Africa: Was it all just a dream?

I am back in Canada now, looking out the window at all the snow and wondering if biking in Africa was all just a dream. Well, if it was, here is what else happened before I woke up…

We realized that there was no way we had time to bike from Rwanda to the Tanzanian coast and visit Zanzibar in the time we had left, plus there was the small matter of needing to get through the Serengeti (which we weren’t allowed to do on bicycles). Fortunately, the folks I had just been gorilla tracking with had the solution – join them on their overland truck tour that was going exactly where we wanted to go. So we did, and discovered another way to travel in Africa.

We tied our bikes on the front of the truck, thinking that we would probably take them off every evening and go for a ride. Little did we know that we wouldn’t touch them again for over a week (except when Nelson pretended to ride my bike while strapped onto the truck). Traveling with the overland truck was extremely easy, being driven everywhere we needed to go with a guide organizing everything for the group, so suddenly we didn’t have to think about any of the logistics of our travel. It was a bit strange being part of a group of 20 other travelers (mostly from Australia and the UK) but it was also really fun. We listened to a lot of music, including the group’s theme song:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCca5mPMp9A

We crossed into Tanzania (pronounced Tan-zany-ya by many Africans we met), and took a little ferry across a small finger of Lake Victoria, which we almost missed because we were waiting for our goat meat to be grilled. We spent one night camped on the lake shore, looking across at a jumble of houses on a small peninsula, then spent two days driving through the Serengeti, camping one night in the park. We could hear lions and hyenas from our tents at night, and saw both of those animals the next day from the truck. We also saw thousands and thousands of zebras and wildebeest migrating, which was pretty spectacular, and hippos, buffalo, a leopard, and lots of giraffes (still my favourite).















We visited a Maasai village just outside the gates of the park. It was a slightly weird experience, with a truckload of us descending on it all at the same time, and it was definitely pretty scripted and choreographed but very interesting all the same. The Maasai have lost a lot of their traditional lands and way of life with most of the area around their villages being designated parks and world heritage sites, so they are working to both make a living and maintain their culture by offering tours of their villages, including a traditional dance which involves them jumping really high. They have sandals made out of old car tires that I’d like to try to make. Their bead jewelry was very intricate and beautiful and the holes in their ears from heavy earrings were so large that many of them had the bottom of their ears flipped up over the top of their ears. We were taken inside one of their mud houses, after Nelson chatted about its architecture and construction with the owner. We also got to visit the children’s schoolhouse.

The following day we drove down into the Ngorongoro crater, which was a bit of a dream world. It’s the largest intact caldera in the world, a volcano that collapsed into itself 2 to 3 million years ago, and fossils show that human-like creatures have been there for pretty much that same length of time. We saw flamingos, male lions for the first time, as well as our first black rhino (sadly all too far away to take decent photos). Seeing a rhino meant that we had now seen all of the “big five”. I hadn’t heard this term before arriving in Africa, but it’s the animals that are most difficult and dangerous to hunt apparently – lion, leopard, elephant, Cape buffalo, and black rhino.

Unfortunately, Nelson didn’t entirely appreciate this as he was quite sick and spent the day alternating between shivering and being boiling hot and extremely exhausted. Fortunately, we were with the overland truck and they organized for him to get to a clinic. I was really grateful that I was able to just take care of Nelson without also having to organize everything else. While we were at the clinic, the guide set up a tent for us, and the group made us dinner, which was really nice. The doctor concluded that Nelson had the flu and a kidney infection and gave him antibiotics but when Nelson wasn’t feeling better a few days later, he started taking malaria medication as well, just in case. We heard from several people who’d had cerebral malaria and almost died from it that the symptoms were fever, chills, and extreme exhaustion and that it doesn’t always show up in tests, so we weren’t taking any chances. We rarely take prescription or even over-the-counter medication at home, so it was interesting to us to see how quick we were to take drugs that we might not even need. Anyhow, back to the trip…

We left the overland truck in Dar Es Salaam and headed over to Zanzibar on a ferry. Known as the Spice Island because of all the spices grown there, it was a really interesting and beautiful place to end our journey. We stayed a night in Stone Town, then biked to the north end of the island where we spent a few days relaxing and playing in the Indian Ocean and Nelson went swimming with turtles.

I’ve included a map of our actual journey, which is pretty similar to our proposed one, with the parts we biked, took busses or trucks, or boated marked in different colours. We ended up biking just over 3000km.

As we talk to people about our trip, and answer questions like “What was your favourite country?”, or “What did you learn?”, or “What were your top three moments?”, we are slowly starting to make sense of our whole journey and what it means to us, so please do keep asking us those questions and others!

Gorilla video

People have asked me, since the previous blog posting, if I was ever afraid being so close to the gorillas. I'm including here a video of the one time that my heart was racing a little bit. One of the adult female gorillas pounded on her chest, and ran in our direction, circling across in front of us. One of the other travelers I was there with asked "Was she trying to scare us?" and I said "I'm scared. That worked", but our guide reassured us that she was just excited to see us. Apparently, if the silverback does that, though, he IS trying to intimidate you.

