stories it could
tell.
I
wonder who wore it before and where. Maybe some of my Goodwill donations have
made a similar roundtrip, and, now well-traveled, tell tales of markets and
muzungus. Surely, stuff made of spun yarn has the stuff to spin yarns.
I’ll continue to look for my chickens
and bananas in other places. Maybe the Virungas will be less elusive here.
MAY 20-RWANDA DAY 7 PART 2
There’s
a messy, democratic ‘us-ness’ to sharing pizzas.
Every urban, semi-urban, or semi-urban
wanna be town we have ever been to--- Musanze, Rwanda, is no exception--- has
pizza, or some version of it, sometimes misguided, but the ancestry and intent
recognizable. Regardless of the execution, pizzas are designed to be messily
shared, round wholenesses to be equally divided, everybody with a wide crust
end for holding and a narrow pointed end for eating. (Square pizzas with their
edge-less middle pieces miss the point of pizza, totally.)
Pizza is food for friends, messy
finger, hand-food friends. The day leads up to pizza with Onesmus naturally….
There are no other guests around. The
blitzkrieging, frantic, and humorless trekkers zoom off at 6—loud, tightly
wound and tight-lipped---to invade the gorillas, the most laid back of
primates. There oughtta be a law…
In the quiet afterwards, Onesmus makes
us breakfast. It’s not part of the Canvas Condo deal, but he does it anyway.
By the time we get back from ‘town’,
he’s ready to chill. We just hang out together, Onesmus and us. We see pictures
of his wife and pudgy baby back in Uganda, take and print photos of him to send
to his wife. He invites us to share the lunch he cooks (fish stew, white and
sweet potatoes, corn meal grits), then leads us on a walk through and up above
the town.
We sit on the grass and watch the sun
set and the moon rise to the gospel singing of the church behind us and the
cartwheeling antics of the kids all around us. He’s delighted when the immense
graceful slope of a Virunga slices through the clouds ‘for us’, apologizes that
we don’t get The Full Monty.
Dinner seems like the next step. Pizza
gets all the votes.
Onesmus and Focus opt for ham and
pineapple pizza. We chomp through a ‘regular’ with mushrooms, sharing aromas
and blurry edges, if not full tastes. It’s not great pizza. Quality is beside
the point. It’s gooey, cheesy, a little salty, and thoroughly fingerlickingly,
democratically messy.
It’s a perfect end to a fine day with
a fine man.
And, oh yes, we saw the Virungas, 2.6
of them. At sunset. Spectacular. Somehow the pizza party is more memorable.
MAY 21, 2016-RWANDA DAY 8-
PARADISE IN A TENT
We’re
living in a garden. Flowers crowd around and over our tent, creep up onto our
porch. In front of us the view tumbles down to Lake Kivu through orange lilies,
white daisies, yellow coreopsis, and the reds, purples, blues of other flowers.
This is Africa, just south of the Equator, but lifted up out of the heat into
the cool perfection of mountainous Rwanda. Everything can grow here, and does.
We thrive.
Our tented paradise is at Inzu Lodge,
outside of Gisenyi. It’s a two-hour bus ride from Musanze, a beautiful way to
spend a morning. Onesmus walk with us to the bus park and checks that were
getting the right bus. It’s unnecessary, but sweet, and kind. Later he emails
to check that we’ve arrived safely. It’s what Pizza Pals do.
Our tent is an African tent, royalty
of that family. Set up as a permanent structure on a stone platform---hence the
porch---and covered with a peaked bamboo roof to protect the canvas from sun
and rain, it’s roomy and beautiful inside, as big as one of our guestrooms back
home. And the walls zip open. With bright fabric curtains, bedspreads, thick
mattresses, bamboo furniture, draping mosquito nets, electricity, spectacular,
perfect climate, this is definitely a step WAAAYYY up from the Mat Motel in the
oven of Djibouti. It costs $33 a night for the two of us, breakfast is $4
extra, each.
The ‘dining room’ is thatched, and
open on three sides to the views. Chunks of eggplant, tomato, onion, pepper,
neatly skewered and perfectly roasted, crisp edges holding flame flavor, seduce
our senses, our view besotted eyes giving way taste-ready noses and tongues.
It’s a wonderful lunch, fitting this place, and $4 a skewer, one each enough,
and sided with salad and chips, aka French fries.
Hours later, pasta with pesto
completes our day. We walk in the dark, through the flowers, up to our tent,
our way lit by gas lanterns. White flowers catch the light and glow, just a
bit, and catch the light breeze, nodding us to our tent.
We are seriously indulgent, and loving
it.
