The Pearl of Africa

Hi all

 

Well, we’re in Rwanda, after a fabulous ten day stint in Uganda (surely the world’s greenest country). While there, we saw the other source of the Nile (the one that comes from Lake Victoria, and the one that caused poor Speke to come to grief on the day he was due to debate with Burton), the Murchison Falls (where the Nile gets squeezed into a narrow gorge only 7 metres wide), Queen Elizabeth National Park (where I once briefly worked as a consultant for CARE) and the Mgahinga Gorilla Park on the border with Rwanda and Congo. We caught glimpses of the Ruwenzori mountains (that’s on next year’s list for a return visit), and spent some quality time amongst a group of chimpanzees in the Bugongo forest (which I found to be an unnervingly familiar experience, perhaps a reflection on the less-then-immaculate table manners of my own three boys!). Oh, and we re-crossed the equator for the final time on the trip, signifying the fact that we truly are, now, on the home straight. We also, by the way, saw unnervingly large quantities of kigelia fruit. But I’ll perhaps keep that a secret for the time being….

 

Rwanda is an entirely different experience. Also stunningly green and beautiful, and clearly a country very much on the up. But the omnipresent reminders of its recent dark days are pretty stark. They are also, for us in Zim, a cause of some rather grim relief. Whatever we’ve been through in the last decade, thank goodness it never came to this.

 

On the positive side, though (there are many positives about Rwanda, fortunately), we managed to get some extremely hard-to-come by gorilla permits, and a select few of our party will be going to see the gorillas tomorrow, back up on the Rwandan side of the Virunga Massif. Sadly I’m not one of them, having already seen the gorillas before (many years ago, it has to be said). But I’m still thrilled that they’ll get a chance to do so. It’s an opportunity that simply can’t be missed.

 

From here our route is uncertain. We were planning to go down Lake Tanganyika and then over to Mtwara, hoping to cross the Rovuma into northern Mozambique. However, latest word is that the Rovuma ferry is now languishing at the bottom of the Rovuma river, and the only way across is by paying several enterprising villagers fairly substantial sums to lash their pirogues together and load the vehicle on top. This appeals to me enormously, but we’ve also heard that the river is in full spate at the moment and therefore not crossable. As it’s a very long way to travel to find out that we can’t cross the river, we may end up finding an alternative route down through Malawi. Ahh, the hazards of African travel. I love it!

 

More soon……

 

Gus