Rwanda

Through Kamuganguzi border crossing – all very officious and efficient and a straight 45 USD – then back westwards thru Ruhengeri to Gisenyi and a night at Paradis Malahide on the shores of Lake Kivu. Gisenyi faces Goma in the DRC, the “Dante’esque Hell” of a refugee camp as one observer described it during the crisis of 1994; at one point I think I’ve actually gone and inadvertently crossed the border when I am unexpectedly confronted by a manned pole-across-the-road barrier festooned with lights and overseen by a tall watch tower and, all around, I notice the ground has been cleared and levelled flat for the size of several football pitches ... Clear fields of fire at what has been a hostile crossing for many years ...? Coming then to an abrupt and somewhat baffled halt – which is greeted by perplexed looks by the locals sitting around it, as it is up (though clearly ready to be operational) - then proceeding slowly, waiting to be yelled at to halt, I soon realize I am not at the border but instead crossing a huge airstrip that bisects both the road and a huge expanse of UN refugee camp (man that must have been some landing to execute ...), still well-tended and looking for all intents and purposes ready for another million to arrive at any day ...

(Note also that fuel is very few and far between on this route – if it was available at all - and Gisenyi offers the first (operational station) I’ve seen since the border).

So then down to the shores of Lake Kivu, a front row seat across to the DRC and a night at Paradis Malahide ... Odd place: apparently once graced by Brad & Angelina and recommended by all I find the European owner, Odette, away and – while a lovely setting – it is as no other is for being run by the most junior of local staff. Camping seems to confound them as an option; and, once multiple calls are made to the (absent) manager a price of 25 USD is demanded for the parking lot (behind the resto and so, for that, blocked entirely from any view). Negotiations and repeat calls commence and, finally, 19 USD is left on the table as the ‘take-it-or-leave-it’ best offer. I take it, begrudgingly, especially given it is cold showers only (a bucket of hot can apparently be arranged, but is not pursued by either side) ...

The next morning I feel I am in the midst of an odd crossed-parallels experience when the (now evident) manager asks the couple next to me at breakfast – at our lovely lakeshore table – how their night was and he replies positively, citing the “total silence and peacefulness” ... And I, confused, hold my tongue about the nearby bar that blasted dance tunes til gone 0400, the locals who passed by, chatting loudly, on the road behind from 0500 forward and, not least, the guards on site who kept up a non-stop (and often apparently hilarious) running call-and-reply throughout the night. Maybe it was just me being all a bit delicate, but ...

But wait: I get far more delicate with my next night ...

From Lake Kivu I head for Kigali, crawling up through crazy switchback climbs with expanses of lush green all around, and up to barely controlled road-works (flag operators running out of the surrounding bush waving red as I pass by, causing great brake stands – well, brake stands from 2^nd gear - while they sort themselves out, make a few calls and finally change to a sheepish, or sometimes surly at being disturbed, green-for-go ... Rwanda is incredibly lush, and apparently unparalleled on the continent for agricultural potential with its volcanic soil and, with its elevations, huge annual rainfalls. T4A, however, is baffled by the twists and turns of the route and for every 30 minutes I cover adds another 30 minutes to the clock – I feel I’m driving backwards ... On arriving in Kigali – well, at least I know I’m in Kigali – T4A is still, forcefully, insisting that I have a further 4.5 hours to go (of a total trip calculated at start as being 4 hours in total) and is adamantly “recalculating” ...

I override technology with common sense, map, compass and road signs and arrive within minutes at One Love Club, the recommended campsite - and only one located in central Kigali (the rest are in the surrounding suburbs and good for airport access, etc, but not for easy central access). So ... the Staff Pick in the East Africa Lonely Planet guidebook, and supporting a worthwhile charity providing artificial limbs to amputees and disabled children from both the campsite proceeds (and rooms and resto) and a crafts shop – not least the only game in town for a reasonably-priced room (Rwanda’s economy being NGO’d all out of reality ...) – I arrive to find a desolate place with only a single person to be found on the extensive grounds. Now, I have stayed in some pretty awful places in the past year, but this has got to be the most miserable place yet and I am up and out before dawn’s fully broken the next morning.

