Land of a Thousand Hills

After a fairly tortuous but interesting 25 hour bus ride, I'm in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda. This is the farthest I've gone from Kenya, and my first real travel out of my host country.

I'm traveling with Alain, a Rwandan I met in Nairobi and have become close with in the past few months. I'm lucky enough to have his and his family's support in Rwanda. That means someone to travel with, a house to stay in, real fresh hot Rwandan food... All for free. And someone to keep me safe! And show me the awesome restaurants! I'm lucky for this.

Let me provide some quick anecdotes about the bus ride. As usual, any traveling in Africa is filled with strange events. For instance, our first bus driver was absolutely crazy. He drove so fast that I worried for my life! But somehow we made it to Kampala, Uganda. Some crazy crazy lady was sitting behind us and would NOT close the window and night, and nights in Africa, at least in a lot of places, are damn freezing and I was so unhappy because my bones were cold. We ate two giant plates of Pilau (spiced rice with beef chunks) on our way through, because somehow that was all that was available. Alain and I drank a lot of soda and ate a lot of cookies. Bus rides are definitely an excuse to eat bad food.

We crossed the border to Rwanda around 11am. Rwanda is clean, green, calm, hilly, and incredibly beautiful. I haven't been here very long and I can already see how DIFFERENT it is from Kenya. No garbage, I'm not getting hassled, there is an actual speed limit with police officers you cannot bribe, and people seem NICE. I have a good impression so far. I don't know how much it is appropriate to talk about this stuff, but it seems impossible that there was a genocide here 15 years ago. Only thing is there are a lot of amputees. Anyway, we arrived around 3, perhaps, at Alain's sister's house in a very nice neighborhood a bit from from downtown Kigali.

Last night I was completely exhausted from not sleeping well on a bus that went all night. I feel a LOT better this morning. While we're here, we'll spend a couple days in a national park, a couple days in Gisenyi on Lake Kivu, and plenty of time here in Kigali. I'll keep everyone updated!