Wandering Footsteps: Wandering the World One Step at a Time » East Africa

The Road to Moyale

Brittany — Tue, 11 Nov 2014 09:38:14 +0000

The Marsabit-Moyale road that cuts through the arid plains of Northern Kenya is legendary among overlanders. It’s a long, car-busting road through ethereal faraway lands claimed – and fought over somewhat violently – by gun-wielding tribal warriors.

It’s also the only way to reach Ethiopia – some 800km away – overland from Kenya.

Actually, I better clarify that last statement. Moyale isn’t the only way to drive into Ethiopia. It’s just the only official way. Bruno and I contemplated leaving Kenya via Lake Turkana, further west. This is a viable option when entering Kenya from Ethiopia. But traveling the other way involves going to immigration and customs in Nairobi, explaining our plans, and begging for the required exit stamps. There is no official border at the north of Lake Turkana, and the Ethiopians in the nearest village beyond are very severe with those that leave Kenya without the required ink. Since we’d already been through some hassle with bureaucracy (Ethiopian and Sudanese visas) and are likely to have further hassle shortly (Saudi Arabian visas), we opted to simplify our lives and go the official route to Ethiopia.

Leaving Nairobi, heading to Moyale, 788km north.

The Road from Nairobi to Archer’s Post (almost 300km)

The drive is easy, as the road is smooth tar the entire way. Though we opt to break up the journey to Archer’s Post into two days, it’s certainly doable in a day’s drive. It’s a scenic road, passing through hilly equatorial foliage and past the 5200m peak of Mount Kenya.

As we leave Kenya’s largest mountain behind and descend into the plains, it’s as though we enter a new country. Isiolo is teeming with women draped head-to-toe in wispy black fabric , all but the eyes covered; men with kofia hats and brown skin, looking more like Somalis than Kenyans; and camels being trotted along the road instead of cows and goats.

Mere kilometers later, the scene changes again. Now are women draped in bright fabrics with rings of multi-colored beads perched around their necks and over their shoulders, thick beaded headbands dangling mirror-like beads over their foreheads. The men crisscross rope around their chests and jaws, sport button earrings in the large ear-holes and longer beaded earrings from the tops of their ears. Manyattas, huts shaped like well-raised bread and covered in plastic bags, dot the otherwise flat, acacia-filled landscape.

We’ve reached the heart of Samburu-land.

A Samburu woman and her beaded neckware.

These camels and young camel-herders waltz past our vehicle, parked in the bush near Archer’s Post, as we hide from the afternoon heat.

Samburu huts, or manyattas.

A [somewhat blurry] Samburu man.

The Road from Archer’s Post to Marsabit (about 250km)

This is the most difficult day’s drive, but also the most rewarding. Animals throw themselves across the road as though we are in a national park. We see duikers, oryx, giraffes, ostrich, warthogs, and generuk without even trying. Colorful samburu people explode like paint from the dull-colored landscape, hills like wizard hats pop up from the flat plains, and caravans of camels journey along the road in search of precious water.

It is indeed dry, and it is hot. As the road draws north, the thermometer rises and the wind blows hot. And, worst of all, 120km past Archer’s Post, the tar road ends.

Those next 40km have me wondering if it is worth driving to Ethiopia. Maybe it’s not too late to turn around. The undulating waves on the road are the worst I’ve ever seen, and too far apart to be able to drive quickly upon. I try to say something to Bruno, but can’t get the words out, such are the vibrations.

Marsabit is only a day’s drive away.

A duiker. Plentiful in this region.

Goodbye tar road… (for now).

Another Samburu woman.

We jingle and jangle along until, up ahead, we spot the heavy equipment tell-tale signs of construction. There is no tar (yet), but the road has been mercifully smoothed of its waves. For the next 40km we ride quickly and comfortably, and only have to deal with bumpy rocky up-hill road for the final 40km of the day.

It takes less than six hours to reach Marsabit. Not too bad, but we are thankful to spend a few days recuperating and resting in cool and windy Marsabit. Henry’s Camp is an affordable and comfortable haven, and I stock up on the hot showers, electricity, and fresh produce from the local market that will be hard to find in Ethiopia.

We are now ready to hit the road again for the final stretch of this legendary road.

At the Marsabit market.

I’m not the only one doing my produce shopping!

The Road from Marsabit to Moyale (250km)

The night before we leave, it rains. That’s no good. The road leaving Marsabit isn’t tarred and several trucks are already stuck on the clay-like mud of the main road.

We are happy when the tar comes again a few kilometers out of town. And we are surprised when it lasts over 150km. Sure, there are several diversions due to construction – and sure, some of them last 15 or 20km – but each kilometer of tarred road is like a gift from the road-constructions Gods.

The road here passes through the Dida Galgalla Desert. The earth is baked crispy, red with black charcoal rocks. Almost nothing grows here. Hints of Saharan sand dunes sometimes poke out from under the earth. Sand tornadoes whip across the roads. Villages are scarce, people scarcer. Only camels seem to survive here, which explains why we no longer see the cow-loving Samburu, but instead the camel-herding Borana people. Ethnic Ethiopians, this group is fiercely involved in the inter-tribal conflicts in the region. The conflicts are over water sources for the herds. Driving through here, I understand why.

Nothingness.

Caravans of camels in search of water.

And then, green starts to mix with the brown and red of the landscape. More and then more green. And then, surprise of all surprises, rain. In the desert, at the beginning of the dry season, we drive through rain.

We reach our destination victorious and problem-free. As If to celebrate, dry, dusty Moyale town is surrounded by bushes of thick green. It is time to say goodbye to Kenya and cross into my 35^th country – Ethiopia.

Green.

Even greener.

Conclusions on our Marsabit-Moyale Road Trip

The Marsabit-Moyale road didn’t live up to its name. I expected little tar, gut-wrenching bumps, and at least one flat tire. I expected to feel as though I’d reached the end of the earth, to feel as though if I made a wrong turn, bandits or thirst would get me.

Instead, the 600 periodic kilometers of tar made the drive easy, even mundane.

Ok, let me rephrase that. The drive wasn’t mundane. The views – of the Samburu people, the manyattas, the camels, and the stark landscape – were phenomenal. It was a Kenya like I’d never seen before, and I’m happy I did. I just mean the road – the off-road adventure I was expecting – was rather, well, ordinary.

View from the road.

View from the road

I’m sure the road was once as legendary as I’d been told. As the only unavoidable stretch of dirt road between Cairo and Cape Town, it was undoubtedly a bit of an adventure for those overlanders who otherwise rarely veered off the main track on their trips through Africa.

But I’d seen much worse. Take the Dodoma road through central Tanzania, for instance. Or the road around Mt. Elgon between Uganda and Kenya. Or, most grueling of all, the 900km detour through no-man’s land Luangwa, Zambia.

No, the Marsabit-Moyale road wasn’t bad at all. It’s well on its way to being fully tarred, which means that in a year or two, the legend surrounding the infamous Marsabit-Moyale road will fade away into ancient overlander folklore, just another stretch of asphalt connecting the two tips of Africa.

Tired Bruno, in transit on the Marsabit-Moyale road.

An Overland Roadie Reunion in Nairobi

Brittany — Wed, 05 Nov 2014 13:57:15 +0000

We’re not the only ones living this way.

This is a sentence I hear myself say more than I ever imagined I would. I say it to concerned relatives. I say it to family friends with incredulous looks on their faces. I say it to long-long friends, reacquainted through Facebook. I even say it to strangers.

We’re not the only ones who live in a camper van and travel around the world.

The white Toyota with its homemade wooden structure on the pick-up pulling into the campsite in Nairobi is confirmation of this fact. Inside are Josu and Ana, Bruno’s long-time camper-van living worldwide traveling friends.

This is Josu and Ana. They live in a camper van, too.

Bruno first met this Basque traveling duo in Nepal. They’d left their jobs and lives behind only a year before to join the community of lifestyle travelers. For the next several months, they would periodically meet up in random corners of South Asia before Bruno continued solo toward Mongolia and Russia. The three stayed in touch and were able to meet up on the American continent a few years later – in the US, Mexico, Guatemala, and Colombia.

It was rare for Bruno to find a couple who traveled as slowly as he. It wasn’t the only bit of travel style the three shared, in fact. They all liked to park their cars in the campsite and explore by foot instead. They all had a minimalistic preference for their vehicle and gadgets (Josu and Ana don’t even have a fridge!). And they all loved animals, hiking, and nature.

