I arrived at the airport Sunday late afternoon. Kristin
dropped me off at the departures entrance closest to United Airlines, though
the carrier would be Lufthansa, recently renamed Discovery Airlines. My baggage
was a bit heavier than usual, as the instructions had included admonitions to
bring a number of extras normally not needed on an international vacation.
These included things like toilet paper, bug spray, a sleeping bag liner, hiking poles, flashlights, a spork, water purification tablets, extra granola bars and water bottles, various braces for knees, elbows, and back, and some Imodium and ibuprofen. Oh, and some malaria pills.
The trip would include seven days of camping and three nights in hotels. The sophistication of the camp sites was not specified, but they included a list of must-haves. Not all of which were ultimately necessary. It pretty much included everything you might need anywhere in Africa during every season if you were traveling with Dr. Livingstone. Or so I presume.
This was to be a time of roughing it, though I knew not what grade of sandpaper I would encounter.
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| That's a handy skill to have. |
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| These are very beautiful people. |
Luckily she had not put my one checked bag onto the conveyor belt that fed into the maze of luggage distribution, sorting, and ultimate assignation to its fate. They set my bag aside for me and directed me back to the United line. My flight from Frankfort to Nairobi had been cancelled and I had not been informed.
Usually, I remember to check-in ahead of time, at which time I would have been informed of this fact, though they should have notified me by email proactively. I was careless in that regard-an attention to detail I normally follow. This would prove to be a harbinger of things to come.
The gods taunt us with subtle coincidences.
Tampa airport was not at all busy, at least the check-in I was using. “You need to check in at the Lufthansa line,” said an agent. She directed me to that checkpoint.
“Here is your boarding pass for Frankfort,” said the German looking agent. “Frankfort?” I said. “But I am going to Nairobi!”
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| Things I never saw in New England. |
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| Quite an impressive sight. |
In the afternoon we visited a Masai village. The Masai are a
warrior people who have lived in Kenya and Tanzania for centuries. These are
the people who wear colorful blankets and the men dance and jump like human Pogo
sticks. The Masai people are the second tallest people on earth and have long
legs, hence the jumping, which is a male display for potential mates. Some
claim that height doesn’t matter, but I know better.
They are nomadic, though today the ones we visited stay close to a school for their children. Normally they live in huts in a village surrounded by a fence made from acacia branches, which have enormous thorns, to keep out the wild animals. They stay in a village until the termites eat the foundations of their houses, about nine years, and then pack up and move elsewhere. Once this migration was necessary to follow the food and water for themselves and their flocks and they could end up anywhere. Today they stay close to the school, which was built using modern, termite resistant, materials.
When they find a suitable spot to build a new village, the women build their houses. Not as a group project in urban development. Each woman builds her house for her family, with help from her daughters, if she has any. It is a matter of merit and pride. The building material is unpalatable to us. They use sticks and cow dung.
Note to the squeamish. You make do with what
you have where you have it for as long as you can get it.
The houses are small and dark, having only a very small window to let out smoke and let in a little light. It is this way to keep out mosquitos. Each house has a central common room for the hearth, a room for animals, a room for the parents, one for the children, and one for guests, which could be used for grandparents, if needed.
The Masai are very intelligent. The few I met spoke very good English and demonstrated a confidence in both their traditional world as well as the modern world. They have resisted integration into modernity for the most part, having voluntarily remained in their primitive lifestyle, with nods to modernity such as the school and entertaining/marketing to visitors like us.
You do what you can do for as long as you can do it.
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| All that's between us and a lion's loving embrace. |
After the welcome dance and tour of a Masai house, we saw a
demonstration of building a fire using tinder and stick. It was surprisingly
easy. For them, at least. They can flip their bic like anything.
The Masai people practice some of the more extreme and unsavory social rules. They are warriors, and must be organized, disciplined, and programmed as such if they want to survive in one of the more hostile places on earth. Spartan comes to mind. And life is hard on the Mara.
Thomas Hobbs described the life of primitive societies which lacked a central order as, “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.” He quite well might have had the Masai in mind.
