The Very Lost Tribesman

9th April 2010

Video

On Monday morning, we met up with a guide from a local travel company we had hired for a two-day voyage to the north and west of the country. Hamadi was a gem — friendly, helpful, and very open. We hesitated to ask too many questions but he talked frankly about some of his own experience in 1994. During the genocide, he was working for the International Red Cross, the only international organization that didn’t flee. He spent the worst of it holed up in the ICRC headquarters a few blocks from our hotel in Kigali, ducking gunfire and watching bodies quite literally pile up in the streets.

Hamadi is a big fan of Kagame, and not terribly worried about the lack of a serious opposition or the complaints of mistreatment by those who would comprise one. The country, he said, urgently needs decisiveness, action, planning. It does not have the luxury of a checks-and-balances system like ours designed to slow things down and frustrate change. It is mired in poverty and deep psychological wounds and still faces external threats in the Congo. It’s a fairly persuasive argument.

We drove up into the hills outside Kigali and across spectacular mountain scenery on a winding drive to Musanze, a substantial city on the edge of Volcanoes National Park. Hamadi took us off the main road up a steep hill to the extravagant Virunga Lodge, overlooking two lakes, Burera and Ruhangaro, just a couple miles from the Uganda border. The eco-lodge (scene of many of our photos) was out of our price range (though Bill Gates reportedly enjoyed his stay there), but we stayed for an hour or so and watching local villagers perform an Intore dance. I was expecting some kind of cheesy Disneyland experience, but it was in fact extremely impressive. The troupe of dancers, sponsored by the hotel, is traveling to South Africa for the World Cup this summer.

We decided, to my partial subsequent regret, not to undertake the activity that brings the most tourists to Rwanda and on which the country‘s future tourist economy probably depends: trekking up the Virunga Mountains to see the highly endangered mountain gorillas. People regularly describe it as a transformative or life-changing moment. To me it seemed like a lot of expense ($500 each for a permit) and work for one hour observing some of our biological cousins in order to be reminded of the oneness of the web of life, etc. I like to think I already appreciated that all species are connected, though I don’t think that’s the only reason we should be nicer to each other. In any case, I had a higher utility for spending the $500 on some decent food to carry me through the three more weeks I have in Tanzania before departing for a month of cultural and culinary recovery in Europe. So sue me.

Instead, on day 2, we continued south to Gisenyi, a handsomely situated town on Lake Kivu. To Maria’s immense annoyance, I kept remarking how the entire verdant and hilly area could be a fantastic golf destination; looking over one tea plantation in particular, I was suddenly with a vision of 18 magnificent Par 3s, 4s and 5s fitting neatly together on the property. With its cooler climate and saw tooth hills, the Lake Kivu area almost looks like an equatorial Switzerland. Perhaps someday it could be, though it still has a ways to go.

For the moment, it is still smack in the middle of one of the more troubled places on earth (something I didn’t quite fully appreciate in planning the trip but which I later came to appreciate in accounts like this one:

). The road to Gisenyi follows towering mountains that form the border between Rwanda and the inaptly named Democratic Republic of Congo, which surely must figure in any top 5 list of most wretched countries on earth for the last 20 years.

I certainly never expected to be traveling within sight of the Congo, but there we were — in fact, at one point just a few feet away. Gisenyi directly borders the Congo city of Goma and Hamadi, who used to cross over regularly to attend classes at a Congolese university, seemed eager to show it to us. It didn’t seem like an obvious attraction but given my interest in such things I agreed, figuring hey, when am I ever going to get back to the Congo?

The answer is, hopefully, never. There are actually two border crossings in Gisenyi — one in the more crowded upper town, and one, much calmer, on the lakeshore, near a number of pleasant-looking hotels on the Rwandan side in what passes for the tourist part of the city. The upper crossing was complete madness: shouting everywhere, our safari jeep slowly parting a mass of people and bicycle taxis while bumping along the pock-marked dirt road (the line “Roll ’em up,” from Chevy Chase‘s drive through East Saint Louis in the movie “Vacation” was uttered a few times).

Hamadi, who didn’t seemed concerned by much of anything, told me it was a very bad idea to take pictures, a request I honored at the upper crossing though I snapped a few surreptitiously at the lower one. It was apparently just an average day but pure chaos; a few Rwandan guards seemed to peer over the scene but waves of people essentially moved back and forth across the demarcation line without impediment to work, shop and attend schools. When the border you most commonly see is the U.S-Mexico or Canada one, you forget most borders in the world don’t look like that at all — they are porous and poorly controlled, even in urban areas. At least at that moment nobody seemed to be exactly fleeing anywhere, though over the last 15 years literally millions of people have done so, many down this very road. In the weeks after the Rwandan genocide, when Hutus fearful of reprisals walked over to the Congo, about 12,000 people an hour crossed the post here. More recently, the flow has been the other way, away from the assorted civil wars in the Congo back to Rwanda and camps like the UNHCR one we passed a few miles outside Gisenyi.

I would have loved to add the DRC and its 875,000 square miles (it is the size of the United States east of the Mississippi River) to my world map of countries visited, even it meant just stepping a toe over. But as two white people is a safari van, our prospects for just sliding across unnoticed seemed substantially less than those of the average local. Probably the best thing that would happen is talking to somebody with a gun and paying $60 for a visa. Peering down the road into Goma, I didn‘t see the pay off. If Gisenyi on the Rwanda side is San Diego, Goma is Tijuana — and trust me, Gisenyi, while perched in a nice spot, is not San Diego.

Since I only had a map of Rwanda, I hadn’t realized until we arrived that Goma was just across the border; I’d thought it was deeper inside the Congo. Later, reading up on the place, I decided it was probably just as well I didn’t realize we were close. The place makes about as good a case as you can make for being utterly cursed. First came the wave of millions of refugees fleeing Rwanda who piled into camps in and around the city (whose “regular” population is about 250,000). Then, Rwanda invaded the Congo in part to break up the camps, where Hutu militia were reconstituting. That precipitated a wave of wars, officially ended last year but still smoldering in many places, that add up to the deadliest in Africa’s entire history, with 5.6 million people killed — most civilians caught up in the fighting or diseases in the camps. Eastern Congo has also become the rape capital of the world, with rape commonly employed as a tactic of political terror. Goma (where, to her credit, Hilary Clinton visited last August) has been very much caught up in the middle of it.

Then in 2002 a volcano about 10 kilometers north of Goma erupted and poured lava into the center of town and across the airport runway along the border, where we saw a steady stream of UN planes coming in to land. Topping it all off, we read in our book over lunch, scientists are concerned Goma (and Gisenyi, too) could be suddenly wiped out by an explosion of poisonous carbon dioxide building up at the bottom of Lake Kivu, similar to one that killed 1,750 people in Cameroon several years ago. In short, gas builds up in the bottom of a lake, and some trigger causes it to float up in a giant, belching bubble of poison that suffocates everything for miles. It took scientists a long time to figure out why so many people simply dropped dead in Cameroon. Once they did, they tried to identify other lakes in danger and pointed to Kivu. They say they’re working on it. In any case, after a lakeside lunch on Gisenyi, we weren’t too upset about leaving town.