The trio meeting up somewhere along the way in South America.

It was little wonder to me, as I began to get to know Josu and Ana in Nairobi, why Bruno had kept in touch with them all these years. They were kindred spirits.

Josu and Ana hadn’t always traveled overland around the world, of course. Two decades ago, Josu – a mathematics teacher – was offered a position in Harare, Zimbabwe. Rather than fly there, the two opted for a slow overland journey from Spain to Zimbabwe. After the contract, it seemed perfectly natural that they would return home overland as well, and so they drove up the other side of Africa.

Back in their mountainous region of northern Spain, it was back to the hum-drum of regular sedentary life. But the two had travel in their bones, and were looking for the right opportunity to head back out onto the open road. It took almost a decade, but by flipping a few homes in the burgeoning Spanish economy, they were able to place their new cash-flow into investments, which have supported them since 2005. And so, they journeyed through Europe and into Asia. They journeyed throughout the Americas. They journeyed to Australia. And, for the past two years, they’ve journeyed through Africa.

Josu and Ana’s older camper van model. Doing a little mechanic together, isn’t that cute?

In fact, they’ve been tailing us since 2012. When we were in Southern Africa, they were in the west. When we were in Eastern Africa, they were in the South.

“Will we ever be in the same place at the same time?” I would ask Bruno. “I want to finally meet these friends you talk so often about!”

“We’ll meet again,” he’d declare with faith. “The world is a small place.”

As it so happened, the day we touched back down in Africa, an email was waiting in Bruno’s inbox. We’re in Moshi [Tanzania], it said. We’ll be in Nairobi in four days. Will you be there? It looked as though Josu and Ana had made some headway in their journey toward East Africa while we were drifting through Canada and France. The reunion we’d been waiting for – for Bruno, since Columbia, five years ago – was about to happen!

And what a lovely reunion it was. The four of us feasted on Nepali food, perfect pie-like Spanish omelettes, wine, and Swiss chocolate (courtesy of Micheline, Bruno’s sister-in-law), and shared funny and amazing travel stories. We discussed getting stuck in the mud, terrible roads, travel routes, visas, and vehicle mechanics. It felt good being with these old-school roadies, people that live on the same planet as me.

Preparing Nepali food with Josu and Ana.

Bringing a little Spanish omelette to Nairobi.

We’re not the only people living this way, I smiled inwardly.

But it was Josu and Ana’s passionate spirit that I loved most. They live their choice to travel fully each day – up early, walking around, discovering a new place, meeting people, going to the market, planning the next part of their journey. Every moment of their day is done with positivity and intention – even when they are, say, struggling to get their Ethiopian visas. They know why they are here, what they have left behind, and that the choice to live on the road was completely the right one for them.

When you’re living the life you’re meant to be leading, it shows.

It was easy to say farewell to Josu and Ana. From here, they plan to head north, just like us. We will surely meet again, in Ethiopia or Sudan, or maybe in the Middle East or Europe. And, in any case, if we don’t meet on this part of the journey, there’s always later. The world, after all, is a small place.

Four overlanders [re]unite in Nairobi, Kenya. Where will we meet next?

Travel Plans and Visa Affairs

Brittany — Fri, 31 Oct 2014 05:57:57 +0000

After two-and-a-half months visiting family and friends in Canada and France, I am back in Africa. Touching down on Kenyan soil, I was filled with a Freudian mixture of familiarity and foreignness. Two-and-a-half months is a long time, after all.

Over the past two years, Bruno and I have traveled to a dozen countries in Southern and East Africa behind the wheel of our trusty Toyota Land Cruiser. Now, in Kenya yet again, the obvious question is Where to next?

The answer, my friends, is North.

Our ultimate goal in the next year is to reach Canada with the vehicle. To do so, we need to catch a ferry from Germany. To do that, we need to go through the Middle East. And to do that, we need to leave Africa.

Our 2015 travel plan in a nutshell (ever subject to change, of course).

Soon – if all goes according to plan – we will say goodbye to a continent that has shown me lions and leopards, taught me how to ride a horse, fed me sadza, rolex, and chipsi maayai, and introduced me to my beloved Bruno and my nomadic style of life. It won’t be a goodbye forever – I still haven’t seen my big-maned male lion, after all – but more of a see you again one day kind of goodbye.

And it’s not goodbye just yet, anyway. Our passports are armed with tourist visas for Ethiopia and Sudan, and we intend to use them. Especially since getting them wasn’t an easy process. We’d learned that receiving an Ethiopian tourist visa in Nairobi was unpredictable, so we sent our passports to the Ethiopian embassy in Paris while we were in France, and received 3-month multiple entry visas. We were lucky we chose this option, because good travel friends of ours tried to get their Ethiopian tourist visas in Nairobi last week, and were refused. Twice. It turns out that new regulations (put in place on October 20^th, 2014) forbid overlanders from getting tourist visas in Ethiopia. The only way to get a visa from East Africa, now, is to fly into the country and receive a one-month single entry visa on arrival. Or to get the visa in your home country. I’m praising Bruno, yet again, for his foresight.

While our friends were being refused their Ethiopian visa, we were struggling with our Sudanese visa. We had gone to the embassy with the standard documents – passport, passport copy, passport photos, forms filled out – only to learn that we needed letters of introduction from our respective embassies. We also needed photocopies of our carnet de passage and credit cards, but that wasn’t a problem. The problem was driving to the other end of the city to the Canadian High Commission, and then to the center of town to the French Embassy before coming back to complete our application.

We almost didn’t do it. The traffic in Nairobi is so terrible that we decided we’d get our Sudanese visas in Addis Ababa (Ethiopia). A bit of internet research, however, showed us that Sudanese tourist visas are virtually impossible to get in Ethiopia, and that, to get a 15-day transit visa you first needed an Egyptian visa. Since we aren’t planning to go to Egypt – entering the country by road is one of overland travel’s biggest headaches, apparently – it was clear that we would need to make the long trek to our embassies.

I’m happy we did. It was easy (if expensive, for me) to get the letters, and we were back at the Sudanese embassy the next day. Our forms were handed in, we were asked to wait while they were evaluated, and 90 minutes later, we paid the 5000 shilling fee (about $75) and were told to come back 48 hours later for our visas.

Proudly displaying my Sudanese visa outside the embassy. We’re ready to go!

Since I began traveling with Bruno, visas have been easy to come by. In every country, we were able to get a visa upon entry at the border, and in much of Southern Africa, visas were even free. This was thus my first experience with visa-related bureaucracy. It won’t be my last, I think, because we are planning to try to get the extremely difficult Saudi Arabian transit visa.

But that’s a story for a later time. For now, it’s off to the horn of Africa!

So Long East Africa… For Now; Reflections on Seven Months of Overland Travel

Brittany — Sun, 10 Aug 2014 10:17:00 +0000

Disclaimer: The following blog entry contains several photos of Bruno and Brittany looking really, really happy on the road, such as the photo that follows. The authors will not be held responsible for ensuing depression or suicidal thoughts of reader. Proceed at your own discretion.

“…If there is a wider purpose to our life, it is to understand the world, to seek out its diversity,

to celebrate its heroes and its wonders – in short, to witness it.”

– Philip Marsden

The calm before the storm affords me a moment of reflection.

The calm is, ironically, an airport departure lounge. Despite the bustle of transiting people and loudspeakers blaring jumbles of numbers and names, I steal a moment of solitude here before the downpour.

My airplane, which arrives soon, will take me firmly into a tempest of visits with family and friends, more people and conversations packed into five weeks that I’ve experienced since the beginning of the year. In a single day, I will be thrust into a world with reliable electricity and fast internet, calm and order, wide spaces and a big home, cleanliness and whiteness. My airplane, which arrives soon, will take me into a tornado of modernity after an unbroken year of A.f.r.i.c.a.

Walking along the mangroves off the coast of Tanga, Tanzania.

After a skype conversation in which my father professed the many virtues of peanut butter,
a certain skeptical Frenchman decided to give it a try.

Trying nsima made from wheat (rather than the usual maize) in Burundi.

There’s little doubt as to why I’m taking this private airport moment to organize my thoughts.