MAY 22, 2016-RWANDA DAY 9 – LAKE KIVU TO KIBUYE ON
'THE AFRICAN QUEEN'
She’s
our very own African Queen.
Easily a childhood contemporary of
Good Queen Elizabeth (the current one) and quite rumpled around the edges…and
everywhere else, except in her semi-plush airline style seats, she rules over
the rickety dock outside Gisenyi with pointed prow authority. She calls herself
Gloria Express, but allow us our fantasy.
She’ll chug-chug us down to Kibuye for
3 hours on her thrice weekly every other day southward run the length of Lake
Kivu. She putt-putts northward on the days in between.
Like true royalty, our Queen has no
affectation. She’s not a cruise ship, nor a beauty. She’s a muscular cargo
boat, a sort of floating Rosie the Riveter who tolerates people, but prefers
sacks of potatoes, and stashes us accordingly.
Her minions issue life jackets as they
add our names and citizenship to the manifest, check our IDs, guide us across
the bouncing gangplank….and stuff us on board into her window lined cabin. The
comfy seats fill the space. Completely. We head for 2 window seats on the shore
facing side. We can watch the scenery slide by, but we can’t move, hostages to
steerage class. Shimmying and climbing skills are useful for the latecomers,
the life jackets orange bumpers in the crowd.
The lake is island-studded and
beautiful, deep blue, and just plain deep, one of the deepest in the world. The
scenery is early morning emerald, Rwanda in its glory.
At 10:30 we offload at Kibuye and
switch places with people on-loading for the trip down to where the lake
squeezes into the narrows between Congo and Cyangugu. Our Queen pulls away
without a wave. Sic transit Gloria.
We trade chug-chug for vroom-vroom on
motorbikes spinning along the coastal road then up high above the lake to our
digs at Home St. Jean. The view from the terrace is spectacular, the viewless
room much less so. It’s big, clean, efficient, cheap, and
uninteresting.
We don’t bond with St. Jean, but make
do…and make plans to catch our Queen the day after tomorrow on her way back
north and return to our tent amidst the flowers.
Life is short. We’ll smell the
flowers.
MAY 23, 2016-RWANDA DAY 10
– BACK TO PARADISE AT INZU LODGE IN GISENYI
‘Nous sommes presque arrivés.’ says the
smiling man hanging over the railing. Yes, we’re almost there. The African
Queen chug-chugs into Gisenyi, and we’re back in Paradise.
Our return to Gisenyi today is a snap
decision. Kibuye IS gorgeous, but Home St. Jean is not home, and we miss our
tent and hillside garden at Inzu Lodge only a three-hour chug-chug back up the
lake...tomorrow.
At 9:40, the two Dutch sisters we’ve
been trading travel tales with tell us there’s a boat back to Gisenyi…today.
Yes!! By 10 our packs have been whirlwind stuffed, we’ve bid adieu to St. Jean,
and are on our way up the dirt road to find the shortcut down to the lake. By
11 we’re having cold lemon Fanta on a veranda overlooking the lakeshore and the
grassy spot where the good Queen will haul in.
And she does, a growing speck on the
immense blue lake. Her greyness is washed out, aged, against the voluptuous
green of the shore. No matter. At 12:30 we greet and board our African Queen.
The old girl has a big surprise under
that greying hull. Young Justin, in charge of the gangplank, recognizes us from
the downward trip yesterday, and leads us past the crowded deck we know, turns
towards the bow…and into the First Class Salon, lined with plump, comfy, roomy
couches. On the downward trip we followed the crowd into steerage and missed
this upgrade into comfort. We spread out into it with our Dutch friends,
Yolande and Sondra, an elegant young man and his laptop, two guys clearly Off
to Have a Good Time, and a young woman being earnestly chatted up by a very
determined swain. There’s plenty of room to spread out for our 5000Francs
($6.50). It’s twice the fare for steerage, and my legs thank me.
Fun Guys snap our pictures. We take
theirs and then print them. For the next two hours the FC Salon becomes Foto
Central. One by one, our sofa mates ask for, pose for, and thank us for their
pictures. Computer Guy demurs, too cool by half.
The word spreads out of the FC Salon.
We meet and snap crew and passengers.
I have my favorites There’s kind and
helpful Justin, who affects a sideway glance, pose and smile that show off his
brawny arms, lithe physique and very good looks. His photo just screams ‘For
the Girlfriend’, lucky lady.
There’s Smiling Guy, who tries
‘serious’, but gives it up when I make a face at him, and he just beams light
at the camera.
