Turning Right on Red: Gettin' Around

Traveling in East Africa is remarkably fairly easy. While inter-African flights in most places are still expensive, buses get you most places if you have the time. Rwanda and Burundi are so small that getting around within and between the countries usually involves less than 6 hours going most places. The prices are super cheap generally speaking and the list of cool places is relatively known (at least among the Ex-Pat community). Visas are usually not too bad (except Tanzania where they gouge you for $100) and I've heard as a Resident you can get a multi-country pass for cheap. The East African Community is smart in forming a union and increasing economic inter-activity in a way I didn't see in West Africa.

I love "other important town" of which there are like 8 in Rwanda

Getting on a plane here is often like this where you are randomly in front of a bunch of planes with no direction and could easily end up in the completely wrong place

For travel here, you just have to put up with very tight spaces on buses, blaringly loud radio in a language you don’t understand (or if you are less lucky terribly dubbed movies), and usually uncomfortably hot temperatures with incredibly frustrating people reaching over your shoulder every time you try to open a window. Seriously, this happens every trip, it’s like Africans are immune to cold (and when I say cold I mean 65 F and above with a nice cool breeze). Roads are not surprisingly horrible and bumpy, unless you are in Rwanda, which is an exceptional East African country for a variety of reasons.

Two weeks ago I traveled to Bujumbura, one of my top 5 favorite sounding African capital names (slightly behind Ouagadougou, pronounced “wagudugu,” Antananarivo and Yamoussoukro, but slightly ahead of Tripoli, Windhoek, and Djibouti –the Capital of none other than Djibouti), in Burundi, to visit the famous beaches of Lake Tanganyika. They do not let down, the lake seems like an ocean it’s so big, the beaches are sandy and the water is warm. It’s amazing to see the beach culture also transported there with pick-up volleyball games happening and I even saw someone kite boarding.

Mount Meru in the foreground, Kilimanjaro in the background

Lucy the crazy female chimp at our hotel in Bujumbura

My Kiwi friend and roommate Johanna plays with Lucy

Some Burundian friends and Rwandans that went down as well for the weekend

Nightfalls on Bujumbura (downtown in the background)

It was also amazing getting a hug from Lucy the enormous and aggressive female chimpanzee the owner keeps at Pinnacle 19, the hotel I stayed at. But the highlight of the trip might have been on the way there on the bus. Next to me sat an African man continuously chowing down samosa’s (later we reportedly heard people were keeping tabs and it was more than 10)! When you enter Burundi from Rwanda the road gets super windy and mountain-e. It didn't help that the bus driver was driving like a mad man (you can guess where this is going by now). I feel so fortunate that this passenger turned to his right (and not me on his left) to projectile vomit everywhere hitting no fewer than three people. The reaction was my favorite part: the bus did not stop, no one yelled (as they would for sure in the States), and besides a few sighs, the people covered in this man’s vomit mostly just laughed; as in: “look how many samosa’s you ate, you idiot, you vomited, hahahahaha.” They wiped themselves down the best they could as the man continued to vomit and went on with life. It wasn't just that these passengers were all remarkably calm, I would go as far as saying this incident was an ice breaker and stimulated good conversation. TIA – This Is Africa, as they say…

Insect with crazy natural wholes in it's wings at Mt. Kabuye, the tallest mountain (doesn't include volcanoes which are much higher) in rwanda, about 2700 meters