Kigali to Kibuye: Rwanda is Beautiful

Kigali to Kibuye: Rwanda is Beautiful.
Jan 31
At 09:00, hotel management knocked on the door of my room to ask for money.  I paid them and crawled back into bed beside Nana.  We had another tussle this morning!  Ah, life is good…  We fell back asleep and got up at 13:00.  She went home and I hung out in the bar to wait for Leopold.  Leopold was too hung over and decided that he was not going to drive west today. By then, it was too late, so I stayed pretty close to Panafrica bar for the rest of the day.  No Kigali to Kibuye today.  So, it was something of a maintenance day…

This is Rwanda. Soldiers every 50 or 100 meters to keep the country safe.

Leopold and Joseph told me quite a story…  The two men have been great friends for many years.  The day before Leopold was to get married, Joseph told him to come to his bar because he had dowry money that he wanted to give him.  Leopold stayed at the bar with Joseph and they ended up drinking all of the dowry money that night.  Then, Leopold ended up spending all of the money he had brought as well.  At 07:00, he left the bar to many phone calls on the morning of his wedding.  He drove to collect his suit, went to the house to meet his wife at 08:00, and at 13:00 the wedding took place.

Feb 1
Whoa.  February…

Joseph came to meet me to say goodbye and I made my way to the Nyabugogo bus station to get on my way from Kigali to Kibuye, a city next to Lake Kivu in the western part of Rwanda.  $3.35 for the bus!  Great.

Rwanda is beautiful.  It is mountain ranges, lakes, rivers and clean.  They have a plastic bag ban here, so unlike most other developing countries, there is not a filth of plastic stuck in the bushes, trees and on the edges of the water.  The Rwandans keep this place so clean…

Lake Kivu.

I got to Kibuye and did not know what to do or where to go, so I walked down to the lakefront and had a beer with the older men who were enjoying the day there.  At about 16:00, as I was walking out, I met with four locals who were smoking marijuana on a dock on the side of the lake.  One of them introduced himself as Bob to me.  I did not get high with them, but I did share my bourbon whiskey flavored tobacco with them that we smoked from my pipe as we talked about Rwanda.

I told them about my story from two nights ago and my friends Joseph and Leopold chasing a girl away from me in favor of another because of their presumed moisture conditions.  My new friends nodded their heads at the story and told me as well that this is a Rwandan specialty.  Really?  This is a thing here!  What a crazy cultural phenomenon…

For $6.70, I found a room on top of a hill that overlooks Lake Kivu at Home St. Jean.  The guesthouse is impeccably clean and should cost ten times the price for the views it offers.  Incredible!

Kigali to Kibuye was a good move!

I walked into a service center for mobile networks, had fun getting my Rwandan SIM fixed while teasing the girl behind the counter. I headed back to the guesthouse where I met a Dutchman named Philip, who I drank beer with until midnight.  Philip is biking all around Rwanda.  Biking is his thing and he does it all over the world.  He told me his biggest hassle is dogs.  He said that usually the dogs are just curious about him, but sometimes aggressive dogs come after him.  One time in India, a very aggressive dog started chasing him and it was getting close.  Philip was riding his bike as fast as he could through the Indian village.  He said the villages stopped and stared, as a white guy came whizzing through their town with a dog hot on his heels.  That must have been a pretty bizarre daily incident for the locals…

p.s….

The dark line is a superhighway of ants that ran for about 40 meters until I lost it in the grass. I saw something like this once before in South America and now again in Africa. The dirt below them on their road is a groomed path from so many ants moving down it. Just think of the footwork it would take them to wear a 40 meter path through the grass, 40… I am not sure what they were moving, but there must be billions of them to form a line like this that does not stop crawling for that kind of distance. And how is something like this initially organized? Whatever the goal, it was a bit of a high risk operation because part of their highway crossed a dirt road that did not have much traffic on it, but when it did, there were hundreds of any casualties everytime. They sure are fascinating and busy little creatures. The ant does not get enough recognition for their hard work. For some reason, “I worked as hard as an ant all day” just does not have the right flow…