View the full set of Kinigi photos
They call Rwanda the land of a thousand hills. There is room in the country for precisely these thousand. It is all hill. Leaving Kigali you immediately climb into a landscape not dissimilar to the Great Dividing Range in Australia, even down to the masses of gum trees lining the road. In fact, the major difference in scenery are the people walking everywhere. No matter where you are in the country there are people walking along the road. There are nearly 11 million people crammed into a country less than a third the size of Tasmania.
Rwanda immediately felt more prosperous than West Africa. Whether this is from money pouring in from international donors, good planning or good luck is hard to tell, but it feels much more modern. For instance, in West Africa you are very unlikely to see a peleton of lyra-clad African cyclists training in the hills. That said, along the very same roads you will see people gathered with jerry cans filling up with water trickling down the side of the cliff face. Rwanda is a largely rural country and luckily has fertile land to plough but you don’t have to travel far off the well-built main roads to see small, poor villages and roads impassable without a 4WD. Push bikes are more common here, piled high with goods to transport or to act as cheap taxis.
When we arrived in Kinigi, the town used as a base for the gorilla treks, we went for a walk and immediately attracted a crowd of kids who decided to walk with us. One guy looked like Arnold from Different Strokes with a No. 1 haircut. His deep voice boomed out his small frame as he asked quite perceptive questions about our homeland. His English was great for his age. Rwanda has made English one of the official languages and there is a big push to learn it, illustrated by the eagerness of the kids to have a chat. The countryside we were walking through, along an excellent Chinese-built tarmac road, could have been in regional Victoria if not for the huge volcanic mountains on the horizon. Most of the land is devoted to farming. The fields even stretch to the top of the steep hills in a parody of the flat English countryside it most resembles. Lying on the grass in the sun with insects buzzing around you could mistake it for a warm English spring day.
Word must have leaked that there were English speakers wandering along the road because we were exuberantly greeted on the way back to the hotel by a young guy who claimed to be the best English speaker in the village. We got the same questions again: What is your name? Where are you going? Where are you from? Are you married? Do you have children? Talk soon drifted into how the kids needed an English dictionary to better perfect their speaking and could we spare any money for this. It wasn’t clear whether this was a scam or not but by the fifth time we were asked it seemed clear. Still, they were pleasant about it and asked interesting questions so it was hard to get annoyed about it. In the end it just got frustrating to not be able to go for a walk without attracting a crowd of people asking the same questions over and over again.
The hotel organised a group of dancers, drummers and singers, just local kids by the look of it but dressed in the traditional dance outfit, a flowing straw headdress that looks like a lions mane and bells jangling on their ankles. The dancers leapt around with abandon but one little kid kept doing a freaky laugh with eyes opened wide. They dragged me into a dance, which is an impressive achievement in itself, and seemed to genuinely enjoy what they were doing. Either that or they are very good actors.
I was hit with a slight fever after the gorilla trek so took it easy for a day while Sarah fetched food for me, bless her. Sarah managed to pack in a full day without me, going to see the golden monkeys in the morning and a pygmy village in the afternoon. The golden monkeys are not some kind of statue made from precious metal, they are a colourful breed of monkey who, judging by the footage, do very little other than sit in a bamboo grove and eat shoots. The leader is judged on weight and in this case is a fat bastard who proves that the tensile strength of bamboo is very high.
The pygmy village is inhabited by the minority Twa, although in Rwanda today people are very keen not to mention ethnic divisions and refer to themselves as Rwandan if asked with they are Hutu or Tutsi. Despite everyone being Rwandan the Twa, who make up about 1% of the population, get a rough deal. Their land was taken for the national park or large farms and they get paid a pittance to work on either of them. They live in dirt floor shacks and only recently got new corrugated iron roofs. In fact half the country seems to have a gleaming new roof twinkling in the sunshine. Whether this is to replace houses burned down during the genocide, I don’t know. The Twa are just thankful not to have to dodge leaks when it rains and say that rain on their new iron roof sounds like music.
View the full set of Kinigi photos
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