The Incredible Journey

Who's in Rwanda? IIIII'MMMM in Rwanda!!! It's a magical, magical land filled with coffee and traffic laws. I almost don't know what to do with myself, to be honest. So I know I promised I would post a lot of pictures, but here's the problem: Some of the little gremlins at the orphanage (otherwise known as kids) found my camera and decided to play with it. Needless to say, they broke it. So I've been trying to find somewhere that can fix it, to no avail so far. Luckily, I brought my other camera too, but it's a film camera (I know, old school) so I'll have to post those pictures when I get home. There's still hope that the digital camera will be fixed, though.

So we had a bit of an adventurous journey to Rwanda. Certainly not over the top as far as travelling in Africa can go, but still kind of fun. We knew that it was about a 10 hour bus ride from Kampala to Kigali, so we were settled in for a long day. I was at the window, Terra was in the middle, and a random lady was sitting on the other side of Terra. The first part of the ride was just the usual. We'd stop occasionally so everyone could get out and go to the bathroom in the bushes or buy some meat on a stick off the side of the road. Luckily, we had our own toilet paper in our bags. Whew! Never travel without it. Terra was coming back to our seats after going to the bathroom and managed to get a meat stick to the side of her head. Meaning, the guy knocked her behind the ear with it and actually drew blood. The typical part is that he noticed, but just walked away. Niiiice.

We continued the journey, and then all of a sudden we turned off the main road onto this tiny dirt road that seemed waaaay too small for our gigantic bus, and we actually almost tipped over as we made the awkward and slanted turn. I was a little confused because it seemed like a strange route to take to Rwanda on a major bus line, but it IS Africa so I just accepted it. Terra, however, has been to Rwanda before and did not remember such a funky detour. She threw out the idea that maybe we were sneaking into Rwanda the back way. Seemed logical. Of course, no one around us spoke English so we were really clueless for the first while. We were travelling along, flying out of our seats like it was some kind of a really bumpy amusement park ride when we suddenly came to a stop. Here was the problem: We were face to face with another bus on this one way road. On our left side was a nice hefty drop, sufficient to turn our bus over a few times. On the right side was an upwards slope, covered in bushes and trees. Hmmmmmmm, what to do. OBVIOUSLY, we started to back up right along the edge of the drop with one guy standing there in case we started to slide over. Because you know, he could hold us up on his own. After about 20 minutes of manuevering, we were actually able to let the other bus pass by us, while we teetered on the side of the slope. I covered my eyes the whole time. Sorry Mom, I did think of you while it was happening :0)

After the other bus passed by, we kept driving for awhile and we met numerous other slopes and ditches, and hit one bump the made every person on the bus fly out of their seats and scream. Fun, eh? You know it's crazy when even the Africans are looking a little nervous. Then they just laughed awkwardly and continued on, which was even funnier to Terra and I. But eventually, after about an hour we came upon another bus off to the side of the road. It looked like they were stuck in the mud, but they were waaaay off the road so we had no idea how they could have possibly ended up there. Anyways, 3/4 of the people on our bus got off and we drove away. Terra and I looked at each other and then just accepted this crazy process as natural and decided to eat our lunch. A few minutes later, we did the mother of all turn arounds. There was much manuevering, backing into bushes, and skidding in the mud, but we made it. We drove back to the place where we had left our passengers and they got back on, tired and muddy. Then we headed back the way we had come and it started to rain. Back muddy roads in the rain in Africa on a big bus...always a good idea. But we made it to the main road okay. So clearly, the only reason that we took this massive detour was to push that one bus out of the mud. A bus that had no business being back there in the first place. Africa? Africa.

When we made it back to the main road, everyone applauded and the journey continued. Then, it started to rain again. Of course, it would be too much to ask to have a window that actually closed. So all the way through Western Uganda I had a steady waterfall on my shoulder and pants. I was quite pruny by the time we reached the border. When we got to the border, there was all of a sudden an "every man for himself" feel to everything. We had to fight our way off the bus, using our passports as weapons, and run over to immigration. When we were allowed to leave Uganda, we ran through no man's land past all of the men promising to give us a "good exchange rate". Code for RIP-OFF, which we're not stupid enough to fall for. We got our passports stamped on the Rwandan side and noticed that there were 3 identical bussed parked next to each other and we weren't sure which one was ours. Eventually we found it because our luggage was being torn apart by immigration outside the bus. Very helpful. Once we fought our way back ON the bus, a guy came on and told us that the immigration guys had used the wrong stamp in our passports. It was the 2010 stamp instead of 2009. So what did we do? We fought our way off the bus again, elbowed people to get into the line-up at immigration, yelled at a guy to tried to throw his passport over our heads into the window, and got the guy at the desk to handwrite 2009 in our passports. Then we scrambled back on the bus right before it took off to continue the journey.

So that's a little summary of the trip here. It was wonderfully amusing, I have to say. Now we're staying at our friend Ian's house (a Rwandan pastor) and we're trying to enjoy our little vacation from the craziness of Uganda. We just drank Rwandan coffee...mmmmmmm...that also probably explains why this blog is so long. I can't keep control of my fingers! They're going a mile a minute! But yeah, we're going to visit some of the genocide memorials on Monday and hopefully go and see Ian's school and maybe get some ideas for our own project. Kigali is a wonderful place and I think Rwanda is one of the most beautiful places I've ever been. I know that there's a lot more beautiful places in the world for me to see, though. To me, that's really really exciting.

Au Revoir!!!!