On Saturday I arrived in Ruhengeri town (also renamed Musanze). It's the place where tourists gather together before heading out to Volcanoes National Park to visit the mountain gorillas. Despite it being the place to be, I don't find it very attractive for tourists, but there's a lot you can do around here. After dragging a heavy bag with me from one end of town to the other, I found a nice and cheap dorm-bed in Centre Pastorale de Fatima. (Sorry Mo for bursting your bubble, Fatima is actually Catholic!)
Palm Sunday
On Sunday morning I woke up to all the Hallelujahs in the world. It sounded as if the entire village was standing at my frontdoor, singing. Tired and with no scheduled plans whatsoever I got myself a nice breakfast served at the upstairs bar and glanzed over the garden hedge. Guided by drums, clapping and singing, I heard people coming near, but didn't see anyone as such. Until I noticed half a forest of walking palmleaves, jumping up and down over the hedge. I clearly wasn't very much awake yet, cause it did take me a few minutes to realize what the hell those things were and what was happening. When I left the hostel a little later, I found out that the entire village was in fact sitting and singing next to my dorm. The churchservice was held in the immense garden, adjacent to my dorm. I did stick around for a while, but got so bored I left and set out on a hike.
Musanze Cave
According to my personal bible - the interesting, funny and only guide on Rwanda: the Bradt Guide - there should be a small private airstrip (daddy & co) just a bit further down the road from here and a huge cave with an entrance the size of a cathedral. You can easily visit and they're trying to make it a bit more touristic, but locals see it as a holy place. During the genocide, many people fled to into the cave, trying to find shelter for the killers. All in vain cause it ended up in a bloodbath. To most people here, it is regarded as a massgrave and should not be entered. Didn't matter anyway cause life changes more rapidly than the Bradt-people can update their guide and there was no sign of the cave or any arrow that pointed towards it.
I ended up at Muhabara hotel - named after the humongous volcano right in front of us - for a drink and met Ira, Sabrina and Amelia who were planning to hike a trail in Volcanoes Park on Monday: Mount Bisoke and Dian Fossey's tomb. Interested in the whole let's-all-share-a-car plan, I decided to got with them.
Climbing Mount Bisoke
I don't even want to go into details about the discussion Amelia and I had with the 'park manager', but we were pretty pissed off and this guy was just a freakin' puppeteer who knew absolutely nothing about what he was doing. The standard answer to any question is 'you have to go to Kigali and ask'. I'll discuss the 'we-don't-have-a-form-for-that-policy in my blogpost on tourism, but to cut a long story short: although Dian Fossey's tomb was actually on the way back from the Mt Bisoke trail, we weren't allowed to go there or combine the two because 'it are two different tours, on two different days'. End of story. We chose the biggest challenge: to take on the steep climb to the 3711m top of Mount Bisoke and the volcano crater lake.
From the park's headquarters at Kinigi, we drove 20km in rollercoaster-style to the start of our trail at 2700m. The slopes on the edges of the park are all used for cultivation and by the time we reached the last crop fields - all already a bit exhausted - our guide told us we had just arrived at the border of the National Park at 2800m. Oh my! We looked at eachother thinking we'd never make it even halfway up.
The climb was tough, strenguous, exhausting and physically demanding. It wasn't so much the tiredness, it was the altitude that really got to me. Grasping for breath, I had to stop every few meters to try and inhale. And some point I got a headache and my stomach was playing up. The rest of the group was way ahead of me and we split up. One army guy and guide stayed with me, the other two joined the other group. The armed guards are needed to protect groups from buffalo and possible elephants that roam the area. And of course, off the record: rebels that try to cross the Congolese-Rwandese border through the National Park.
Views from the mountain down onto the valley and villages were - literally - breathtaking and absolutely beautiful. We found ourselves walked amidst a wild jungle of ferns, trees, tropical flowers and plants, grasses, vicious nettles and up to our knees in the mud. The paths were made by the buffaloes, so the mud was a mix of dirt, dung and water from the heavy rains. It made the walking even harder. In the end I made it to 3300m, but was too slow to make it to the top and back the same day. When the other reached the top and started their decent, I turned back as well. The decent was in a way even more demanding, especially for your knees and more sliding down than climbing down.
Around 4pm we made it back to the resting place where the path to Dian Fossey and Mt Bisoke splits up. All reunited, we decended further until we made it back to the cars around 5.30pm. We'd been climbing since 8.30am in the morning.
I was pretty pissed off at myself, for not being able to reach the top, but on the other hand I didn't do too bad in the end, knowing I am in no shape whatsoever. And besides, I'm getting used to be the last one or the only one giving up during such activities. Whenever I read in my guide 'we have no record of tourists having to return during a hike', I'm thinking straight away 'wanna bet I know the first one'?
Overall, it was super nice, despite the Dian Fossey setback. Incredible vegetation, in the middle of the jungle, sort of off the beaten track and halfway up a freakin' volcano... that's pretty awesome all together. Tomorrow I'll be heading downtown to find Amahoro-tours, another touroperator offering a nice range of community based activities in the Musanze-region. On Wednesday, I'll be visiting the Ubushobozi women's organisation who support young girls in making a living by sewing bags.
Monday April 18th - Ruhengeri 22 degrees
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