Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Tourist in Rwanda - during Genocide Memorial (Journal: April 2011)


Excerpt from my April 11, 2011 journal:

In about an hour Jonathan and I will be back on the road headed toward Bujumbura.  What a Rwanda tour this has been!  We’ve hiked through tea fields (who knew those bushes can grow up to chest height?!), seen a group of Colobus monkeys in the wild, including the cutest baby Colobus, all covered in white hair, eaten and shopped our way through Kigali and are now enjoying a lake/marshaland in south-easter Rwanda.  As I type, Jonathan is using binoculars to check out some big (3 feet tall) stork/pelican walking along the shore.  From a distance they seem majestic and graceful, and I suppose they are, but as soon as you get a closer view, they seem to have flown out a bad horror movie – their face is covered in warts and red blotches and their waddles (which are gigantic) are covered in short, coarse hair.  To cool off they stand still and spread their wings, about 5 feet across.

We’ve been in Rwanda for 5 days now, and all 5 have been official genocide memorial days.  I hadn’t planned to visit then, but neither had I actually looked to be sure when it was so we wouldn’t interrupt.  The airplane carrying the Preisdent of Rwanda and the President of Burundi was shot down around 8:30pm on April 6 and their 7-day memorial period starts April 7.  (Burundians memorialize the genocide on April 6 – not sure why there are different dates.)  During the whole week, everything is open in the morning but closed in the afternoon.  It seems like a very smart way to memorialize something of this magnitude – 1 day would never be enough, yet 7 days is significant.  But life can’t shut down – people still need to earn a living, buy food, work, so the lively mornings shows living resilience in contrast to all the death that occurred. 

Every where we’ve gone, from the Nyuwenge Forest to this remote lake, people where purple shirts, purple ribbons and hang purple banners to remember what happened – how 800,000 people were killed in 2 months.  Memorial sites dot the landscape. 

We visited the Genocide Memorial Museum in Kigali on Saturday, and I’m not sure what to write.  It’s like visiting the Holocaust Museum in Washignton, DC, where everyone is quiet and doesn’t know how to react appropriately because it’s all so horrific.  The Rwandan genocide occurred 18 years ago, so if you were 10 when it happened (definitely old enough to remember it all), you’d be 28 years old now.  The museum had video interviews with survivors and you realize that there are thousands of people who lost as much as those we heard.  A woman told how her parents were taken away, and she saw and heard her three sisters be thrown into a latrine, followed by large rocks until their screams were silent.   I wonder how many people we passed on the street, or spoke to in a gas station or a shop or a hotel, experienced something similar.  Thousands.  I won’t write more, because: 1) it’s so mind-blowing to be chased down by your neighbors, have so many people killed, and still the international community didn’t intervene; and 2) Rwanda is trying really hard to be more than the genocide and they are.

Last January I in Rwanda I met a couple from NYC who had flown in to go on a 12-day Rwanda tour.  It’s definitely on the radar and has amazing nature and culture to offer.  Our second day we had lunch and lounged at the Nyuwenge Forest Lodge, a private hotel with its own helipad and infinity pool over-looking the oldest prehistoric forest in the world.  It never completely froze over during the last ice age so there are many plants/animals that could have been here for literally millions of years.  The Igishigishigi plant is literally thought to have been food for dinosaurs!  The lodge is the kind of place that Brangelina would stay should they ever visit Rwanda – the location and decoration is absolutely stunning.  We saw a chandelier made of tea strainers since it’s located on a tea plantation next to the forest.

Rwanda is using tourism, for a large part, to dig it’s way out of poverty, and the government has a highly-centralized office of parks and recreation.  Their capacity to communicate what you can do and for how much money is not up to snuff, however.  Each “activity” is billed separately and costs a pretty penny.  For example, a hike to see the Colobus, Chimpanzees or “Primates” are all paid separately.  A plain “hike” is also paid separately from that.  We paid $70 (for Jonathan) / $50 (for me as an East African Community resident) to go on a hike to see the Colobus monkeys, which we saw largely in part to the tracking team that stays on the ground to direct visitors.  However, we were told we could see them near the guest house where we stayed and then also hike to find them from the other tourism office.  The neglected to tell us that if the monkeys moved too far away and wouldn’t be able to reach them and hike back before dark, that they wouldn’t even let us try and find them.  The guide (one of 7 guides sitting at the park reception park doing nothing) refused to let us enter the park since they had moved 2.5 hours away by 1pm.  Essentially we had hiked through the tea fields to find the smaller colony (a 2 hour trip) and were not allowed to enter the real forest to hike or try and find the monkeys again.  They explained that it is because we would have been “hiking,” instead of tracking Colobus, and that’s a different activity and would cost another $40 – 50.  They’re extremely proud of the 6,000 people who visited the park in 2010 and couldn’t have cared less that a new pricing system may give them more clients.  But oh, well!  We did see Colobus during our hike, Mountain monkeys (cute black monkeys with really puffy, white lamb chops on the side and bottom of their face) along the road, and Vervet monkeys on the guesthouse grounds.  Now I’ll now how to do it next time – pay for a 1-2 day hiking pass and get into the forest.  If you really want to see monkeys, pay for that separately. 

In Kigali, we ate at Mama Africa a large, open-air terraced restaurant with thatched roof, followed by drinks at Republika Café – how I would LOVE to decorate a place like that.  All bright African patterns and old wooden chairs and fixtures.  So cool.  We had coffee at La Galette, where I’ll definitely be bringing the boys for croissants and limitless rocking on the big rocking horses for children.  Lunch was, of course, at Khana Khazana, the Indian restaurant that used to have a sister restaurant in Burundi.  (Indian food in Africa is somehow some of the best in the world!). 

In a few minutes we’ll head back to the main road, giving the hotel manager a ride to a funeral before driving back to Bujumbura.  It’s 18 years after the genocide and bodies are still being found and services held.

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