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.