This past year has brought me a whole lot of firsts. First time in East Africa, first time living in a camper van for over half a year, first time traveling, uninterrupted, for so long. first time being away from Canada for so long, first time on an airplane in over a year, and first time not going on an airplane for over a year!

As such an experienced traveler, you wouldn’t think all these things would be the case. But 2014 has truly marked the beginning of a new travel style for me – one as an overland tourist rather than an expat. Though I sampled the camper van life last for over five months last year, I’m now totally in the groove of it, and I’ve accepted that I am officially a camper van denizen. I expect many more firsts to come out of this change in travel style over the coming years of travel.

Staring at black and white colobus monkeys in between dips in the Indian Ocean at Kenya’s Tiwi Beach.

Yoga session along the bank of the Nile River, near Jinja, Uganda.

Bringing the yoga balance to Kenya’s Lake Naivasha.

If I haven’t explicitly declared it before on my blog, I love this way of life. The freedom, the simplicity, the variety. The fact that we can live by our values, put our money into local economies, and live in a more ecologically-friendly way. The perfect marriage between the excitement of travel and the comforts of home. The time to create memories and to appreciate the beauty of the world. The active seeking of cultural understanding and peace.

But especially, I love this way of life because of the education it affords me. The process of discovering a new place, making sense of it, and developing a view of it based on personal experiences and observations is the fullest and most meaningful of educations I could possibly receive. I’m constantly stimulated and inspired – I think the slew of blog entries this year proves that – and it’s so satisfying to know it’s all because of the camper-van-wandering-traveler lifestyle I’ve chosen to lead.

Munching on popcorn and beer while I wait for my chipsi mayai, at a local bar in Tanzania’s capital, Dodoma.

Bruno getting up close and personal with a chameleon.

Me getting up close and personal with a chameleon!

It feels funny, then, to admit that I didn’t love East Africa. In my blog entries, I occasionally mentioned challenges or frustrations, like hairy road trips, uncomfortable village moments, or safaris that couldn’t happen, but I never came out and actually said it – East Africa wasn’t my cup of tea.

It wasn’t any one thing that turned me off the region – it was a lot of little things that slowly began to get to me. The fact that the region is massively overpopulated, making villages and towns polluted, dirty, crowded and uncomfortable. The fact that much of the worthy sites were expensive and thus off-limits to us. And the fact that, no matter where I went, I couldn’t shake off my mzungu persona – being a white woman followed me everywhere and tainted most of my interactions with local people.

Sunning myself to ward off the cold mountain air of Western Kenya.

Stopping for a quick lunch while on the road.

All the animals in the campsites want my love!

When Bruno and I toured around Southern Africa last year, I enjoyed it, but I didn’t truly appreciate it at the time. Now that I’ve spent a year in East Africa, I know that the wide open spaces, affordable safaris, and relative color-blindness of Southern Africa makes the place special. NowI appreciate and love Southern Africa.

And that’s the thing – you don’t have to fall in love with each place you visit in order to have gained something from travel. Sometimes the most memorable travel experiences are the ones full of difficulties, discomfort, and distaste. Just because I didn’t love East Africa, that doesn’t mean that I didn’t enjoy these past few months (because on the contrary, 2014 has been the best year ever). To have experienced this region, to have created memories, to have learned about the people, the culture, the food, the history and the landscape, to have developed perspective – to just go, in other words, is what travel is all about for me.

Waiting for the sunset over Mt. Kilimanjaro at Lake Chala Crater Lake, Tanzania.

Tip for successful cooking at the coast: Use an umbrella to ward off coastal wind.

Bruno driving. And wearing every hat he owns.

Mosques, Islamic dress, and the call to prayer. Custard apples, chipsi mayai, and rolex. KiSwahili. Rift Valley lakes. Colonial history. The Kikuyu, the Maasai, and the Buganda tribes. African metropolises. Matatus and boda bodas. Markets bursting with exotic fruits and locally-grown vegetables. Like squeezing a lemon into a cup of herbal tea, the distinctive flavor of East Africa was immersed in me. On its own the lemon is bitter, but fused into the tea, it adds a bit of je ne sais quoi.

Besides, had I not come to East Africa, I wouldn’t have climbed a dormant volcano or whiled away hours amid coconut trees on the edge of a coastal coral reef in Kenya. I wouldn’t have spotted Mt. Kilimanjaro or had a picnic on a private island near Zanzibar in Tanzania. I wouldn’t have swam in Lake Malawi or gone boating in Lake Tanganyika. I wouldn’t have eaten baguettes in Burundi’s Belgian-flavored capital or slept at the base of gorilla-infested volcanoes in Rwanda. East Africa is the place where Bruno and I officially tied the knot, and where we each celebrated milestone birthdays.

Checking out the coffee at Mbeya, Tanzania.

Descending Kenya’s Mt. Longonot was no easy feat!

Mmmmm…. Custard apple. My favorite!

Yep, I’m better for having been to East Africa.

The loud speaker is shouting out flight numbers and boarding calls, but I have awhile to go. My thoughts inevitably turn to the place my airplane will take me. A place with hot showers and ultra-clean toilets within easy reach. A place with a gigantic fridge stocked with delicacies I’ve only dreamed of this past year. A place with a beach at least as beautiful as the ones I’ve sat upon this year. A place filled with familiarity. And best of all, a place filled with love and friendship.

About to dive into my birthday Belgian- chocolate bar, purchased in Kigali (where else?).

The one and only time I filtered our drinking water…

Tasting delicious rice and coconut cake with spices, made by a local coastal Kenyan woman.

I appreciate the place that the plane will soon transport me to especially because of the year I’ve had. Yep, I’m better for having spent the year in East Africa.

Though I’ll miss my sweet Bruno, I feel ready to move on. So long, for now, Africa of the East. See you again in October for the start of the next leg of our overland trip around the world!

Bruno finally giving me my wedding ring. Made of Rwandan grasses. Exotic.

Being goofy in Uganda.

Being romantic, in love, and happy on a sunset boat cruise on my birthday, on Rwanda’s Lake Kivu.

The Nature of the Travel Loop

Brittany — Wed, 06 Aug 2014 02:00:00 +0000

Seven months, seven countries, some 10,000km. With our return to Kampala, our East African Loop – otherwise known as the Extended Honeymoon Loop – was completed. We’d looped the loop.

Before I arrived on the scene, Bruno never traveled in loops (unless we count his 14-year trip around the world a loop, which I guess it was). He always ventured forward, ever onward, toward eternal new horizons. It’s strange, then, that this is not the first, but the second, loop that we’ve looped together.

A Ugandan traveling by bicycle. Wonder if he’s doing a travel loop.

The nature of the Travel Loop is peculiar. By definition, it means revisiting a place you’ve already been – yet when you return, something feels different. Quite simply, you’ve changed. You hadn’t really noticed the subtle internal alterations that occurred over the course of the countries and experiences you’ve collected. But now, thrust back in a place where you were an old version of yourself, the differences seem glaring. You are flooded with memories of how you were then – what you thought, felt, and did – and the dire juxtaposition of what you think, feel, and do now.

Loop Travel affords insight into the self, and is, in my opinion, a worthy, meaningful travel style.

On the other hand, as you approach the point where the loop will loop, a strange thing tends to happen. You cease to travel, in a way. Your sense of discovery and inspiration at all that is new around you slows, and you feel yourself to be in a sort of transit mode.

In transit mode – slowing down and just chillin’.

Rather than exploring, we chose to sit and just watch the sun rising over the Nile River.

That’s exactly how Bruno put it to me soon after we’d entered Uganda. We had ten days until we needed to be in Kampala, and it was a two-day drive away. I thought we’d explore the hills of Western Uganda.

“We’re in transit mode now,” he replied.

That meant there was no sense in veering off the main path we’d set for ourselves, to Kampala and then onwards to Nairobi, where I was to fly in less than a month. We would simply drive, relax a bit, and drive again.

For him, this sense of transit mode was born from the fact that we now had dates impeding our freedom – a meeting with friends in Kampala, and a flight for me to Canada. For me, the sense of transit was born more from the fact that between Kampala and Nairobi, we would be driving essentially along the same path we’d driven at the beginning of our loop, and therefore would not be chartering new territory. My sense of adventure and discovery was thus replaced with familiarity and comfort.

Eating the same appetizer salad at the Haven as we had on Christmas Day.
Note the gorgeous view of the Nile River rapids.

