Akagera...Like the San Diego Wild Animal Park, Minus the Tram and the Strollers

Last weekend I took a camping trip to Akagera, one of Rwanda's two national parks. My roommate Nicholas organized the trip, and our group included his girlfriend Mallorie, roommates Pascaline and Laura, our recent house guest Fannie, and another Belgian named Astrit. Despite the risk of French-language over-saturation, I was excited to be joining them for the trip. Nicholas likes to remind everyone that he was a boy scout, and I have a history of being a somewhat useless camper, so I figured I should take advantage of the opportunity to see the park with someone who knew what he was doing.

We left Friday afternoon from Kigali and arrived at the gate of the park by about 6:30, which was 30 minutes after it had closed. Oops. Fortunately, things aren’t always all that official in Rwanda, so after trying to explain ourselves to the guard, who spoke only Kinyarwanda (“camping!”…hand motions...“camping!”) and a brief wait while he checked with someone via radio, we were allowed to enter. It was already completely dark when we arrived at our campsite, so Nicholas and I set out right away to round up some firewood. We had headlamps, but we still lost our way a couple times, stumbled into thorny bushes, and slipped around on the grass, which was wet from the recent rain. Eventually we gathered enough wood and after a few tries Nicholas and Mallorie got the fire going. We put a grill over the fire and had a solid camping dinner of brochettes (meat on a stick) and pasta salad. After dinner I pulled out the marshmallows, chocolate, and biscuits I’d brought (sadly, graham crackers weren’t an option) and proceeded to make my greatest contribution to the trip: these poor folks had never eaten a s’mores.

The next morning we rose before dawn. As the sun rose behind the clouds and the park’s features took shape in the morning glow, I started to realize how expansive and visually stunning Akagera is. For me, the aesthetic beauty of the park would prove to be the dominant theme of the weekend. At the time, though, I was groggy from a restless night of sleep and was working hard to summon the energy to stuff our gear and our bodies back into the 4X4 we rented for the weekend. But pile in we did, and after picking up our guide, we started our mini-safari. Within fifteen minutes, we were spotting antelope, zebra, and an occasional warthog. Without fail, the warthog cameos prompted the Belgians to reference Pumba and The Lion King. If you’re ever interested in having the soundtrack sung to you in French, I’ll happily put you in touch with my friends, as they belted out Just Can’t Wait to Be King at least eight times over the course of the weekend.

As the day progressed, we made our way down to the lake shore to see some hippos. According to my Kenyan friend Victoria, hippos are like white people: they burn easily in the sun. So, as we stood by the lake, the hippos surfaced, flapped their ears, and stared back at us, but none of them bothered to get any farther out of the water.

Our objective was to make it to a more remote campsite in the park by mid-afternoon, so from the lake, we got back in the truck and bumped along a dirt path full of holes, rocks, and patches of mud. This stretch of road was also surrounded by heavy brush on both sides. After about forty five minutes of hot, uncomfortable driving, the brush on our right cleared just a bit and we found ourselves in close quarters with a couple of elephants. Needless to say, they were incredible to watch. I was driving at the time, and our guide quickly told me not to turn off the engine because you never know when the elephants might decide to charge the car.

After navigating the road for another thirty minutes or so, and making our way around a tree recently knocked into the road by an elephant, we began to head up into the hills toward our campsite. It was up in the hills that we spotted our first group of giraffes. The giraffes were easily the most stunning animals we saw. This time we did turn off the engine, and as we stood on the hillside, with the expanse of the park as a backdrop, the wind and the soft thumps of one giraffe’s gallop were the only sources of noise. Pretty mesmerizing.

We set up camp, had lunch, and headed out to see more animals (where I took my favorite picture of the weekend), but soon it started to rain. Realizing we needed to collect dry firewood, we cut our drive short and gathered a big bundle of wood. We had a problem, though, in that there was no way to fit the wood in the car. So we wrapped it in a blanket, threw it on top, and Nicholas and I served as human tie-downs by sitting on the back-seat window sills and holding down the bundle as we drove back to camp. The drive lasted a good twenty minutes, and it rained for most of it, but riding in the open air, looking out over the hills, and watching antelope bounce along next to us as we drove was something I won’t soon forget.

Feeling very much in the wilderness, we had another fun night at the campsite. This time when it was time to sing, the francophone contingent made drunken attempts to harmonize their way through The Lion Sleeps Tonight.

We had another half day of animal viewing, the highlight of which was driving alongside a herd of giraffe as they ran through a small valley. We also saw some buffalo and a large herd of topi.

By late afternoon we were back at the house in Kigali, where there aren’t any giraffes, but because we’d called ahead and asked our roommate to turn on the boiler, there were much-needed hot showers for all.

Women and the Rwandan Economy

The Washington Post ran this article about the role women have played in Rwanda's post-genocide economy. It's definitely worth a read.

Sigourney Weaver Filmed a Movie in Rwanda...And It Wasn't "Ghostbusters"

Just thought I'd share that today I bought permits for Rose and me to go gorilla trekking in August. The gorilla families here in Rwanda, of Dian Fossey and Gorillas In The Mist fame, are some of the last in the world, and are stars of the country's tourism industry. We were lucky enough to get some of the last permits available for the month of August. Here's a Flikr album of photos taken by other travelers.

