Un mille collines et un lac

Bukavu (DRC) --> Cyangugu / Kamembe --> Kibuye --> Gisenyi --> Kigali (with daytrip to Nyamata and Ntarama) --> Kabale (Uganda)

Just as I walked from Bukavu to the border post so I could and did walk from the border post to the nearby towns of Cyangugu and Kamembe. Again the scenery is worth writing about: trees and hills beside a brilliant blue lake prompt these reactions.

Kamembe, where I stayed, is again the sort of town which isn't worth writing about, so I won't. It had the essentials: cheap accommodation, internet cafes and pubs. I ended up spending a fair bit of time in the pub rehydrating as the temperatures were very hot during the day and even a short walk was tiring. I retraced my route back to close to the border to revisit and photograph the scenery which I had seen the previous day and also walked in other directions quickly finding farming land.

My plan was to head north along the edge of Lake Kivu stopping next at the town of Kibuye. I checked the bus times: tomorrow was Saturday although advice was variable; some people said yes, come tomorrow morning and others said there's no buses tomorrow at all. I went anyway and found that the naysayers were correct, there were no buses. The reason: the last Saturday is a community action day where people are expected to spend the morning doing community work (essentially cleaning the public roadway and land in front of their property, for example) before having a community meeting to raise any concerns / problems. Shops didn't open until late morning and buses did not run. Come back on Sunday morning I was told. Come at 0630 for the bus leaves at 0700.

The next day, sure enough, there's a bus. I order to avoid the rabble fighting their way onto the bus the driver kindly lets me in through his door so I get to choose my own seat. Easy peasy, I'm choosing the seat with the view west towards the lake and as much as I don't like to blow my own trumpet what a great decision it was. Great views and I avoided the squash for inevitably the bus was filled until no-one else could squash into the aisle.

The road between Cyangugu and Kibuye is very beautiful - well, not the road but the view from the road, but you knew that - passing a range of tea plantations, maize and other crops all spread out over some quite steep and abrupt rolling hillside.

The weather was fantastic too.

Kibuye is a small town, in fact it barely passes as a town although that's the beauty of it: the town is so insignificant that you can only concentrate on the views. And what views! Just as Bukavu could be a high profile tourist destination if it was not in a place called Congo, so Kibuye would be a massive tourist destination if people actually knew about it.

I found a place to stay, an imposing brick mansion perched on the top of a hill on a peninsula thrust into Lake Kivu. According to the guide book it's a cheap place to stay but the location and style of the place shouted out 'bring your cash'. The price? 2000 Fr ($3.50) for a dorm bed or 5000 Fr (c$9) for a private room. I went dorm. Food there was a little more expensive with the cheapest item on the menu, 'Plat vegetarian' costing the same as the dorm. I quickly found a local restaurant with local restaurant prices: a breakfast of spuds with diced offal in gravy for less than a dollar.

I passed the next few days walking around the roads around town and taking in the lake on a number of hotel balconies, beer in hand. It's a great place to be. Go there.

Continuing north I arrived at Gisenyi, a spit away from Goma on the other side of the border and also blessed with some low-key volcanic-rock streets. The town itself is standard fare and, to be honest once I arrived I realised that there would be nothing much to hold me back, except ...

... my friend and ex-colleague Peter had raised money through a UK charity for a nearby orphanage called Noel Orphange. Stop by, said Peter, have a look around. So I did. It was interesting and moving. There are c580 orphans there and c70 carers including volunteers. The numbers include abandoned children and some handicapped adolsecents in care which the government had asked to orphanage to look after. The youngest children were 1-2 weeks old. I was shown a range of facilities and childrens areas - including a pigsty and a cow shed (these are facilities, not children's areas). Yep, the kiddies get fresh bacon from time to time. Quite by coincidence I met a Belgian lady who's doing a university course on international development and spending her time at the orphanage as part of her course. 'Come and have lunch with us,' which turned out to be a fine meal of veges and rice with some chilled beer thrown in. The orphanage seems to be doing well.

And so to Kigali. The journey was again through hills, farmland and tea plantations: it just lacked a lake. I found the EER guesthouse to stay at - yes, that's Eglise Episcopal au Rwanda - and their guesthouse compound comes with a big church, not that I was keen to visit after my last experience.