After being initially put-out by Bruno’s declaration of our transit-mode-status, I came to terms with it. We’d traveled so quickly since our safari in Zambia’s South Luangwa, and had such horrendous campsites, that I was exhausted, and actually welcomed a bit of relaxation and tedium.

And so, after leaving Kampala, we returned to The Haven, a lodge outside of Jinja, near the source of the White Nile, and on a beautiful section of rapids on the Nile River. We had spent Christmas here, our first stop after leaving Kampala, when all I wanted was some much-needed R&R. We returned for the same reason – and ended up spending an entire week watching red-tailed monkeys, with white hearts for noses, bound through the trees, fish eagles soar over forest beyond, and birds wake us every morning with their chirping songs. It was, as its name indicates, a total haven.

Revisiting the red-tailed monkeys.

Parked at the Haven – a total haven.

Later, we returned to Camp Carnelley’s at Lake Naivasha, where we’d spent Bruno’s birthday, for a few days of ping pong tournaments, wood-oven pizza, hippos at the lake’s edge, and once again, loads and loads of birds.

The birds of Lake Naivasha (this one, the infamous fish eagle).

Parked again at the lovely Camp Carnelley’s along Kenya’s Lake Naivasha.

It was nice to be back in the familiar. It was restful in a way that visiting places for a first time never is – for me, at least, who can’t help but be curious and touristy and exploratory to a fault. It was a luxury not to have to find new campsites, but instead to know for sure that we had a place to sleep that night (and that there would be a hot shower!). And it was especially nice to see savannah – that most African of sceneries – after months of forested and farmed hills.

More than all that, being back in places we’d already been allowed small details already lost in our memories to re-emerge. To recall the forgotten memories of the zebras and giraffes along the side of the Kenyan highway, the rose plantations on the edge of Lake Naivasha, or the pointed shoulders on the traditional gomezi dresses of the Buganda people of Eastern Uganda. I’m trying to lodge those memories more firmly in my mind this time.

Zébras LITERALLY on the edge of this Kenyan highway.

The gomezi, a lovely pointy-shouldered traditional dress of the Buganda people.

Now we are back in Nairobi, affording us a final touch of déjà vu before I take my plane ride to Canada. We had a lovely home-made Thai dinner with my friend Jo (the one who made me the five-course crumble meal in Paris), and I picked up my suitcase of work clothes that I’d left at his place the last time we were here.

With nothing left to do but pack, Bruno and I have begun planning the next leg of our overland adventure around the world. It’s exciting to gather information about visas and boats and road conditions, and to look at a new section of the world map. I plan to string you along, dear reader, for at least another month, before I divulge our future plan in detail. Let me simply say that they are sure to be just as interesting as what we’ve just done.

Oh yeah. And it’s not a loop.

Having five delicious Thai dishes made by Jo.
For dessert, a pineapple crumble!!

Back to Uganda

Brittany — Fri, 01 Aug 2014 02:00:00 +0000

The school children of Uganda, around Lake Bunyonyi.
They look pretty friendly – so why hadn’t I enjoyed Uganda the first time around?

Poo-ganda. That’s what Bruno and I have been calling it since we left last December. And that’s probably why both of us had a tiny knot vibrating in our stomachs as we prepared to cross back into Uganda.

Uganda left a sour taste in each of our mouths for different reasons. For me, it was school-related – the stress, the workload, the sleepless nights. For Bruno, it was authority-related – the police officers stopping him whenever he drove to try to squander money out of him, the customs issues with the vehicle, the endless paperwork and trips into dusty, chaotic Kampala. When I say neither of us thrived in Uganda, it’s a tad of an understatement.

Prepping my wall displays the day before school started last September.

Exhausted at the end of a single term teaching in Uganda.
Even the cat I was taking care of for a friend could sense my exhaustion!

But that’s exactly why I wanted to go back. We’ve met a lot of travelers in the last seven months, and every single one of them has had great things to say about Uganda. They unanimously love it, and so I wanted to know what I’d missed. More than that, I desperately wanted my Poo-ganda nightmares to go away, replaced at last with positive memories of this small equatorial country.

Nonetheless, I was nervous as we crossed into the country. My last Ugandan visa had been messed up by the school I was working for, resulting in me being illegal in the country for over a month. I was worried I’d run into hassle with the notoriously power-tripping Ugandan officials. Both Bruno and I were surprised, then, by our generally uneventful border crossing. Ok, so we had to negotiate to get the vehicle into the country for more than two weeks, and we were forced to buy Ugandan shillings on the black market, but these experiences were not much worse than at any other border. At least my visa was stamped with ease.

Our border crossing into Uganda embodied our entire time revisiting this country – a bit of hassle, a touch of familiarity, and a pleasant surprise or two.

We decided to begin our visit in Bwindi Impenetrable Forest, Uganda’s claim to gorilla fame. At $600USD, we wouldn’t actually track gorillas, but we hoped to hike through this dense, steep mountain forest.

It didn’t really work out. All the lodges that offered camping were far from the forest – at least a three hour walk. The ambiance was more village than forest, and we’d had enough of villages in Burundi and Rwanda. Hiking in the hills toward the forest wasn’t at all appealing, either, since the roads were made of a dust so powder-like that stepping your foot lightly in it created a dense cloud that went straight to your nostrils. Enough cars and motorbikes drove along this road to make a walk more trouble than it would be worth.

Dust being kicked up on the dirt road around Bwindi Impenetrable Forest by a herd of goats.

The poor villagers of Southwest Uganda must have some serious lung problems walking along those dusty roads.

Onwards we went, to Lake Bunyonyi, the chill-out spot in all of Uganda. It looked really touristy, and the only proper campsite was made for overland trucks and was thus chock-full of young tourists looking for the nearest party. We worried we wouldn’t get a relaxing sleep, but actually managed to find a little corner in the grass, on the edge of the lake, that proved to be peaceful enough.

Good thing, too, because both Bruno and I were laid up for over a week with colds. We didn’t get to properly visit Bunyonyi – no ride on a wooden pirogue, a single quick walk in the surrounding villages – but we watched village children riding to school on the school canoe-bus, and we did lots of bird-watching from our campsite. “Bunyonyi” means “lake of many small birds,” and true to its name, this lake was a good place to convalesce.

Lake Bunyonyi and the Overland Camp where we are parked.
See our car at the end of the peninsula?

The Lake Bunyonyi school bus.

Sick as a dog. This is really embarrassing, but do you see the tissue stuck in my nose?
I slept that way all night. Bruno thought it was funny.

It was a return to Kampala that I’d been waiting for most of all. Perhaps as much as giving Uganda another chance, I’d come to visit old school friends. Bruno braved the crazy drivers, the boda-boda motorcycle taxis, the awful traffic and the pungent smells of Kampala so that I could have this reunion. If that’s not a proof of love, I don’t know what is.

We hadn’t even arrived at our campsite – ironically about a five minute walk from school and our old home – before we ran into a school friend by chance. Over the next few days, there were several serendipitous encounters with old acquaintances and colleagues. And it was surprisingly good to see them all. To laugh with them and hear about all the school-related drama, to hear the highs and lows of the year, and to share what we’d done with 2014 instead. It was therapeutic in a way I hadn’t expected it to be.

I can only describe my visit to my old school as cathartic. I hadn’t planned on going, but was feeling so positive about my [re]encounters that I thought why not? Just like Kampala city, the school had changed in small, almost-imperceptible ways, but in many ways was much the same place as when I left. It was me that was different. A better, more relaxed, care-free, and happy version of myself.

Visiting my old school and some of my friends there.

Visiting one of the first people I met in Uganda last August!

Feeling renewed, I chowed down on cheap pizza from our campsite – the same pizza I’d eaten in between stressful weeks of work here. It tasted much better this time. I went again to the nearby village to buy papayas and oranges, to the local restaurant to eat matooke (mashed plantains) and beans, and to the rolex stand to eat greasy omelette wrapped into chapatti. I went to the same supermarket I used to shop at, but this time I took a matatu (minibus) just because I had the time. It felt good to know what destination to say to the driver and not to worry about getting off at the wrong place. I guess it felt good that, after so many months of being a lost tourist, things were somewhat familiar.