Stick Shifts and Safety Belts

ORI has a car that the employees get to share and use to get around town. Since the current program managers will be leaving ORI in the coming weeks (in one case) and a couple months (in another case) we all decided that I should dust off my non-existent stick shift driving skills. The first and only time I'd driven a stick shift, it was the middle of the night in Colorado Springs, the streets were clear, my aunt Olivia was offering me encouragement, and the driver's seat was on the left-hand side of the car. Yesterday I had three incredibly patient passengers, Kigali's evening traffic, a traffic circle full of motos, and a seating assignment on the right side of the car. I'm happy to report that I didn't stall, didn't crash, and only made ugly gear crunching sounds once! Christine even eased her death grip on the ceiling handle well before we reached our destination. Overall I'd call it a huge success.

Blog to Blog

Here's a link to something I wrote for the ORI blog about one of our students:

http://orphansofrwanda.org/blog/?p=45

City Mouse

As Carol commented on a recent post, I just hit the one month mark on my time here. I didn't intend for it to work out this way, but I guess you could say I celebrated the occasion with a trip to Kampala, Uganda. I traveled with Lauren, my fellow ORI intern, and Elisa, who works for a public health organization here in Kigali and who's also a fellow Columbia grad.

Thursday was a holiday here (May Day/International Labor Day/way too socialist of a holiday for the US) so we started the 8-hour bus ride as early as we could. In a word, the bus ride was rough. Including the time we spent at the border, the trip took about 9.5 hours. It was crowded, incredibly bumpy, and made all sorts of random stops. At each stop there were always people trying to sell goods through the bus windows. The TV on the bus had a steady stream of entertainment, though. We started with the movie Tremors, which might have been fine, but it was dubbed into Luganda, and there was one man voicing every character. At least we still got to see some classic Kevin Bacon hair. After the movie they showed a variety of local soap operas, including an episode called "Stolen Bible 2." I was hoping the subtitle would be "Gideon's Revenge"...

By the time we arrived in Kampala and made it to our hostel, we were desperate to get some food. Compared to Kigali, Kampala is very much an international city, and we'd been told ahead of time to take advantage of the opportunity to have some good food while there. We took a cab to a Chinese restaurant and had a solid meal full of familiar tastes. Our post-dinner plan was to try to catch some live local music, but when we got to Club Obligato we found out they were hosting a special concert, which carried a hefty cover charge. We were in a pretty desolate, industrial area, but I had spotted a tiny bar on the road to the club, so we walked a ways and ended up at Paradise Club. We hung around, drank some beer, and played pool while the locals laughed at us. Definitely a good time.

After getting some rest and enjoying some coffee at the hostel, we were off to explore Kampala. I took a liking to the city right away, and I think that was mostly because of its size. Beyond the fact that big cities have always fascinated me, while the three of us still received plenty of stares and mzungu calls, it seemed like we were a little more anonymous in Kampala than we are when we walk around here in Kigali. The city was lively and chaotic, and while poverty seemed just as prevalent as it is in Kigali, it felt like there was a broader base of economic activity holding the city up. Our first stop in town was as a ticket vendor to see if there were any more tickets for the Akon concert. There weren't, but apparently he ended up canceling the show anyway. Someone forgot to tell him that you can't make it to Texas for a show the day after you perform in Uganda.

A walk through one of the city's parks was next. One of the first things I noticed, and lamented, about Kigali is that there aren't any parks available for people to sit and enjoy the country's beautiful weather. Kampala doesn't have as many as some of my other favorite big cities but I was happy to find at least one. We spent the rest of Friday walking through the city, having a cup of Ugandan coffee, wading our way through the market and taxi park, and being American. By evening we’d come across another park, called Centenary Park, where there were a number of outdoor restaurants. We had a couple drinks and let the afternoon cool into evening, then headed over to a bar called Kasalina’s to give our previously-stymied live music goals another try. We found a fun band playing local music and a tourist-free crowd, which was surprising given how close the bar was to a couple of major hotels.

We rose early the next morning to embark on the part of the trip that I'd been most excited about: white-water rafting on the Nile. The rafting company picked us up at the hostel and we made our way out to Jinja, a town situated right at the source of the Nile. I only have one photo of us so far, but I should get the rest from the company soon. Here's something I found on Google that should give you a pretty good idea of what it was like. I'd always been told that rafting was something I needed to try, and the experience at Jinja definitely didn't disappoint. Just being out on the river was an experience in itself. The sky was a pure blue, and the horizon seemed to extend for miles. The banks of the river were lush, and there were families and children washing clothes and minding cattle along the way. Occasionally we had to paddle around fishermen who were at work in their dug-out canoes. Hitting the rapids was a huge rush. Our guide kept us from flipping, which was actually a bit disappointing, but we still charged hard at all four different class 5 rapids, some with Hemingway-esque names like The Cuban, The Bad Place, and my favorite, The Other Place. The sun was hot, and the paddling was hard work, but we were treated to lunch on a small island halfway through the day, and there was cold beer waiting for us at the end. I'm definitely hooked.

We finished the weekend with a day trip to Entebbe, the former capital of Uganda. Entebbe is located right next to Lake Victoria, and we chose to spend the whole afternoon at the botanical gardens there. We saw monkeys, enjoyed a lunch of fresh tilapia, did some people watching, and plenty of walking. It was the perfect way to end a rewarding trip.

After another 8 hour overnight bus ride, we were back in Kigali by mid-morning today.

I'll be sure to add an update when there are more rafting pictures and when I've had a chance to add photos that the girls took.