Hotel Credo Butare

... ils ont vu mon passport (car j etais francais). Donc, en voyant cela j ai vu le consul de france qui a telephone (2 fois) a l embassade du rwanda, et comme cela ma demande a prise de maniere plus serieuse (Merci le consul). Mais les autorites rwandaise ont traine les pieds et m ont donne le visa apres une semaine d attente au lieu de l avoir le lendemain. En sortant du Rwanda j ai vu un couple de francais qui ...

... Gisenyi. A small town in the hills overlooking Lake Kivu. It does have a small beach but the color of the water near the shore dissuaded me from swimming. The walk along the lake is quite lovely and about 1 km from town is the border to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. I walked to the border but to cross it it would have cost US$35 and there's not much reason to visit the border town of Goma. Basically, I just spent a couple of ...

... and that I was, for the first time on this journey, getting to leave Kigali, now infamous for inducing a case of the Folly (see previous entry). And by leaving Kigali, I actually got to see a little bit of the real Rwanda, outside of the bustling metropolis and capital, and indeed I came away impressed. A couple of quick notes, first. 1) Rwanda is, by American standards, fairly poor, but on the 'Dan Moses Industrial Country Scale and Index' (which you can ...

... have been dug up and preserved in lime and placed in rooms in the college. There is currently no writing or information or anything about this at the site, it looks like they are in the process of thinking about it. So we were taken by a man around the back of the main building to rooms which were opened to see the bodies ranging from babies to adults laid on metal beds in 20 rooms and another room that contained bones ...

The Land Rover of our guide Paul ate up the beautiful hills of Rwanda as we made our way from Kigali to the northern part of the country and the Volcano National Park. The last Saturday of each month was a national "cleaning day" and Paul proudly explained that communities would gather this day and decide on projects they would co-operatively work on. We sped by many such gatherings of neighbours doing the things most of us ...

... afternoon we leave for a 4-days trip through the country to see some lovely places we've been previously. This is the itinerary we will follow: Kigali, Butare, Nyungwe forest, Cyangugu, Kibuye, Gisenyi, Ruhengeri and finally we return to Kigali First we visit Butare, here we stay at hotel Ibis. Butare once was "the" university town of Rwanda. . Today the site of several academic institutions, including the country's ...

While in Rwanda, a macabre, but necessary tourist attraction are the genocide memorials. There are many of these scattered all over the country, noticeable by the purple ribbons or paint, the colour of mourning and remembrance. The first, and essential, site you should go to is the Kigali Memorial Centre. This site houses mass graves, but also an incredible museum and research centre. Inside the history of the Rwandan genocide is laid out in clear, multi-lingual displays. The ...

I had deliberately left visits to genocide sites until the end of my stay in Rwanda, so that I might have spoken to people about what happened, have read as much as possible, and have tried to gain the best understanding possible of what happened before seeing it with my own two eyes. I'm not sure how well I achieved these goals; I certainly have read all I could get my hands on, but it is rare that I have spoken to Rwandans about their personal experiences of what happened in ...

"It was unlike any other event I have reported on and in different ways it has changed everybody - the survivors most of all, but also the doctors, the aid workers, the priests, the journalists. We had learned something about the soul of man that would leave us with nightmares long into the future. This was not death as I had seen it in South Africa, or Eritrea, or even Northern Ireland. Nothing could have prepared me for ...

So, I've been here a week now. It hasn't been an action packed week but still there has been plenty of interesting things see and try to absorb. Upon arriving at 8:30pm on Saturday (of last week) I spent the night in Kigali at a Presbyterian guest house. Seemed better than driving the two hours from Kigali to Butare that same night after a 7 hour plane flight. This also provided a chance to go shopping the ...