And then the moment I’d been waiting for most of all happened – I got to see my closest school friends, Claire and Debra. Admittedly, they were busy packing and running errands around town for their next-day departure, but it was great to see them again nonetheless. It brought back the best moments of my time in Uganda – the school lunchtime chats, the Sundays at the country club, the weekend drinks and dinners. These girls are the only reason I survived five months in Kampala – they spoiled me for my wedding, lent me their ear for my endless complaints, and made me feel loved when it was time to leave. Kampala had never felt so good as on this reunion day.

Claire and Debra (Claire is changing schools so is unwrapping her goodbye gift).
I can’t believe I forgot to take a photo of the three of us. Too busy gossiping I guess!

I’m glad we came to Uganda again. I don’t think we can say that we love this country, like all the other travelers we’ve encountered declare. But this time the police officers left us alone, Kampala was more full of love than traffic, and we found a quiet lakeside haven for a bit of R&R. I guess Bruno and I can change the name from Poo-ganda to Good-ganda.

Dian Fossey’s Mountain Gorillas

Brittany — Sat, 26 Jul 2014 07:08:00 +0000

Through fog and thick bush, a group of mountain gorillas appears. The giant silverback male beats his chest in a gesture of intimidation before settling into the ground to munch on leaves. A baby tentatively descends a tree, then stares, with deep emotion, into my eyes…

And then, I wake up. I am surrounded by misty volcanoes and the air is as crisp as a Canadian fall day. I am close to the gorillas – for they are at the base of the volcanoes a few kilometers away – but not that close.

My favorite peak of the Virunga Mountains.

Almost every tourist to Rwanda comes with one goal in mind – to have a close encounter with the country’s infamous mountain gorillas. Last year, over 25,000 foreign tourists trekked in the Volcanoes National Park to see one of the dozen or so gorilla groups up-close.

And each of them paid $750US.

***

It wasn’t always possible to visit the mountain gorillas of the Virungas. They were once so endangered that all believed it was inevitable that they would soon disappear from the face of the earth.

Enter Dian Fossey.

Though she was trained as an occupational therapist, Fossey’s love of animals, stubbornness, and persuasive skills led Richard Leaky to invite her to Central Africa to study the few remaining mountain gorillas. They’d been pushed further and further up the mountains by poaching and human encroachment, thereby developing the fur and larger size than their lowland cousins.For the next eighteen years, Fossey rarely left the dark and damp Virunga Mountains. She developed an incredible kinship with the gorillas she studied, approaching them more closely than anyone ever had, and even developing some of their physical habits and vocalizations in order to be seen as “just another gorilla.”

Snapshot from the Nat Geo article: Fossey approaching her gorillas to within a few feet.

Snapshot from the Nat Geo article: Fossey cuddling and playing with Coco and Pucker Puss, the two infant
gorillas she agreed to nurse back to health before they were sent off to international zoos.

Gorillas in the Mistportrays Dian Fossey as a bit of an eccentric woman. It is true that she donned a Halloween mask to frighten poachers away from her gorilla groups, and it is true that she was incredibly difficult to work for and that she had trouble keeping local staff. But it is also true that without her dedication, the mountain gorilla would probably now be extinct.

In January 1970, a National Geographic photographer captured Fossey cuddling and playing with two baby gorillas that she had agreed to nurse back to health before they were taken away by zoo collectors. Fossey wrote a 20-page article for the magazine about her studies (I’m holding the original Nat Geo issue in my hands right now – Bruno is a die-hard Fossey-fan), and woke the world up to the gentility and plight of these giant beasts. Her subsequent fame led to greater conservation efforts, and ultimately mass gorilla tourism.

***

We arrived in Kinigi, the town outside the headquarters for the Volcanoes National Park, in the middle of a massive celebration – The Gorilla-Naming Ceremony. Theoretically, this yearly ceremony is conducted to name all the baby gorillas born in the previous year. The prime minister delivers a speech, names are given, and that’s that.

What we saw was a massive party – a giant stage with booming speakers, thousands of people on a large grass field eating and laughing and drinking. When the revelers finally left, there were so many plastic cups and paper plates strewn upon the grass that the field looked like a landfill site. I couldn’t help but think about the gorillas. They were only a few kilometers away, and could undoubtedly hear the thumping of the bass. I doubt this was what Dian Fossey had in mind when she set out to save them.

The Gorilla-Naming Ceremony, just outside the headquarters of the Volcanoes National Park.

Ironically, Dian Fossey was against mass tourism as a method of saving her precious gorillas. Because they are such close relatives to humans, gorillas are very susceptible to a variety of human diseases. Tourists bring flu and colds, which can actually kill a gorilla. Fossey protected her gorillas like a mother protects her newborn child.

That hasn’t stopped the Rwandan government from using Fossey’s gorillas to make major bucks.

***

I think by now, dear reader, you are probably fairly sure that I didn’t trek out for a one-hour visit with the gorillas I’ve been talking about for the past 600 words. I don’t think I could have kept such an awe-inspiring experience secret from you for so long, right?

As lifestyle travelers rather than tourists, forking over $1500US – a sum that carries us through at least a month of travel – for us to spend an hour with the gorillas is not something we can even consider. One “drawback” of lifestyle travel is that, sometimes, you have to forego the expensive tourist experiences that everyone around you seems to be indulging in.

I admit that, for a moment, I was jealous of the gorilla-trekkers coming and going at our lodge. As an animal-lover, I would love nothing more than to be within reach of a gorilla. In my daydreams, I’ve cuddled with a baby gorilla at night in his leafy bed, been kissed on the cheek by the leathery lips of an old female, and been accepted by the dominant silverback of the group. I guess in my daydreams I’ve been Dian Fossey.

In truth, though, I think I’m more jealous of Bruno than I am of the one-hour-gorilla-trekkers. Some eighteen years ago, Bruno spent over a month with BaAka pygmies in Central African Republic. They trekked for over two weeks, following tracks and locating nests, before Bruno spotted his first gorillas. The dominant male reached out and touched Bruno’s shoulder before pushing over his pygmy guide.

I don’t have any shots of Bruno with the gorillas (because he didn’t have a digital camera at the time), but here he is
with the BaAka pygmies. The little baby on the right was named “Bruno” after my Bruno.

You have to stand 7 meters away from the mountain gorillas when you
visit them. At the front is the gorilla, and at the end of the yellow
ruler is me. It’s really far away.

In comparison, modern-day gorilla trekking is pretty tame. My friends from Kampala recently went to see the mountain gorillas of Uganda, and I heard their stories and saw their pictures. The fact that there were more local guides and trackers than tourists, the fact that they were limited to a single hour with the gorillas, the fact that you have to stay at least seven meters away from the gorillas at all times, and the fact that anyone who has the money can see the gorillas – all that takes away from the satisfaction of the experience.The fact that I just read an angry article about a woman whose gorilla-trekking experience was marred by a rude woman with an Ipad assures me my money is better left in my pocket.

***

Since we weren’t going to be gorilla-trekking, we decided to try to feel as close to the gorillas as possible. We visited Rosamond Carr’s farm, where Dian Fossey often stayed when recuperating from the many colds she had as a result of living on those misty mountains. Several scenes from the film, Gorillas in the Mist, were filmed here – one in the bright flower garden behind Carr’s ivy-walled home, and one inside the spare bedroom.

A deleted dance scene from Gorillas in the Mist that was filmed on Roz Carr’s farm.

The gate that Sigourney Weaver waves from when she is forced to leave the DRC.

The actual room that Dian Fossey stayed in on her visits to Roz Carr’s farm.
This is Graham, our tour guide, re-enacting Sigourney’s scene from the desk in the room.

We came for the Fossey-connection, but it turns out that Madame Carr was a pretty interesting woman herself. She’d been living on this farm – growing flowers and pyrethrum, a natural insecticide – for decades before the 1994 Rwandan Genocide. When she returned from the U.S. later that year, she opened up a children’s home, called Imbabazi (“care of a mother” in Kinyarwanda) for the newly-orphaned children in the area. She passed away in 2006, and was buried in the vast gardens near her house, but the orphanage continued to run under her foundation until last year. Now that the children are all grown up, the Imbabazi Foundation plans to open up a preschool and to teach adults in the region diversified farming.

From our campsite beside Carr’s carefully tended garden, we spotted three distant volcanoes for the first time. One glowed red in the dark that night. Dian Fossey’s gorillas were beckoning us closer.