And Kigali, what's it like? Relatively small, especially the town centre. There's about two high rise buildings in the entire city (ergo, in all of Rwanda) and there's a definite laid back, relaxed air to the place; no traffic jams because it's hard to get the traffic together. All of which means that one of the unfortunate tourist highlights of a visit to Kigali to going to see the Kigali Memorial Centre.

Opened in 2004, on the tenth anniverary of the Rwandan genocide, the Kigali Memorial Centre doesn't pull it's punches. It's divided into three sections: before the genocide, the genocide, and then general information / education about other genocides (the Holocaust, the Armenian genocide and the genocide by German settlers in Namibia amongst others). Some interesting information about the Rwandan genocide emerged: apparently Tutsi, Hutu and a third tribe, Twa, did not exist pre-colonisation. Rwanda was divided into divided into different clans which shared the same history, legends, culture and so on. The designation of Tutsi and Hutu was socio-economic and fluid: i.e. if you were rich, you were Tutsi, if you then lost your cows you became Hutu. When the Belgians put the bash on the Germans (who first colonised Rwanda) after WWI they screwed up the system: if you have 10 or more cows you are Tutsi, you stay Tutsi and all your family who follows thereafter are Tutsi. Hutus had less than 10 cows and consequently accounted for the vast majority of Rwandans. Then they handed out ID cards that recorded this. Is that all? Ohh no. European anthropologists and explorers decided to measure people, and in a manner not dissimilar to Nazis concluding that people with blond hair and blue eyes were decidedly Ayrian and better, Tutsis were said to be sharper than Hutus. Church preaching reinforced this.

Then we get to the bit that I didn't fully understand: after independence in the 1960s, the Memorial Centre simply notes that the first, Hutu dominated governement was 'fascist'. Hutu youth groups were formed and, yes, they had machetes. After the military coup a new dictator, another Hutu and more of the same. Still, there's no clear information about why the idea of a
Tutsi genocide was formulated and came to fruition, aside from the reference to 'fascist' government and therefore the presumption that the Hutus were bitter and resentful.

Then the sting: the genocide was well planned, as genocides tend to be. There were about seven to eight massacres of Tutsi villages in the four years leading up to the genocide, hit lists of Tutsis were generated, arms were bought and stockpiled - thanks largely to the French government under Mitterand, who handed Rwanda a $10 million arms loan, and Le Credit Lyonnais who chucked in another couple of million in a private loan. A Rwandan journalist predicted, months in advance, the death of the Rwandan military leader whose plane was later shot down. This was the event that prompted the genocide.

The UN, despite plenty of warning weren't prepared. The head of the UN mission there, Romeo Dallaire (see his book: Shake Hands With The Devil) told UN command that he could stop the violence with 5000 soldiers. The UN, notes the Memorial, recorded its unhappiness / digust / disappointment etc with the events there before, in the same session, voting to reduce the UN force there to 270 Ghanian soldiers. Well done the UN. There then follows a quote from Kofi Annan and the Belgian PM both saying, yes, whoops, silly us, we were complete muppets and we're sorry.

As many people sheltered in churches during the genocide there were consequently many massacres in churches - some with the connivance of the local priests who either collaborated with the Hutu 'genocidaires', or in one case gave the order to bulldoze his own church and the flock gathered within. Today there are genocide memorial churches dotted across Rwanda and I
visited two of them in the towns of Nyamata and Ntarama.

Nyamata's church was the biggest of the two and, as appears to be the standard, the church is filled with the belongings - cloths essentially - of the murdered. Piles and piles of clothes dumped onto pews. The smell was a little pungent and stale.

The man at the Nyamata church gave a short description and answered questions: 'no', he told me, 'the holes in the roof are not bullet holes, they're holes from grenade shrapnel. The dark marks there are blood,' before noting that 'grenades can be quite powerful.'

It's a bugger to finish a blog in this fashion however, for Rwanda, there's no way to escape seeing the remains of the genocide. It's unavoidable and highly visible and, I think, intentionally meant to be this way.