Our favorite, by far, for all of us is
Noble Man, a dignified septuagenarian who hobbles in on a spectacularly carved
wooden cane, his burnished canyon-lined face dark and his grey eyes light under
a rakish cowboy hat. He doffs the hat, arranges his stunning purple jacket with
black flowers vining all over it, and stands erect, chin up, staring directly
into the camera. It is a royal portrait of our African Queen’s King.
At Inzu, Yves greets us with
handshakes and smiles. ‘Your tent is ready.’ It’s a few dozen meters up the
slope and easily visible through the flowers, but he insists on leading us.
Home.
Dinner under thatch and open to the 180-degree
view of the lake starts with crunchy tiny fish, perfectly fried, a local
specialty recommended by Josh, the other guest. Young, smart, funny, he is in
Rwanda from England to help Rwandans further develop their already impressive
infrastructure. Like many people we meet he’s confused by, and interested in,
America’s gun fetish, our primary and election processes, and the Trump person.
We confess to total befuddlement.
A return engagement with the luscious
veggie brochette is as successful as the first. Josh wrestles with an immense
broiled fish, definitely on our plates next dinner time.
As we chat into the darkness, Inzu
wizardry unleashes more magic. Out on the lake, now just a great blackness to
us, but rippling life source to the people of the lake, fishermen go to work at
their craft. Working in groups of 3 knife slender canoes, wooden slivers low to
the black, the middle canoe shines gas lanterns over the water to attract fish
to the nets and rods of the two other canoes. From here on the hill with no
horizon visible in the dark to tell us where the sky begins, the lights float,
suspended in blackness, unblinking fireflies.
They’re belied by the real thing,
close-in fireflies rising out of the flowers, Morse coding amorous intents to
one another, on off, on off, on off, the dit dot of insect love, but creating
magic for us.
The Garden Guys place gas lanterns
along the paths leading to the tents. Above us are stars.
In
the lake, in the air, on the ground, in the sky spots of light dim the
boundaries between earth lake and sky. Suspended, we, too, join the floaters.
How could dreams compare?
MAY 24, 2016-RWANDA DAY 11 - GISENYI-INZU LODGE
WORKS ITS MAGIC
The
fishermen sing the day awake.
They have been working all night. As
our day grows and theirs ebbs, they head to shore carrying with them a soft and
rhythmic chant. I don’t know if it is a chant to help coordinate pulling on the
oars, or pulling in their nets, or to celebrate a good harvest, or soothe an
unsuccessful one. Whatever the reason, the chant is one voice, a shared
message: we’re in this together. How little of that insight remains in the so
called ‘developed’ world?
Gauffres are on the breakfast menu,
waffles, à la francais. They’re thick, dense inside, crunchy on the surface,
perfect. They are also only an accompaniment to the real star of our petit
déjeuner, an immense platter of fresh fruit. On an 18-inch flat straw basket
lined with a dew-shined banana leaf is an orchard of orange, banana, and
pineapple slices, and seed-rich halves of passion fruit. The oranges and
passion fruit are tart. The bananas hint at the flavors of other fruit. The
pineapple is drippingly honey-sweet, no relative of those hard, armored things
passed off as pineapples outside of the tropics. I manage all the fruit, only
half of the gauffres, take two wrapped to go back to the tent, lunch-to-be
later on our porch.
Paradise has been invaded. First, two
large and loud young stormtroopers clump in, drop their rucksacks and address
the reception clerk in the Demanditive Case, barking questions. Then laugh at
her when she answers slowly because she is considering how to answer their
questions. Charming. Not. (Later, they’re quiet at dinner, and only moderately
inoffensive.)
Later in the afternoon, a family comes
in with two adorable kids (3 and maybe 2) and a LOUD British sounding mother
who addresses the kids megaphonically, as if they are in South America. I think
of Henry Higgins line ‘She’ll have a large Wagnerian mother with a voice that
shatters glass.’ In Buenos Aires. Her laugh would shred lead. Anywhere.
Her mother, however, is soft-spoken,
as is her husband, a gentle Rwandan absolutely besotted by his children, and
they adore him. He sings them to sleep, a soft lilting Rwandan song. Later even
Megaphone Mama turns it down. She’s quite nice, actually.
As the day wanes, the fishermen go out
again, chanting their way into the lake. We just barely make out their oars
striking the quiet surface of the lake. Before and aft are long slender poles
to beat the water and attract the fish. The boats resemble low-lying attenuated
insects, lacking only wings to take flight.
At dark, a lone firefly blinks on and
off. Then off. The crickets sing.
