Day 83 – Back to civilization?

Gisenyi to Kigali, Okapi Hotel

After breakfast and checkout from Paradis Malahide, we caught the bus back to Kigali, retracing the route we had originally taken to get to Gisenyi, via Musanze.

First task after arriving at our hotel (which has decent wireless internet) was to book some flights to Addis Ababa. We’ve decided to fly for a couple of reasons, one being that if we went overland we’d have to retrace a lot of old ground and it’s a long way, and the other that we’ve heard that the Kenya-Ethiopia border is a little unsafe.

After that important business was out of the way, we took a walk up and down the hills of downtown Kigali. We dropped into the Hotel Des Mille Collines, the hotel that was the subject of the film “Hotel Rwanda” (which neither of us have seen yet).

We found a nice looking restaurant strip on our walk, so we selected one of them for dinner, much to K’s relief, who finally managed to get a decent steak with béarnaise sauce!

One of the things to deal with being a muzungu in Africa is that you’re a target for people trying to extract money from you. For some reason, we seemed to see much more of it today than at almost any other time (in recent weeks anyway). While waiting for the bus in Gisenyi we were approached by two different one-armed men (though not at the same time). While walking through Kigali today we had one of the most direct approaches yet - a young guy came up to us and just said “give me money”. A more heart wrenching example today though was a young child, about 4 years old, who must hang around the road leading from our hotel. We walked up and down there twice today, and every time we went past this young child came up and asked us for money. In the background we could see the child’s mother, and occasionally she seemed to call out “instructions”. As we’re here for a couple more days, we’re sure we haven’t seen the last of this particular child, who is way too young to be put to work.

We will miss leaving Swahili speaking countries as we have become used to being called “muzungu”, and the surprise and delight when you let them know you understand that they are talking about us! They often seem surprised that we understand, but when you’ve heard it as much as we have it its pretty hard not to – and since you can also buy t-shirts with the word on it, they should know that we know anyway!

Finally, now that we have decent internet access for a couple of days, we’ve been able to upload another album of photos, this time of our travels in Tanzania, as well as the video of giraffes fighting that we took in Serengeti.