Gorillas in the Mist

Okay, it was actually gorillas in the rain and hail, but it was gorillas nevertheless. After a three-hour hike through a bamboo forest and up into the jungle of Mt. Kirisimbi, the highest volcano in the Virunga range on the Rwanda/Uganda border, we encountered the Susa group. The largest of the 18 groups of mountain gorillas in the park, there are more than 30 gorillas in the group, including three silverbacks (only the dominant one gets to get sexy with the ladies, though) and the only twins to have both lived past age five (they are seven years old now). My photos don’t do the experience justice, but here they are…

Interestingly, I learned this morning that the Project Rwanda headquarters we are staying at used to be the offices of the Dian Fossey gorilla research centre, and they used to dissect gorillas (that had died naturally) in what is now the bike shop. Apparently during the war there used to also be gorillas living here in the compound for their protection.

I wonder if they ever told that joke: “Where does a 500lb. gorilla sleep?”

(Answer: “Wherever it bloody well wants”)

Rwanda: Land of a Thousand Hills

We crossed the border into Rwanda about a week ago, and immediately noticed the difference. It was suddenly so much more quiet, clean and organized. Then, suddenly, a group of kids caught sight of us and started running alongside and behind us, laughing and yelling and practicing their english, and we realized that political boundaries aren’t necessarily cultural ones.

As the name promised, Rwanda is VERY hilly, but absolutely worth it as it so gorgeous. It has the highest population density in continental sub-Saharan Africa and 84% of the population lives in rural areas which means that, as we are getting very used to, we are never alone. It also means that pretty much every available inch of land is cultivated regardless of how steep the slope is - mostly for subsistent agriculture – resulting in some pretty impressive terracing. Rwanda also grows tea and coffee for export and the tea plantations are vibrantly green. We passed through one just before entering one of Rwanda’s national parks. Called Nyungwe, it is virgin equatorial rainforest that survived the last ice age, so it is really old! It is also the source of the Nile that Livingstone died trying to find, and includes the Congo/Nile divide. We hung out with a troop of baboons that passed through where we stayed. We also saw a number of Angolan colobus monkeys in the park, but they were too quick for our camera.

We rode east to Lake Kivu, where we hoped to catch some kind of boat up the lake. This one was a bit trickier to organize as we not only don’t speak the local language (Kinyurwanda), but we don’t really speak the official language (French) either. We went down to the port and were told unequivocally by everyone we asked that there was no passenger boat up the lake and absolutely no way to get up the lake without hiring a “special” boat that would cost close to $500. We even met some folks who spoke English (and French and Kinyurwanda) who asked again for us and got confirmation that we were understanding correctly. We had ridden three days on a windy road over hundreds of hills and thousands of pot holes, and I didn’t really want to backtrack – I also knew that if we had to take a bus back over that road that I would probably puke. For a few hours I felt completely defeated, and even lost a little faith in possibilism.

But I obviously still had some hope because at the guest lodge that we checked into, I asked if they knew of a boat up the lake. It took a day and a half, but they found us a cargo boat that was headed exactly where we wanted. We were told that it might leave that evening or the next morning, and that we should be ready to leave at a moment’s notice. At sunset, the captain called the lodge to say that the boat wasn’t going until the morning, so we relaxed and ordered dinner. We had finished eating and were enjoying a game of cards, when another call came – the boat was leaving in 15 minutes and we had better hurry because they were waiting for us! Yikes. So we threw everything together and starting riding down to the port as fast as we could, given that it was pitch black, there were no streetlights, and more pot holes than road – luckily we had ridden the road a few times and had it memorized. It is a little strange to arrive at a small African port in the dark, where it seems a little deserted and you can’t really communicate with anyone, and for a few seconds we wondered what we were getting ourselves into. However, the guest house we were staying at was run by a church and we didn’t think they would send us into our undoing. After a bit, we found the captain, learned that they still had to load two big trucks full of cement onto the boat, and that nobody could really say when the boat would leave but that it wouldn’t be anytime soon. We instantly felt like we were back in a land that we could understand – that of “hurry up and wait” – so we just relaxed until the boat left at midnight. After spending the night on the “Francine” we arrived at Gisenyi, at the north end of the lake, around noon and disembarked near the national brewery and where lots of fisherman had their wooden boats moored – they take these boats out in groups of three boats lashed together like a trimaran.

Interestingly, the boilers in the brewery are powered by methane gas that is extracted from Lake Kivu. It’s a pilot project to see if they could power the country and several neighbouring countries by the gases trapped in the lake. Lake Kivu is one of three “exploding” lakes (the other two are in Cameroon) that also has a lot of carbon dioxide trapped in it, that sometimes escapes and asphyxiates every living thing on or near it. Maybe that’s why there are no passenger ferries!

Lake Kivu is one of the African Great Lakes (that also includes Lake Tanganyika and Lake Malawi) that are part of the Great Rift Valley that formed when two continental plates collided, created volcanoes and mountains (like Mt. Kilimanjaro) then started moving apart to create a huge valley and big lakes between them. The lakes are some of the oldest and deepest in the world.

We rode from Gisenyi east to a town called Musanze, where we are staying at the headquarters of both Project Rwanda (www.projectrwanda.org), which does all sorts of amazing things to support economic development with bicycles, and also Team Rwanda, the country’s national cycling team. A film has recently been made about the team, called Rising From Ashes, that is going to be screened around North America this year. See the trailer here: risingfromashesthemovie.com