A Masai boy is circumcised on his 15th birthday. He is not supposed to display any reaction to pain during the procedure. They do it in the early morning when it is cold, ostensibly to dull the pain, though I doubt it works. It is a public ceremony performed before the whole village. If he succeeds he is then privileged to leave the village for a five year pilgrimage, sleeping on the ground or in trees, scavenging what he can, forming alliances with other boys he meets, and all around not dying of heat, cold, disease, accident, dehydration, predation, or starvation. All on his wits and the equivalent of a Swiss army knife for gear. After five years he comes back a warrior and can then marry, start a family, and live in his own manure house. It may be poore, nasty, brutish, and short, but at least it’s not solitary anymore.
Girls are not treated much better. These are the people who practice the most extreme form of female circumcision or female genital mutilation. I remember when Hollywood activists like Jane Fonda protested such barbarity. Today mutilating underaged genitalia is considered a virtue in our society. Who’s the barbarian?
I have studied Anthropology somewhat and have striven to understand other cultures and their curious ways non-judgmentally-understand don’t judge-and I understand that environments shape the cultures, religions, practices, and mindset of the people that live in them. I know that evolution is a blind force that produces what works and not what is pleasing to western sensibility, but this is beyond comprehension. Why would men treat their sons like this and women treat their daughters like this? It is hard to fathom these depths of social conditioning.
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| Come over here and say that... |
Frank Herbert’s Fremen in his Dune saga reminds me somewhat of the Masai. Herbert was interested more in the politics and ecology of marginal living conditions and how it shapes a people into a messianic frenzy. I don’t know what coming of age rituals the Fremen had, but they must have been brutal.
The human animal has lived for millions of years as marginal
groups of extended families and clans as quasi civilized brutes, though brutes
with passion, occasionally forming alliances and occasionally fighting with
each other. Living in communities, villages, commonwealths, city states,
kingdoms, and empires is a recent phenomenon. As are large scale governments,
legal systems, engineered infrastructures, irrigation systems, and agriculture.
And the modern world most recent of all. These all happened in the blink of an
eye. But inside we are still living on the savannah.
We rode though the Masai Mara National Reserve, a mara being another word for savannah. And back to the camp site. The next morning was a balloon ride, more safari in our land cruiser, and then back to Nairobi.
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| Come along, junior. |
And then an unexpected diversion.
Left Behind
A visa was available: to begin with. There is no doubt about
that. The availability of its certification was guaranteed by the travel
company, as recorded on its official website, and attested to by Pesh, the
leader of my trip, as well as Duncan, our driver, on the night before I was to
depart Nairobi for Uganda. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing
wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate.
OK. Enough Dickens.
Forgive me if I backtrack a bit. I want to cover some things I omitted in the first part and did not know how to cover adequately…
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| Good to know. |
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| Our ranger. And her gun. These are wild animals, don't you know? |
The flights to Kenya, once I settled into the new schedule, were typical and uneventful. The Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi was sprawling, like all airports, and crowded, ditto. Immigration and passport control were slow, as is tradition, and it took me a while to be digested into the alimentary canal of the bureaucracy.
I exchanged a Franklin for a stack of Ugandan shillings (my first mistake. Everybody takes/prefers dollars,) and met my driver. I was too late to meet the rest of my group and receive my first briefing, but I met them at breakfast in the morrow. We were several souls from around the world. Only two of us were American. So ended Day 1 of our trip. The first day is always arrival, getting to the hotel, meeting the leader and the other pilgrims and attending an introductory briefing, etc. As I said earlier, I like to get there the day before so I have a few hours on my own to explore and recover from 24 hours of traveling and no sleep the day before. And a buffer if anything slips, as it did on this occasion.
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| Soon to be banana gin. |
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| So. Tell me about your performance problems. |
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| The original Starbucks. |
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| I left my poncho in the car. |
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| Sunrise at the farm. |
2. Uganda - visa on arrival is possible. You'll be able to get this from the Entebbe Airport with the group.
3 Rwanda - visa on arrival is also possible and can be obatined (sic) with the group when you cross the border.
Kind regards,
G Adventures
And there it is. |
| The only actual tent we stayed in. At least it was under cover. |
Kenya definitely required a visa in advance, no exception. I
applied for one and got it within a few days.
Alrighty, then. Back to our regularly scheduled travelog.
I scribbled these notes on Sunday. It is stream of consciousness. I include them here exactly as I typed them on my cell phone, typos and all, and will comment on them after.
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| Peek-a-boo! |
Begin Consciousness Stream
Jul 20, 2024. At 67Airport hotel
I can’t write about this yet. It’s too terrifying. Something I always knew was possible. Something I have tried to guard against. Prepare fore. Plan for. But now that it is here I cam only feel dread.