Rosamond Carr’s ivy-covered home and garden.

Where Madame Carr was buried, mere meters from her home.

View of two volcanoes from the Virunga Range from Mrs. Carr’s farm.

The morning after the loud Gorilla-Naming Ceremony in Kinigi, we walked to the headquarters of the park. At least eighty tourists were packed into safari cars ready to take them out to the various starting points for their gorilla treks. That’s $60,000 in a single day!

Since this is Africa, Bruno and I were a bit skeptical as to where this money goes. We scoured fact sheets and graphs posted on the bulletin boards outside the headquarters in vain before approaching a park ranger with our questions.

“Some of the money goes to paying the trackers – two to each group – and an on-call veterinarian. The trackers follow the groups 24/7, not only to locate them for the tourists, but to protect them from poachers. The vet is there, among other things, to cure them of human illnesses.”

Rwanda’s gorilla group names and locations.

On the bulletin board I had read that if someone is sick, they should not go gorilla-trekking. With a doctor’s note, they can get a full refund on their gorilla pass. But who, really, is likely to give up this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity over a cold?

“Most of the money goes toward conservation efforts within the park. And we think we’re doing a pretty good job – there are now 880 mountain gorillas, and over half of them live in the Virunga Mountains!”

Indeed, the numbers were more than neither Bruno nor I expected, and we were slightly encouraged.

Maybe Dian Fossey was wrong about gorilla tourism?

***

I’m happy we walked in the footsteps of Dian Fossey. Waking up every morning at the base of gorgeous volcanoes, and feeling in proximity of her gentle mountain gorillas was special. My breath was taken away each morning as I stared at the outline of a Mordor-esque volcano, as it was taken away when we were surrounded by the colors of Rosamond Carr’s farm.

That’s when I realized that the “downside” of lifestyle travel – not being able to gorilla trek – wasn’t a downside at all. It had forced us to dig deeper and to visit the region in another way. I may not have gotten to stare into the eyes of a mountain gorilla, but I felt as connected to their past, present, and future as if I had.

I recommend reading the online version of Dian Fossey’s 1970 National Geographic article, Making Friends with Mountain Gorillas. For more facts on mountain gorillas, and to learn how you can help protect them, click here.

A Filipino Haven in Rwanda

Brittany — Mon, 21 Jul 2014 07:30:00 +0000

Sometimes, you turn down an unknown road, just by chance, and you end up exactly where you’re meant to be.

It had been one of those days where everything goes wrong. We had driven from Kigali to Rwanda’s Nyungwe Forest National Park, with the sole goal of purchasing two one-week passes for chimpanzee tracking. We were making a huge detour south for this, but who wouldn’t for chimpanzees?

At the entrance gate, however, we learned that the prices advertised in the newest travel guides and on the internet were no longer accurate, and that we’d have to add $500 each to our total in order to track chimps for a week.

No can do, thanks.

“At least we got to see l’Hoest monkeys,” I said. It was our first time seeing these white-bearded monkeys, who are endemic to the mountainous forests of Eastern Congo, Western Rwanda, and Southwestern Uganda. We’d gotten to watch them on the side of the highway for an hour, and it hadn’t cost us a dime.

A l’Hoest monkey eating red berries from the trees.
This was our first time seeing this rare, shy monkey.

Look at him looking at us!

Consoled, we turned to our backup plan – to camp at Banda Community Campsite, on the border of Nyungwe Forest, where apparently at this time of year, we would run a high chance of seeing chimps near the campsite.

This meant driving 15km on yet another terrible dirt road – steep, bumpy, and narrow. But who wouldn’t do this for chimpanzees?

Unfortunately, this road brought us into a valley from our nightmares. No signs for the camping, no one speaking English or French, hundreds of children staring at us, chasing the car, and trying to hitch rides on the back, and everyone who “helped” us holding out their hands for a “gift”.

Without locating the campsite, we got the hell out of there, back up those same fifteen bumpy kilometers. Our detour had cost us over three hours, and it was now mid-afternoon.

Driving down the bad 15km road to Banda Campsite.

Arriving in Banda village, where the signs ended and no one spoke our language.

These kids might seem harmless, but I assure you they weren’t

The backup to our backup plan was to head to Karongi, on Lake Kivu, 150km away. It wasn’t a great backup-backup, especially since we didn’t know of a campsite there, but we’d never expected to need to turn to this half-baked option.

“At least it’s tar road,” Bruno said. All the main roads in Rwanda thus far had been smooth and fast-going. “We’ll be there in two hours.”

Well, it wasn’t, and we weren’t. There was some of the most intense construction I’ve ever seen in all of Africa. The narrow, bumpy dirt road wound around the hills, and when the builders were in the middle of moving rocks or creating terraces, there was no detour around them. We just had to wait.

When we got blocked for over an hour by a truck launching rocks onto the road from a cliff above, it was time to concede defeat. It was almost 6pm, the sun would set in an hour, we’d been driving for ten full hours and we still had almost 40km of bad road (meaning two hours) before we arrived at a town with possibly no campsite. We had never been in this situation before – Bruno being such an experienced and well-planned traveler – but there seemed nothing to do but drive on.

Construction work blocking our path for over an hour.
Time to concede defeat?

Out of nowhere, a sign appeared announcing the Ngoma Camp Site a mere kilometer up the hill. It seemed like the answer to our prayers. Naturally we turned.

Once again, however, the signs ended there, and the campsite was nowhere to be found. We must have looked despondent, for a man approached our vehicle. Strangely, he was Asian, – a rarity in small African villages – and stranger yet, he spoke perfect English.

“You are welcome to park your car at our home,” he offered, pointing not far up the road.

Bruno is fiercely independent and is unusually uncomfortable with intruding on others and disturbing their lives. To my surprise, he acquiesced, which showed how truly exhausted he was.

I’m so thankful that he acquiesced, for it allowed us to know Jesse and his wife, Amy. A Filipino couple living and working as missionaries throughout Africa for at least the past decade, they welcomed us into their home with true Asian hospitality. They offered us a hot shower, access to a toilet, a room if we wanted, and a hot meal. We kept trying to refuse, but it was impossible to turn Amy down. She was not going to let us go hungry, and she filled our freshly-washed bodies with avocadoes from their tree, home-made guava jam (also from their tree), an entire vine of bananas, and a cup of before-bed hot chocolate.

“I’m going to make you a fresh loaf of herb bread, too,” she continued, not taking no for an answer. “I have a bread machine, so I’ll just pop all the ingredients in now, and it will be ready in the morning.”

When morning came, the bread was indeed ready, cooling on the kitchen table for us, along with coffee, hot chocolate, jam, and peanut butter.

“Sit. Eat.” In the years that I’ve known Bruno, I’ve never seen him eat anything but fruit-yogurt-muesli for breakfast. But he sat, without argument, and ate delicious homemade jam on warm homemade bread.

Feeling refreshed after our long night sleep, we were finally able to converse properly with Jesse and Amy, to learn about their family back home, their work as surgeons, their upcoming travel plans, and their life in Africa. They oohed and ahhed at the inside of our camper van, and took photos galore of us at the breakfast table, outside the camper, and in the front garden.

When we departed a couple of hours later, it was as old friends. They wished us well and waved us off from the door, still snapping photos.

Posing with our Filipino hosts outside their home.

Posing outside our home!

This twelve-hour encounter absolutely blew me away. Despite all the positive aspects of traveling in Africa, I always carry a hidden weight on my shoulders. It’s the weight of profit and self-interest that seems to motivate most of our interactions with people. Only earlier that day, we’d been given help by Banda villagers, who then turned out their hands for a reward. I’ve unfortunately often become weary and suspicious of friendly people who engage us in conversation or offer their help, because I’m always waiting for the catch, for the business exchange to take place.

In one evening, Jesse and Amy blew away the weight that had been building up for so many months. With them, we knew we weren’t being seen as an opportunity to make a quick buck. More than that, we felt the genuine joy they seemed to take in being able to give, to share, to shower their hospitality onto us.

Jesse and Amy offered us the comfort and safety of their home, several home-cooked and home-grown delicacies, and hours of heart-warming conversation. But what they actually gave us – without even knowing it – is a faith restored in humanity and a refreshed spirit to journey onwards through the heart of Africa.

Thank you so much, Jesse and Amy, for the haven you offered in the middle of Rwanda!!