Here is its reality outside of the LP guidebook (who are these LP staffers and why do they get their reco’s so wrong so often ...?): the ablution block is at the rear of a meagre piece of grass grandly entitled the Campground (these must be the “lush gardens”), where I find about 12 local staff asleep all over the floors, including across the doors of the toilets and showers, lying there like those windbreaks shaped like wiener dogs old folk place at the front door to prevent drafts getting in ... The stalls are filthy, filthy, littered with wads of toilet paper, clumps of hair, soap and shampoo wrappers and all manner of other detritus that show they haven’t been cleaned in weeks. The shower itself is broken, but there is a short hose to shoot cold water at me. And the block is being used to house turkeys - seriously - with a large male aggressively defending his turf (and ladies) with repeated charges at me as I am being shown around. There will be no midnight toilet breaks that night ...

After returning to the grounds after visiting the Genocide Memorial (see below) I head to the (again reco’d) resto to find not a single light on save for a single bulb lamp at the bar, one surly waitress and not a single other patron. There is a South African agricultural programme on at full volume on the tv mounted above the bar, which is competing with a truly tragic playlist of awful 70’s ballads on the sound system (the theme to Born Free is one ... “Borrrrn freeeeeeeeee, as free as the ...” – god help me - and I recognize John Denver mooning about in there as well). I have a beer for dinner, no menu is offered, nor mention of food made. Back at my truck, almost hidden in the unlit gloom of the parking lot, I find there are now at least a dozen security guards on duty for the night, all clustered about a radio in front of the hasn’t-been-open-all-day reco’d crafts shop, and seated facing me. Now ... I don’t want to be too melodramatic about it (... but ...), given the country’s history and events not 17 years back, a dozen Rwandan men grouped together, each with a club, staring at me, silently, as I climb up into my tent in a desolate parking lot and the only person in the place but for them is something I admit to having found fairly unsettling ... I sleep lightly and pack quickly the next morning ...

Toeing the fine line between interest, acknowledgement and education and Tragedy Tourism I visited three sites connected to the Genocide of 1994 (I’ll leave the details to Wiki): the Genocide Memorial in central Kigali, the Hotel des Mille Collines of ‘Hotel Rwanda’ fame - located right behind the new 24 hour Nakumatt and mall with coffee shop and internet cafe that forms the bullseye for central Kigali – and, 30 km’s south, the church at Nyatama.

It is impossible to be unaffected in doing so, from the events alone, but as well I found these exacerbated by the common statement of survivors, made as fact, not opinion, in the interviews played at the Memorial, that they believe there were but “5% innocent; 95% were involved, or did nothing to help.” And that every time now when one of these survivors goes into a shop, or bank, or passes a neighbour is made to wonder, daily, “did you kill my family?” It’s all “Never Again” and ‘we’re-all-Rwandans-united-together’ now, but, at only 17 years ago, no pr campaign can erase the reality I find colours everything: that any Hutu aged ... what, 34 and above, maybe even less so ... was likely either complicit or an active participant in those horrific events. Even as a tourist I find that fact very unsettling and a disturbing filter on everything I take in throughout the country ... God knows how the survivors bear it.