I am at the Nairobi international airport. My group is on the way to Uganda without me. I try to get my visa weeks ago, but couldn’t make it work. The website wouldn’t take my application. I got my Kenya visa alright, but both Uganda and Rwanda didn’t work.
The travel agency, GAdventures, said I could get a visa at the airport. My tour guide in Kenya told me to try again before I left. Still no luck. She reiterated that I could get one at the airport.
At checkin they said they couldn’t issue a visa there. I asked to speak to a manager. He sent me outside to talk to someone ‘in a travel kiosk.’ I met Daniel who was helpful. He said nothing could be done before Monday. He arranged for a hotel, the 67Airport hotel. Three nights plus meals and transportation to/from the airport. It was almost 500.00 and he couldn’t take a credit card.
I paid, what else could I do? I brought extra cash with me.
He also called the embasy and said someone would contact me later. David. He gave me David’s number as well as his own.
At the hotel they said they only had one night and that I would be transferred to another one tomorrow.
The worst thing about this is that the group I was on was being handed off to another representative in Uganda, so there was not one with us to expedite things like this. Plus I had been assured that I would have no issues with visas. I had no problem in Cambodia, Thailand, and Laos.
I contacted the tour agency through the Tour Radar web site to let them know what is happening. I am considering just changing my flights and going home.
7/21. I am sitting at a table outside the Paul Café at Jomo International Airport. The people next to me are smoking. I am drinking a liter bottle of water which I bought for 320 shillings. Robert from G Adventures worked all day getting me a visa. Once secured I just had to change my flight and pay a charge to switch. He said thete were flights today, but not at the same time as yesterday.
I called Daniel and 322r s to be brought to the airport for noon. He said I could get 120 dollars back. I got a ride and met Daniel. He sent me tp a ticketing booth. The 4:45 flight was booked, but thete was a flight at 6:46. It cost 654.00 to upgrade it to business class. Back at Daniel’s office he got a call from David, who had been arranging my visa. I had told him to cancel it last night. I had paid him 50.00, he had asked for 100 and woildn’t take visa, of course. David called for the remainder of his money. This whole side excursion has vost me around 1500 dollars.
Robert said a man named Paul would meet me at Entebe Airport. He would have a car to bring me to my group, which would cost 300 dollars.
End Consciousness Stream
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| Brothers always fight. |
Well, then.
As you can imagine, we got to the airport on Saturday and everyone was let on the flight from Jomo Kenyata International Airport to Entebbe International Airport except me. I do not want to denigrate anyone who has been dispossessed or made homeless, but at that moment I felt a little bit like someone who was suddenly cut off from his life and left stranded, a stranger in a strange place. As I stood on one side of a check point watching my group, my temporary family, on the other side with a tall, scary man in a uniform and possibly a gun between me and them, I felt lost.
I explained to the ticketing agent that I was told I could get a visa at the airport and was told by said agent that they no longer did that, but I could go outside and talk to someone in a kiosk I will find there. Foolishly, I thought they were directing me to someone official, including someone who represents the Kenyan or Ugandan embassy. Hope springs eternal.
Other than just shunting me out of their hair, they were actually just sending me to a travel agent out on the street. I found someone named David in a kiosk who was accommodating. He said it would take a few days to get a visa and that I could rent a room nearby to wait until it was finalized. It would cost several hundred dollars, American. And he couldn’t use his credit card machine for some reason, I’d have to use cash.
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| Pink Flamingos. |
Great. What I should have done was to decline his offer and call the tour group. But at the time I was standing on a busy sidewalk outside an international airport after a traumatizing parting with my fellow travelers and two heavy bags at my feet and no place to go where I could sit down in peace and think things through and come up with a coherent plan. I was starting to panic.
I took his offer. Another contact named Daniel, they go in
for western pronounced names here, took my information and said he would start
the process of obtaining for me an East African visa, which is what I should
have gotten originally. At least I was able to pay the exorbitant price for
that with a card. It would take three days, during which I would remain
abandoned in Nairobi. Say what?
When I arrived at the hotel, the 67Airport Hotel, and had some peace I called the tour company and explained my dilemma. They expedited everything for me. I had a visa the next day, a Sunday, and came back to the airport. I had to get another flight, upgrade to business class, which was the only seat left, and then pay for transfer to where my group was going to be on that day. I could pay for the airfare upgrade via Visa, but the ride was, you guessed, $300.00 American, no card. That was a phrase I heard a lot on this trip.
