Click the photo above to see an album of photos. To return to our website close the window.
Read Next Episode: Nyungwe NP
Land of a
Thousand HIlls - Kigali, Rwanda
Kigali Rwanda
Sunday 6 February
2011
Rwanda is the land of a Thousand Hills and Kigale is the city built
on the hills. This makes practising for our day tracking Gorillas through the
mountains of Rwanda easy. Several times a day we walk from our small guest
house, Auberge La Caverne, about 0.5 km uphill to the center of the city to
visit Bourbon Coffee Shop, to get more money from an ATM, or have dinner in a
restaurant. Sometimes we even make it without puffing. We are also perfecting
our street crossing techniques. Like the other African towns we have visited,
there are no convenient pedestrian crosswalks, although cars and buses seem to
be more tolerant of people like us trying to get to the other side of the
street. Our best bet remains waiting for a local to make the first move in a
break in the traffic and walk beside them as a guard.
We flew from Arusha
to Kigale via Rwandair last Wednesday Feb 4th and have been relaxing and
exploring the area ever since. Kigale seems to be a favourite place for
Westerners to serve as volunteers or get a job working for International
Organizations. We have met several, including a young couple on the plane to
Kigale who shared a taxi into town with us. From Switzerland and Norway, they
both work for UN agencies.
If you ever decide to come to Rwanda to see
the Gorillas and have made a reservation yourself with ORTPN, the Rwandan
Tourist Office, from your home, we highly recommend you leave time to confirm
the reservation when you arrive in Kigali. We wired the requested amount from
our bank in Ottawa to the ORTPN office in late December. It took more than an
hour to find the hard copy reference of the receipt of our wired funds. All
records were in hardcopy in a ring binder by date of receipt of funds, not by
name or date of booking. When the receipt was finally found we were told we owed
more money for the permit because of bank charges levied by the Rwandan bank
that completed the transaction! It would have been easier and cheaper to have
one of the tour companies in Rwanda make the reservation, even paying the tour
company service fee. Anyhow, we are set to see the gorillas on Feb 15th.
Everyone who visits Rwanda should
visit the Kigali Memorial Center. It was a short Moto Taxi ride from our hotel.
For 500 RFr (less than $1 each) we got to ride on the back of a licensed
motorcycle to the Center. The drivers are all around the city, distinguished by
their green vests proclaiming their status as Moto drivers. They even carry an
extra helmet and are allowed one passenger per bike. It works well.
The
Kigali was opened about 2005 in the midst of beautifully kept gardens. The
displays of photos, film clips and good documentation in three languages,
Kinyarwanda, French and English, tell the history of Rwanda leading up to the
Genocide in 1994 and the after effects. It was extremely moving. We spent the
morning appalled at the incredible loss of life and the delayed response by the
rest of the world. Canada’s Lt. Gen Romeo Dallaire, head of the UN Peace Mission
of the time, is highlighted as a voice in the wilderness, who wrote memos to the
UN begging for assistance, but he was ignored. His book Shake Hands With The
Devil was written about his experiences in 1994. Less we forget that Rwanda was
the only recent genocide, another section of the memorial deal with
genocidesover the past century in Cambodia, Armenians, Jews, Namibia and the
former Yugoslavia. Outside are buried the remains of over 28,000 people found in
mass graves in other parts of Rwanda. There were fresh flowers left on one of
the concrete covered tombs.
We also paid a visit to the Hotel des Milles
Collines, made famous by the film Hotel Rwanda. The European management of the
hotel appointed Paul Rusesabagina, a manager of a smaller hotel in Kigali, to
run the hotel when they were evacuated during the 1994 genocide. Paul risked the
lives of himself and his family by harbouring fleeing Tutsis and moderate Hutu
in the hotel. He and his family and some survivors were eventually evacuated in
a UN convoy. He fled to Belgium where he still lives. The hotel has been
entirely renovated and is a smart first class hotel with a big outdoor swimming
pool in the center of Kigali.
One of Ray’s friends at the Carlingwood
YMCA is Bill James. He came to Kigale several years ago and found himself
returning to a small bar close to his hotel. He started talking to a woman
working in the bar and was most impressed by her plans to open a bar for
herself. Immaculé was taking accounting courses and had boned up on what would
be required to start a business on her own. Bill decided she deserved a chance
and helped her start a bar, which she called Billy’s Bar, in Kigali. She did so
well that the owner of the building where the bar was located decided he would
run the bar himself and didn’t renew her lease. Immaculé moved to Kayonza, 65 km
east of Kigali, to be nearer her family and opened another bar there. When Bill
heard we were going to Tanzania, he convinced us to include Rwanda in our trip
and to visit Immaculé in Kayonza. We did.
Today we boarded a comfortable minibus to Kayonza. Immaculé was at the bus stop waiting for us. We walked to her small shop and were impressed with her business and her future plans to expand into a restaurant and guest house. She now has several full time employees and makes enough to send her 11 year old daughter to a private school. She starts courses next week to become computer literate and improve her business skills. Not many westerners visit Kayonza. We were a hit with the local children. We soon had an audience of more than eight, playing games and practising their rudimentary English. After having lunch with Immaculé, we said good bye and boarded another bus back to Kigale. Bill is rightly proud of his protégé.
|
Click one of the following to read about Tanzania, Uganda or Kenya
Return to Travel Intro
Return to Introduction