We arrived in the tiny but yet so much spoken of country of Rwanda. They call it the country of the thousand hills and this is indeed what it is. The scenery is amongst the prettiest so far.
Our first stop was the city of Gisenyi, which is just next to the border with the Congo and is Rwanda’s beach-retreat since it is built on the shore of Lake Kivu. Surprisingly the beach is really nice and it could almost be a beach on the Mediterranean only that the water is a bit less clear. People are chilling on the sand, swimming and having a walk along the pavements (!) that are lined with massive trees.
There is green everywhere and it is extremely clean. This is the most European looking place we have been so far. Gisenyi could easily be the St Tropez of this region, where all the aid workers, UN officials as well as Congolese gangsters are spending their money and afternoons sipping cocktails while taking a break from their base just a few kilometres away in Congo. We drove all along the shore of the lake to its southern point which is not far away from the border to Burundi. After each turn on this tiny road leading along the lake there was yet another spectacular scenery to take a picture of.
Rwanda’s tourism strategy is clearly laid out for up-market tourism; research has shown that people who come to Rwanda have an average of 200 USD to spend per day. Consequently, camping is something that does not exist and the rest of the accommodation options are expectantly pricey. The prices are of a European level but this also applies to the standard of the accommodation, there are no bucket showers here, hot, running water every day!
So until now we have been staying in church accommodations which seem to be the only alternative for backpacker budgets, people don’t ask about your religious views but just to make it safe there are no double beds. Yes, we are married and yes French and Germans can get married..!
After a lot of back and forth, we finally decided that we could not leave this part of Africa without seeing any sort of primates (big monkeys);
we did not visit the gorillas and neither the chimps of Tanzania or Uganda, but our consciousness could not be stilled until we could tick it off the list. So eventually we opted to visit the chimpanzees in the Nungwe National park here in Rwanda.
We did not have to track long into the forest when the first chimp crossed our way. Those guys, with whom we share 99.5% of our DNA, are really big. And they are fast, so as quickly as we had seen him he was gone again.
We could hear them screaming from around the forest but spotting them is a different story. After literally crawling through bushes and brunches, sliding down mountain slopes and fighting with all sorts of vegetation while hunting after their sounds we managed to get a quite good look at a group of them. Unfortunately there are no decent pictures to show...
After all this excitement we felt we needed a proper meal, being tired of rice, potatoes and banana we went for the most exotic option available in the little Rwandan town of Butare, Chinese and believe it or not it was the best Chinese either of us had ever had.
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