Rwanda

Since I last wrote, we've been in Rwanda for about a week. We crossed Lake Victoria on an overnight ferry, which was kind of like the Titanic, except it didn't sink. We got to the Rwandan border using a series of long, confusing and bumpy taxi and daladala rides with several stops at deserted Tanzanian villages along the way.

We crossed the Tanzanian-Rwandan border by foot, (of course). Some random guy in a hut checked our luggage for plastic bags. They outlawed plastic bags in Rwanda in 2005 because apparently they found over 1 million on the streets of Kigali and somebody got mad about it. We could have been carrying AK-47s and a kilo of cocaine but the Rwandan authorities would have just asked us to put the coke in a more environmentally friendly receptical.

We noticed an immediate change when we got on a bus to Kigali. The roads were paved, the person to seat ratio was 1:1 as opposed to 45:1 and there was no livestock on the bus. Rwanda seems much less chaotic than Tanzania. People don't scream "Mzungu" and try to touch you all the time, and nobody is running around clutching a chicken -but they stare. Jo, Ali and I will be sitting at a bus stop and within five minutes a crowd of 15 people will have gathered in front of us, just staring stupidly.

Rwanda is also incredibly beautiful. It is called "the land of 1,000 hills" which is an underestimation. There is almost no flat land. All the bus routes are curvy and barf-inducing. It's a little ironic that the country with probably the highest rate of car sickness is also the only one that has outlawed plastic bags. We are currently in a town called Kibuye, which is on the coast of Lake Kivu. It is one of the most beautiful places I've ever seen, but getting here was a nightmare. We went on a very un-Rwandan bus with metal seats and horrendous overcrowding. I sat in-between Jo and a woman who started puking almost immediately after she got on the bus. Besides being insanely curvy, the ride was so bumpy that you needed a sports bra. The sick woman puked for the entire 5 hour ride and kept passing out on me, even though I would push her off every 5 minutes.

They speak Kinyarwanda, French and Swahili here, so we are usually able to get by on our swahili. Apparently my brain only has room for 1.5 languages, so I've forgotten all 12 years of school and college french and have been unable to use it.

We were surpised to find that Kigali is completely modern. In fact, it looks a little bit like New Jersey! It's hard to believe that 15 years ago the streets were littered with body parts. We've been pretty hesistant to ask a lot of people about the genocide, but most of those we have asked were out of the country as refugees. Our tour guide for Nyungwe National Park, (in SE Rwanda - full of monkeys and chimps!) was in the country for the genocide but all he would say is that it was "horrible, just horrible."

That's it for now.

We will be in Rwanda for the next few days and are planning to head to Uganda. Til then!