MAY 25, 2016-RWANDA DAY 12 - GISENYI-INZU LODGE,
AND SOME LESSONS
From
way above our tent, from far up the steep green slope, we hear singing. Not the
deep masculine, repetitive, pulsing rhythm of the fish-chanters out on the,
this is light, air-lifted, higher pitched, and a song, with beginning, middle,
and end. It’s probably a hymn in this heavily Protestant country, but with
music making life, not quite the life of Gospel singing in the USA, but getting
there. And there are drums. The birds have chosen to not compete.
Today is a day of connecting with
other travelers. But, first, we take Aline up on her offer to help us buy some
kitenge in the central market. Kitenge are the long (4 meters, 13 feet) pieces
of cloth that become the graceful wraps, blouses and head scarves that glow on
almost every woman in most of Sub-Saharan Africa. My hunt for the flock of
fabric chickens and bunch of cotton bananas is fruitless, but we have great fun
with Aline. She has just finished her degree in hotel and tourism management
and aims for a career in the growing Rwandan tourist industry. Staffing the
reception desk at Inzu is step number one on that ladder. Like Yves, her desk
partner, and everyone else at Inzu, she ‘has it’, a real feel for helping.
Thus, our market walk.
Later we motor taxi to join our Dutch
friends, Yolande and Sondra, for chilled Citron on the beach. Still later as we
wait for dinner overlooking the lake, the stormtrooping guys of yesterday turn
out to be interesting trekkers from South Africa. They revive my interest in a
visit to Lesotho and Swaziland and offer to have their car dealer uncle in
Johannesburg find a way to get around the ban on renting to Coffin Dodgers over
70 years old. Us.
The Sri Lankan-Canadian beauty spins
tales of fresh shrimp and fish on the beaches of Sri Lanka, a Scherezade for
sure, seducing us to yet another destination.
The chanting and lights on the lake
launch their magic, but we’re doing magic under the thatch with our printer.
The staff crowds around watching their photos appear automagically from Dennis’
tiny blue printer. Alone, in pairs, grouped with us, the Magic Muzungus,
serious for the camera, wide-smiled for us, charming Alain, his co-workers, and
the Chef-Wizard, create some magic for us. 24 years after the genocide, most of
them are too young to remember that horror. It must ooze deeply into every
family’s story. With people like this, recovery does seem possible. That seems
like magic, and a comfort.
In the distance the fishermen chant as
they have for generations.
MAY 26, 2016-RWANDA DAY 13 –
GINSEYI TO KIGALI, AND RWANDAN KINDNESS SAVES THE DAY
My
money belt is gone. And with it all my money. All.
We’re a half hour into the Virunga Bus
ride on the 10:00 bus from Gisenyi to Kigali and I can’t find my money belt. We
tear the day packs and jackets apart. No dice.
I call Inzu Lodge. Aline is as upset
as we are…and then she finds it! We have to go back. A passenger on the bus and
the driver work it out and explain it to me: the driver will put us on another
Virunga Bus going back to Gisenyi, free of charge. Done. A half hour later we
hop off Bus Number 1, into Bus Number 2.
In Gisenyi, I wave Den goodbye at the
bus station, hop on a MotoTaxi back to Inzu, get the belt, thank Aline, hop
back on, zoom back just in time to catch Bus Number 3, the 1:00 bus to Kigali.
The driver of Bus Number 2 has explained it all, and Virunga gives us free
passage on Bus Number 3 to Kigali. Bravo Aline! Bravo Virunga! Look for your
reviews on Trip Advisor.
The ride is ridge riding, overlooking
deep valleys and slopes farmed up to cloud-wrapped summits, the patches of
bananas and other crops dripping down the steep sides of the mountains.
We pass a strapping young guy walking
along the road while balancing a single running shoe on his head. The latest
offering from New Balance?
Rwanda roads are very different from
the crowded barnyard of the roads in Ethiopia. We see few cattle (these are
farmers, not herders) and few goats. The one we do see keep to the greenery of
the fields and off the paved roads, a wise move. There are far fewer walkers,
too, wheels replacing legs.
The signs alone are worth the trip. A
favorite is one advertising Esperanza Dellavida II. I have no idea what Ms.
Dellavida II has on offer and miss the chance to find out. My attention is
immediately hijacked by Tango Abitha’s Bar.
At the 15-minute rest stop, sellers
crowd the windows with baskets of fruit, drinks munchies.
There are men with no left hand, a
stump chopped off at the wrist. They are not old, just old enough to have been
children maimed during the genocide. Everywhere there are reminders, but Rwanda
is committed to reconciliation. Still, how do you reconcile a missing hand?