The Scars of Genocide in Central Africa

Brittany — Wed, 16 Jul 2014 07:20:00 +0000

Had it not been for the sea of black faces, I swear we could have been in Europe. The streets were clean, the stop-lights worked, the road lines were being freshly repainted. It was hard to believe that exactly twenty years ago, one of the most widely-publicized genocides in history was planned and executed from here. We were driving into Kigali, and I had expected anything but this.

In the space of one hundred days, almost one million Tutsis and Hutu moderates were brutally murdered by Rwandan Hutu extremists. Three hundred thousand children were left orphaned. Seventy percent of the Rwandan population saw someone chopped into pieces with a machete in front of their very own eyes, and seventy percent of the Tutsi population was exterminated. With these kind of stats, it’s little wonder that when someone says “Rwanda” you think “genocide.”

It’s impossible to visit Rwanda nowadays without being reminded of its dark past. All around the country, mass graves – the unnamed dead hastily buried – have been transformed into modern memorials of skulls, flowers, and quotations carved into thick marble. The most famous memorial of all – Kigali’s Genocide Memorial – even comes with a museum describing every brutal detail of the events leading up to, and after, April 6^th, 1994.

Why was Paul Kagame, Rwanda’s president since the end of the genocide, seeking to remind people at every turn of the genocide that had happened here?

A paint job like this is a rarity in Africa.

Memorial at the infamous Hotel des Mille Collines (watch “Hotel Rwanda” if you don’t know about this hotel.)

Ordered roundabouts around tended gardens and fountains.

***

We’d come to Rwanda, that very day, from neighboring Burundi, a country nearly the same size, with the same ethnic composition, and the same colonial history as Rwanda. In fact, Burundi and Rwanda had been a single country under Belgian rule – Rwanda-Urundi. The people had been exposed to the same laws, the same cultural practices, the same economic and geographical reality. The question everyone asks, then, is why were their post-colonial histories so different?

You may be surprised to hear that, actually, they weren’t. Both countries faced racial hatred between the tall, educated, and outnumbered Tutsis and the stockier, more numerous Hutus. Both countries faced post-colonial military coups, presidential assassinations, rebel attacks, and civil war. Both countries even experienced genocides – in fact, Burundi experienced two. The real question, then, is why does the world not know about Burundi’s?

It’s sad to say, but I believe it comes down to the media’s – and therefore, our – love of violence in the extreme. In Burundi’s two genocides, less than thirty thousand people were killed. The murders didn’t happen over intense hundred-day killing sprees. Next to Rwanda’s horrifying statistics, Burundi’s genocide is like soft porn. That kind of story, unfortunately, doesn’t sell newspapers, and so Burundi’s genocide largely went on unnoticed by the world.

That doesn’t mean that it hasn’t affected Burundians, though. The scars of its violent civil war may not be pasted onto countrywide memorials (paid for by the West in Rwanda), but the scars are still present in the minds and hearts of the people we met in Burundi. The nun I befriended at Banga Guesthouse was happy to drink beer with me, to talk about travel, language, and problems in neighboring countries, but as soon as the conversation turned to Burundian politics and history, her eyes welled up and her mouth shut. Deus, the park ranger who let us camp outside the parc national de la Kibira, was willing to talk, but the conversation clearly showed the damage the civil war had done:

“It was horrible. People killing their neighbors. Their countrymen! It’s despicable. I still can’t believe we went through that.”

When I suggested that teaching their children about their recent history might be the way to prevent something like this from happening again in the future, he rebuffed me. “No. It’s too horrible. We can’t tell the children. They cannot know. Ever.”

Bruno posing with Deus (second from right), another ranger, and the boy who’d taken us to the “campsite”
(See “A Week in Burundi” for story)

Bruno walking amid tea to the fragment of virgin forest in the valley.

Deus has always worked in tourism. He is well into his forties now, and already growing his “second hair,” as he calls it. He blames the grey hair on the stress of the civil war, but thanks God that it’s over now. “I hope the tourists start coming back so I can do my job again,” he lamented to me. I can only assume that the civil war was difficult on him economically, as well as emotionally, since tourists haven’t largely avoided the country for the past twenty years.

Perhaps this was why he was so worried about us. Tourists never asked to camp at the edge of the forest, on the top of a hill overlooking the tea plantation, but when Bruno sets his mind on the perfect campsite, he can be very adamant. Deus couldn’t say no, but he had a condition: “You have to take two armed guards with you.” He was paranoid for our safety, even though the country has been at peace for almost a decade. The scars of his civil war ran deeper than we thought, it appeared.

We camped next to the headquarters instead. I wasn’t sleeping with two armed guards stationed outside my car.

Where we wanted to camp. Seems fairly innocuous, no?

***

If Burundi had seemingly chosen to forget its recent bloody history, why was Rwanda choosing to remember?

I have to preface what follows as pure conjecture – my own opinion based on research, observation, and a bit of intuition: I think it works in Paul Kagame’s favor to have people remember the atrocities that happened in his country twenty years ago. He’s a Tutsi, you see, and one of the leaders of the RPF rebels that had been fighting the Hutu government during the country’s civil war. He’d been called a “cockroach,” by the Interhamwe (the group of Hutu extremists leading the genocide), and subsequently “the hero,” when he liberated the country from this evil group.

It’s in Kagame’s interest to play the victim-turned-hero card. Western governments pour in massive amounts of aid and support (making this tiny country one of the most powerful in the region), and his own people shower him with undying support, even when he does questionable things.

And questionable things he has done.

When the RPF liberated Rwanda, two million Hutus fled the country. That’s twice as many people as were killed during the genocide. They fled mainly into a few border towns in the Congo (DRC), creating massive refugee camps. Problem solved, the world forgot about them. But Paul Kagame didn’t.

Over the following few years, occasional attacks on the refugee camps were ordered by Kagame’s government. Officially, it was claimed that the attacks were meant to wipe out remaining Interhamweofficials camouflaging themselves among the masses of refugees. But why, then, did so many civilians perish in these attacks?

Walking in Kigali.

One of many genocide memorials scattered throughout the country.
This one was in Karongi, where we spent my 30th birthday.

The killings in the Congo reached a whole new level in 1996, when the Rwandan government threw its support behind Lauren Kabila’s Congolese rebel forces. From the eastern edge of the DRC, near the Rwandan border, Kabila marched toward Kinshasa, but his march was anything but direct. Along the way, he stopped in the Hutu refugee camps, murdering as many as possible. The remaining refugees would flee, and Kabila’s forces would find them and murder more of them. Ad infinitum. By the time Kabila reached Kinshasa, on the western edge of this massive country, his forces had apparently murdered almost as many as the Interhamwe had killed during the Rwandan genocide.

***

When we drove through Rwanda’s capital that first afternoon, it painted the picture of a country recovered from its dark past. Paul Kagame had transformed Kigali into a city of modern skyscrapers, smoothly-tarred roads, and policemen stationed at intersections to ensure constant law and order. He had outlawed plastic bags, making his city cleaner than any other in all of Africa. And Kagame was reminding people more than ever of his heroism by marking the 20^th anniversary of the country’s genocide with countrywide banners.

Modern skyscrapers dot downtown Kigali.

People holding a memorial service at the Kigali Genocide Memorial to mark the 20th anniversary of the genocide.

Yet, despite being able to go to the cinema and buy imported strawberries and order delivery to our campsite, I didn’t fall for Kigali. Something felt off about it. It was so clean that it smelled rotten. Something was hiding behind Kigali’s perfect image. What, exactly, I’m not sure. Only time will tell – the world has a way of only discovering awful truths after the fact.

A Week in Burundi

Brittany — Fri, 11 Jul 2014 11:31:00 +0000

As soon as we crossed the border from Tanzania into Burundi, the tar road halted. In its place was one of the worst dirt roads we’d ever driven upon. It was a fitting symbol for the week that was to come.

You see, most of the time when we cross the border into a new country, the differences aren’t immediately noticeable. It takes a while for us to feel that we have entered a new land. In Burundi, it was immediately clear that we had entered into a country like no other.

Admittedly, most of the things which made Burundi unique were subtle – villagers wearing tinted spectacles, women sporting Will Smith’s Fresh Prince of Bel-Air haircut and wearing flowery wraps rather than the usual African-patterned ones, or the peculiar way that people greet one another by wrapping their right arm around the other person’s left shoulder.

