July 1 is Independence Day in Rwanda, and the 4th is Liberation Day, celebrating the end of the genocide. Laura and I made big plans to go to Nyungwe Forest, one of three Rwandan rainforests famous for its abundant wildlife, including some sixteen species of primates. In Kigali on Friday, the buses to the park were full, so instead we rode to Butare.
We visited the national museum, which, unlike most of the historical landmarks, had nothing to do with genocide or unity and reconciliation. It was a cheerful celebration of traditional Rwandan culture, chock-full of traditional weapons, instruments, natural garments, and weavings <3. My favorite part was a life-size thatch hut you could walk inside. It was maybe 12 feet wide and round, and the floor was strewn with woven mats. When we left, there were strange things afoot in town. People were thronged at a dirt track or soccer field; there was a big trailer set up as a stage from which someone was playing loud music. We wandered around a little, looking silly and lost, and getting asked for money a few times by children. It turned out there was a car race scheduled for the weekend. Weird.
We spent the night at a nice little motel set back from the main road, with rooms looking out on a central garden. I had the best shower I’ve yet experienced in Rwanda, with water that a) came from a showerhead above me and b) stayed hot. My fellow westerners, we take so much for granted at home. In the morning, we checked out the cathedral, which was built by the Belgians when Butare was selected as the capital. It was quite impressive in comparison with buildings nearby, with high arched ceilings and that traditional nave/apse design with the side chapels. We were there at just the right time of day to see the brick seem to glow red with the sunlight.
Then there was the bus ride to the forest. We ended up on a small one, crammed four across the seat for over an hour. Just before we drove into the forest, we picked up an extra passenger. For the next hour and a half, Laura was scrunched on the front four inches of seat, getting her shins burned by the metal in front of her, while I was wedged in the corner, propped up on one butt cheek. Luckily, the scenery was breathtaking. We had really gotten up into the mountains by that point, and as we rounded bends, you could see out across the forest. The roads were impossibly windy and full of potholes, but the trees were tall and beautiful, and the woods were so thick you couldn’t see into them from the road. Once a family of baboons crossed the road right in front of us.
Although the bus was destined for a town some ways past the forest, we figured out that it could drop us at our destination. After much conferring among the driver and the frontseat passengers (who were looking out for us), the bus pulled over. The sign said the place was the conservation society, but nothing about lodging. I should explain that tourism in Rwanda is really kind of a fledgling industry. We’d had a difficult time trying to figure out how to get to the park, where to buy passes for how much, where to stay, and how to reach the trailheads. At this point, we had been driving past pretty much nothing but forest for miles and miles. According to our Bradt guidebook, the options for lodging were three—one restrictively expensive and the other several miles behind us. We climbed out, taking it on faith that we were in the right spot and wouldn’t have to walk for hours to a place to stay!
Right away it felt like we were in a new country: Touristland. The place was built up, with lovely walkways and a hillside full of flowers and hummingbirds. There were all kinds of muzungus—British, German, French, American—and all of them had booked ahead (something which, as far as we could tell, is not very Rwandan, but then, this was Touristland.) So they were booked and we were out of luck—in the middle of nowhere. The man staffing the place, Oliver, was kind to us, and he quickly got on the phone to his boss to try to find us a room somewhere else. Before long we were marching down the hill to find this other place, and much to our surprise and delight, there was a little town where we could not only sleep in a bed, but also buy things like water and reasonably priced food for the hike.
We spent way too much on dinner at the main lodge that night, but really enjoyed the time talking with the muzungus. There was a Frenchman bicycling across Rwanda as well as a couple of students from India/Florida and South Africa who were studying international development for their master’s degrees in Scotland. Back at our hotel, which was really more of an annex to someone’s house, I chatted with a bunch of medical students doing a travel rotation in Rwanda from Belgium and the UK.
We got ourselves up to the lodge early to buy passes, settling for the waterfalls hike. From this side of the park, we had a choice between the waterfall and the primates tour. Of course we would have loved the primates hike, but it seemed that those passes had been sold out. Our guide introduced himself and his two assistants, both university students studying tourism. We were instructed to tuck our pants into our socks to avoid bites from the ubiquitous red ants. The tour began by cutting through the Gisakura tea plantation, which I hadn’t yet seen in Rwanda, although it is a primary export. The hills here were very steep, but the tea bushes, rolling on and on and on, had no trouble with that. Sometimes the path became so narrow that we were nearly swimming through tea bushes as high as my neck. The tea is picked by hand by local workers; they must be careful to avoid the brand new baby leaves but choose those leaves new enough to be light in color. After two years or so, the bushes must be cut down and cleared for new plants.
After maybe 30 minutes, we reached Nyungwe Forest. The landscape changed immediately from the tea plantation, probably because the tea was planted on what used to be forest. Inside the forest it was both dense and lush, and the trail was full of switchbacks. The plants were unfamiliar, but it felt to me not so very different from being on the Appalachian Trail. The guide pointed out 5-meter fern trees and several avocado-like fruits eaten by chimpanzees. The waterfall was beautiful—about two storeys high, but with an awful lot of force. As for the amazing diversity of wildlife, I think perhaps our group of twelve or so was too big and loud to see it. I saw only a couple of birds and a gigantic earthworm. When I asked who maintains the trail, I learned that the government pays local people to do it. It they don’t receive economic benefit from the park, they will not respect it, which leads to problems like poaching and deforestation. On the way out of the forest, back in the tea plantation, we did spot some monkeys swinging around in the trees at a distance. Take that, primate tour people!
When we returned to the lodge, it was only about noon. For our entrance fee, we could have taken an afternoon walk in another part of the park, but we did not have a way of getting there or getting back from there to someplace to sleep. We were lucky to be offered a ride to Butare with Verity, Lou, and Nick, a British family from our hike. They are just getting settled in Butare for a two-year stay as Nick will be teaching at a law institute there.
Late into the afternoon, we relaxed at the Motel du Mont Huye and finally decided to just have dinner there. This was our first really bad travel experience. When we paid 5,800FRw for our bill of 3,800FRw, we waited for 20 minutes, then asked for our change. The waitress patently refused, claiming we had given her 2,800FRw. It got messy, involving the other staff, who believed the waitress who had stolen from us. When one of them handed our waitress money out of her own pocket, Laura refused to take it and we went to bed upset. In the morning, the table on our patio had disappeared; we assumed we were being denied our complimentary breakfast and left.
It was July 4, Liberation Day, when Rwandans celebrate the end of the genocide and the coming of the Rwandan Patriotic Front government. We bought bus tickets, and as we sat down to eat, we watched a huge procession of schoolkids parade down the street past us, first one way, then the other, some of them carrying celebratory signs. We followed them to the field near our hotel that had begun playing music on huge speakers before we left. The whole town was arriving there, sitting under tents or standing on the grass, facing a drum line of young men and boys. We could only stay for a few minutes, so we felt very sheepish when a man herded us into some seats that looked like they should be reserved for local leaders.
We bused it back to Kigali uneventfully, where we did a couple of errands before returning to Nyamata…to take a nap.
No comments:
Post a Comment