By 4:30 we’re home again in Kigali at
Murugo Hostel, chilling after all that hopping, with a Citron, also chilled,
and catching up on the news with Avode, after the hugs….and ‘Your room is
ready’ (and it is, the rucksacks we left behind delivered and waiting for us).
He’s proud of his new name badge,
enhanced by one of our automagically printed photos, so he has survived his
trial period and has been hired.
The puppy is gone. We suspected she
was sick from her labored breathing, heartworm the likely culprit. It’s not a
happy diagnosis.
Mouhdi hugs a welcome, then the two
guys go back to work. There are 3 other guests.
Whirlwind David spins in, hugs, spins
off to help the other guests arrange their stay at…Inzu Lodge. Lucky people.
‘We have hummus today, and it is
good’. Avode conjures up a bowl of same, chewy bread, and one bottle of cold
beer. We share that and one order of penne pasta with vodka sauce, two plates
please. We like this place, the Murugo Lodge, and Avode, Mouhdi, and spinning
whirlwind owner David.
We sit as the day fades, feeling
lucky. Knowing we are. Tomorrow we leave.
MAY 27, 2016-RWANDA DAY 14 – KIGALI TO
NAIROBI-PARADISE TO MAYHEM
‘Yes! That one’.
I am close to massive overdose on
beauty in the kitenge section of Kimironko market, Kigali’s biggest and best,
when I find not one, but two kitenge I cannot leave behind. No, there are no
chickens romping or bananas ripening on my kitenge, just wildly colorful and
quintessentially African abstract patterns. Four meters of each cost less than
$7. They’ll be summer (or maybe fall, or spring, or winter) foliage in the
guest room. Or, perhaps not.
‘Lemee see, lemme see’ gushes our
whirlwind host. Then he laughs. ‘I have bought the very same fabric to make
tablecloths. You are good.’ That’s ‘good’, underlined, and in bold.
And that’s David, delightfully
underlined and in bold. He is a hoot. Roundish top to bottom, he floats Big
Ideas for Murugo. We’ve spent time discussing his plans for the guesthouse.
Last week I suggest swing seats and hammocks for the garden and that sends him
over the moon. Today he bubbles over designs for a pergola with a swing seat
inside and hammocks hooked to each of the corner posts, with tables in
between…and promises to send me pictures of the finished wonder.
Pictures, hugs, goodbyes with Evode
and Moudhi happen too fast. David drives us to the airport through the orderly,
uncluttered traffic, trees, and cool air, the car dipping into the valleys and
climbing the summits of ‘The Country of a Thousand Hills’. The whirlwind is a
considerate driver.
Kigali Airport is easy, well run,
comfortable. We’re semi-ignored by the Security Dog, our luggage getting a
ho-hum sniff before Fido slumps back into his crate. The humans are fussier.
Our safety pins (useful many times for on the spot repairs) and batteries (for
cameras, water purifier, and head lamps) go into the no-no bin. The Ethiopian
hot spice powder? Security Guy asks Dennis to eat some. SG passes it without
comment. Unlike Dennis in several hours.
Any pin and battery regrets disappear
in the space of our exit row seats. The flight crew is quite definitely
Ethiopian. What other country produces such looks, so rampantly? They almost
compensate for the food, which is insipid, not bad, just pointless, rampantly
so.
But not for the movie. It clutters the
tiny screen with young guys who keep flipping greasy hair out of their eyes,
falling off cliffs, forgetting their shirts, scoping out one another’s muscles,
no, one another’s meaningless tattoos (yeah, right), getting sweaty together,
hugging, and surfing humongous waves, skiing vertical Himalayas... and falling
off more cliffs.
Of course, it makes no sense. Its
Jackass Meets the Endless Summer of Dumb and Dumber. (Perhaps it is a very
clever adaptation of Trump meets Palin, Cruz, and Carson, but that would
require a sense of humor, seriously lacking in that camp, or chutzpah, ditto
among Democrats.) I don’t bother with earphones. I lip read grunts well enough.
The camera work documenting Expendable
and Handsome Young Men Doing Stupid Things is astounding, but I lose interest
back at the second or third episode of heavy breathing male ‘bonding’ disguised
as Macho Man Mayhem. Was this movie funded as a smokescreen by those ‘family
values’ Republicans who keep getting caught looking for male ‘bonding’ in
public restrooms? (Even their Stepford wives saw through their ‘historical
research library’ of torso-rich gladiator films.) Just asking.
We’ve been through Addis Ababa Bole
Airport 10 times before. The up escalators have never worked. The 11th time is
no charm. At 11:05 we join the other
zombies bound for Nairobi, landing time 01:40, way beyond loss of
consciousness.
No comments:
Post a Comment