But there were a few larger differences, too. The fact that this was the first French-speaking African nation I’d visited since Senegal in 2005 (though to say Burundian people speak French is a tad of an overstatement). The fact that people drove on the right side of the road. The fact that the entirety of Bujumbura was jogging (and a few roller-blading, even) along the side of the highway on the Saturday morning of our city departure. Or the fact that there were more people packed into the villages and onto the roadsides than either of us had ever seen before.

Bruno was really – I mean really – happy to see French signs everywhere in Burundi.

That first Burundian dirt road after the border. And the first overcrowded Burundian village.

The entire city of Bujumbura came out to jog on Saturday morning.
I have a few funny shots of people stretching along the highway, too.

It was the people that put Bruno off. “They’re like a colony of ants!” he remarked, as he swerved the Toyota to avoid a family that had darted into the middle of the highway.

I couldn’t blame him. Between the potholed, narrow roads weaving through the hills, the cars doubling him at breakneck speeds, and the hoards of people pressing against the edges of the road, driving in Burundi seemed massively stressful.

For me, though, it was a feast for the eyes. As the passenger, I was free to look the equatorial flora, the hilltop panoramas, Lake Tanganyika sparkling in the sun, the mountains of the Congo hazy beyond. Because of the sheer number of locals, there was always something to look at. My senses hadn’t been this alive since India.

Masses along the Burundian roadside made driving a challenge for Bruno.

Unique floral fabrics, beautiful pottery, equatorial foliage – Burundi was a true feast for the senses.

Snapshots of tropical flora along the coast of Lake Tanganyika.

I was on an overstimulation high by the time we reached Burundi’s capital, Bujumbura. It continued throughout our three days there. This capital pleased me. Its wide, clean boulevards and cobbled side streets, its manageable size, its reasonable amount of traffic and people, its beautiful beach – on the northern tip of Lake Tanganyika – mere kilometers away from the center of town. I could almost believe that I was in Europe, which was a welcome feeling after so many months in the depths of deepest, darkest Africa.

The Belgian influence was still very much present in Bujumbura, if not elsewhere in the country. Here, I could eat quiche, drink amber ale, buy a block of delicious local cheese. I could walk into a patisserie and choose between a baguette, a load of whole wheat bread, even a pain au chocolat! Poor Bruno had to follow me around for two days while I devoured the entirety of the city and restocked our food supply with gourmet delicacies.

Our last afternoon, to compensate for our massively expat-ish behavior, we ate at a local (meaning ‘African’) patisserie. It was filled mostly with men, in groups or alone, dunking various bread products in cups of hot tea or coffee or gigantic glasses of milk. We did the same, in a sort of alternate universe where Europe and Africa coexist in a strange but tasty mélange.

Bujumbura, Burundi’s capital, was teeming with patisseries.

A sneak shot of Bujumbura men dipping their bread products into massive glasses of milk or hot tea.

An empty cobblestone street in Bujumbura. Can you believe this is an African capital city?

But Burundi was far from an easy place to travel. So soon after its lengthy civil war, tourist infrastructure is almost non-existent. It was especially difficult for us, as though there are a smattering of hotels, there is not a single campsite in the entire country. Each time we arrived to a new place, it was a struggle to find a place to sleep. Sometimes we parked at a restaurant or bar (as was the case with our first two campsites along Lake Tanganyika). Once we parked at the headquarters of a national park. Twice we were forced to rent cheap rooms in guest houses and park the car nearby.

The best illustration of Burundi’s readiness for tourists is when we arrived at le parc national de la Kibira, a forest reserve in the northwest of the tiny country. There was no ranger at the headquarters, but an old farmer and a young man who spoke a bit of French soon appeared.

“We’re looking for a campsite,” we spoke in slow, clear French. I pointed to a sign on the wall which showed a picture of a tent and had the word “campsite” written in three languages, including his own, Kirundi.

The fact that there was a sign for a campsite meant that, surely, there was a campsite. Right?
Wrong.

“Yes, yes, it’s 2km that way. I will accompany you,” the young man replied confidently.

Since we didn’t have space for two extra people in our vehicle, we walked. Past the processing plant of a tea plantation. Past the wood factory that feeds it. Up a dirt road, into a small forest, and then up a footpath. Up a big hill, through the tea fields. For kilometers upon kilometers.

“This is more than 2km,” I tried to say to the man. By this point I was sweaty and thirsty and cursing myself that I hadn’t brought my camera for “our little stroll”. He smiled and nodded, but I don’t think he got the message.

The abruptly, we stopped. The old man was now in the lead. We were in the middle of a tea field on a hill overlooking more tea. The forest was still up ahead.

“Here is the campsite,” translated the young man.

We looked into the bush, and spotted some sort of brick column. Behind was possibly a veranda and maybe a small room. I think the roof was caved in, but I’m not sure because all of it was covered in thick bush. There was, in any case, no road for us to bring our car, no place for us to park, and no water, toilet, or shower.

Re-enacting our hike through the tea plantations to the “campsite,” near the forest over yonder (top right).

The campsite we were brought to after a 4km jaunt through the hilly tea plantations.

Admittedly tea is beautiful, even though it’s sad to see it juxtaposed next to virgin forest.

Eventually we understood that this had been the campsite. Maybe twenty years ago, before the war. Perhaps these two locals thought we wanted to visit a historical sight? We will never really know for sure. All we know is that we were walked a total of 8km roundtrip, through Teza tea plantation to the edge of the Kibira Forest to see a campsite that no longer existed. And we still didn’t have a place to sleep for the night.

Finally, the ranger showed up and allowed us to park our car at his headquarters for the night. That meant we could hike in the forest! Though the plantation was pretty – the hills of fluorescent tea looked like a gathering of tortoises showing off their carapaces – it was sad to walk through. Tiny pockets of virgin forest stood in the valleys between the hills of tea, reminding us of what had been here before man had taken over.

This was, in fact, the case throughout Burundi. It seemed as if every inch of land had been carved up into square plots for small-scale agriculture. Along the coast, palm trees stood in perfect rows, their multi-purpose orange oil showing up in rusty barrels and plastic water bottles in markets across the country. Cassava, the poor-man’s plant, grew around tin-roof huts built by the same international aid agencies that were trying to convince Burundians to grow healthier maize, instead. From the top of the hill in Kibira National Park, the Burundian landscape looked more like an earthy patchwork quilt than a forest.

Wandering through the parc national de la Kibira

Palm tree plantations along the coast of Lake Tanganyika.
You can use this oil for cooking, for lighting a room, and for cleaning your body

Sleeping wasn’t our only challenge in Burundi, either. Remember how I mentioned all the people in the villages and on the roads? Wherever we drove, we had people screaming “mzungu!” at us. We get called this most-endearing [insert sarcastic tone] KiSwahili term for “foreigner” throughout Africa, but this was on a whole other level. It was screaming and running bordering on crazy. It was people attaching themselves to our vehicle as we drove past. And it wasn’t just children.

If we got out of the vehicle, most people seemed to lose their nerve, as though we’d stepped onto equal footing. But the more time we spent in Burundi, and the further we got from Bujumbura, the more we realized that we hadn’t stepped down to their level at all. They were just too stunned to react. Wherever we walked, it was as though we were in a scene of a movie on pause. Everyone stopped doing what they were doing and simply stared. Only we moved through the scene, trying desperately to feign indifference.

But it was hard. And eventually, once we had spent a few nights in a row being stared for hours at our “campsites,” it got the better of us. It was time to leave Burundi.

So many villages, so many people.

Kids staring and shouting “mzungu!”

Burundi will remain forevermore a paradox for me. As a nameless mass, the Burundian people were incredibly challenging, with their begging, invasive staring, and fanatic shouting. But as individuals – restaurant workers, nuns, students, and park rangers – they were polite, kind, soft-tempered, and wonderful to interact with. The country had so much cultural potential, so much to engage the traveler, so much to stimulate the senses, yet it was nearly impossible to travel through.

I’m glad we went to Burundi. It was a challenging week, but it was one-of-a-kind. Will I ever go back? I don’t think so. A week in Burundi is enough.

Bruno and I celebrated our two-year anniversary on our last evening in Burundi.
Has it ONLY been two years? Feels like a lifetime already.