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