The Genocide Memorial is an exceptionally well-laid out and operated museum, while also serving as the mass burial site for over 275,000 victims – most unidentified (the Memorial Wall is starkly brief, with maybe a few hundred names in total engraved on it ...). Admission is free, but there is a 15 USD charge for a head-set as tour guide which I went with but found not very necessary given how informative the displays were. I was the only non-African there at the time, with one large group visiting to lay a wreath on one of the tombs, so it was difficult to not feel ... intrusive ... The most moving, and staggering, information provided was via the interviews played on video at a number of the displays; survivors relating how within hours of the radio announcements to “rise up and kill the cockroaches” childhood playmates came over to the house and, laughing, killed the parents and left the boy – aged maybe 12 at the time of the interview – with a panga (machete) cleaved into his skull; the Hutu shopkeeper from the corner, who had always given sweets to the kids and assisted this Tutsi family with school fees when they couldn’t make ends meet, storming into the house when told there was a Hutu woman in it caring for the mother, who had been badly injured at a road block – and on telling her to leave the woman alone and being refused “chopped her to pieces where she stood in the living room” then simply turned and walked back out down to his shop; or children – all the siblings of one survivor, who managed to hide in safety – thrown down a well and the Interahamwe (local Hutu militia) placing lively bets on whose rock thrown down onto them would stop the screaming ... Such as this went on and on – and these being tame in comparison to many ... For every 7 Tutsi there at the time only 1 survived the 100 days of massacre, with an estimated 800,000 victims in total ...

Located in a lovely, peaceful and quite rural area 30 km’s south of Kigali the church at Nyatama serves not only as a Memorial to the massacre there and resulting mass burial plot, but also as a stark reminder of what happened (both there and across the country) – it is the only site where the bones of the victims are prominently on display “to ensure nobody ever denies these events happened” according to my guide, as he took me down into the crypts, and the church itself is filled with their clothing. Over 4500 sought refuge in the church, as they had successfully done a few years prior when anti-Tutsi violence flared, and a further 10,000 on the grounds around it. French troops forcibly evacuated the two priests – a Spaniard and a Belgian – when it was announced there was to be a massacre at the site (but did nothing for the refugees themselves). Radio broadcasts announced the planned event like it was a rural Carnival – “Come on out to Nyatama, beer tent, music and a massacre this weekend!” – and the army, from the local base, cordoned off the area awaiting the Interahamwe’s arrival. Once ready they started in with automatic weapons to ensure there was no resistance to be made, clearing a path to let loose the Interahamwe like a pack of wild dogs, with their ‘traditional weapons’ of pangas, clubs and stones specifically designed to give a ‘grassroots’ identity to the participants (showing ‘popular support’ for the policy) ... There were no survivors; the site holds the 14,500 from the immediate grounds, and over time since then has added on a further 30,000 victims from the surrounding area.

Hotel Mille Collines offered a positive reprieve. The hotel – though not the one physically featured in the movie – offered sanctuary to thousands of Tutsi refugees during the days of madness, the Manager buying their lives with money and free hospitality to the powers behind the extermination policy – and those charged with carrying it out. I had a beer at the pool, and tried to get my head around thousands camped out on the grounds – and it’s not a large place – while inside politicians and soldiers who with a word would have had them all, happily, wiped out dined and drank looking down upon them ... Surreal.

Took a local hotel – after a heck of a lot of looking as everything booked solid in town – to avoid a return to One Badness; finally coming to the Impala, just down the street and a huge step up from the Okapi, which was of course nothing close to as described in the LP. Not cheap at 45 USD – though darn cheap by Kigali standards - but friendly staff, wireless in the room, decent shower and bed, balcony for post-dinner g&t and view of the passing parade, free breakfast and alert watchmen (I watching them, watching me, watching them – and my vehicle ...) – and all one block off the central 24 hour mall for resupply the next day (and banking, for it’d be no-ATM but cash-only travels for at least the two weeks and 2.5 countries ...).

Despite the road works, grinding climbs and switchbacks and startling number of further mass-burial sites along the route to Burundi – many in places of beautiful, seemingly peaceful ruralness that always triggered in me a baffled “here too??” as I passed – Rwanda is a stunning country to travel through and I thoroughly enjoyed covering it. Very hard to get over – or stop yourself from inventing – a pervading sense of disquiet and skin-prickling unease given the primal savagery the people passing by only so shortly ago embraced with such horrific enthusiasm, but a stunningly scenic country nonetheless ...