Incidentally, one of the things the immigration department asked for to validate my trip was a picture of me with the group I was traveling with. Fortunately, on the first day of the trip, five days earlier, I asked everybody, guides included, to pose for a group shot in front of our Land Cruiser. I don’t always remember to do this and usually get one ‘some time during the trip, if I remember,’ but this one I got right away. This is only one of several fortunate things I did on this trip ‘on a lark, for no reason, really.’ I supplied it and got my visa fairly soon thereafter. And I was on my way.
It was a six hour drive from the airport in Uganda to the camp site who knows where and I got there at 4:00AM Monday morning. And nobody could take a credit card. Well, the airline upgrade did.
I mentioned that I was in Africa, right? No insult to that grand continent, but it is less technologically advanced than I am used to and more bureaucratically excruciating. I must have had a suspicion, or a premonition, in advance that something might go wrong, see above about the group photo, because I kept increasing the amount of money I took with me. I already had several hundred dollars in ones and fives for small tips and such, and several hundred in twenties, plus some hundred dollar bills to exchange for local money. I kept adding more and more, even to the point of bringing some Euros along that I had from a previous trip to Europe-I could use them during the layovers in Brussels and Frankfort. I was close to a walking Federal Reserve bank. Don’t tell anybody.
I was able to cover all of the expenses. Actually, a few were payable by credit card and I had access to an ATM in one spot where I could withdraw a cash advance in Uganda shillings. One other ATM I tried to use on a different occasion wouldn’t take my card. If that happens too many times the ATM takes your card and shreds it greedily as you watch. Hopelessly. I had that happen once to a bank debit card of mine in Denmark. I had had enough of standing helplessly while some soul crushing system ground up my future, thank you.
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| What is he smiling about? |
I got to Entebbe Airport, had a few tense moments with immigration, was finally let into the country and met my contact. I paid him for the visa, 50 dollars, and the taxi, 300 dollars, and spent the next six hours trying to nap in the front seat of the car. The drivers, there were two, played a very snappy, upbeat music the whole way, I assume designed to keep them awake. I didn’t get a lot of sleep.
So I got to my camp site with enough time to get my tent, take a shower, and meet the rest of my group for breakfast including three new trekkers who joined us from their own tour already in progress. I told my extended group that whoever won the bet that I would actually make it there from Nairobi owes me half. In American, no card. I’m still waiting.
I tend to have a devil of a time remembering new names and my mental state was not conducive to absorbing new facts as it was, so I write down the names of people I meet on trips on a cheat sheet of familiarity I keep in my pocket. We had several people from Australia, Canada, Austria, German-Switzerland, America, and I think that’s it. Our group, both here and the core group from Kenya, turned out to be a very close knit group. That happens sometimes on these trips. Droplets of personality come together into organs of community for a week or so, then dissolve back into the seas of anonymity.
And for the next few days I was recovering from exhaustion…
…and visiting the vastness of Uganda. Our lodging was a guest farm which was a sprawling complex of camp sites, lodges, dining areas, forests, flowering fruit trees, and jungle. They sell produce to local markets. The accommodations we enjoyed were actual tents, though with electricity for lights and outlets, toilets and showers were in a building around the corner. Flashlights required.
Incidentally, the outlets deployed in Kenya and Uganda were of the English variety. I had brought my adapter kit which includes a transformer, 120-220/220-120, along with about a half dozen adapters from straight to crooked to parallel prong to inline prong to those English types with the plastic prong where the ground is supposed to be. I only used a few of them but I was prepared for anything.
They also drive on the left side of the road in both countries, which I found disorientating, not to mention perilous, at first. Rwanda drives on the right side of the road. One of the official languages here is English. This is kind of a heuristic. You can guess who colonized which country by their electric adapters, their font alphabet, and how they point their vehicles. I don’t know how Rwandans plug their plugs into their outlets or how many volts they get in return. It seems like too personal of a question.
This day, day 7 of the tour for some people-day 5 for me, brought us to the Kibale National Park. We went on a forest trek searching for Chimpanzees, which we found promptly. We had a park ranger guide named Florence, spelled Phlorence. The chimps were in the canopy of rainforest trees around us, but also came down at a few points. Once a column of them walked in front of us and marched through the forest.
The picture taking opportunities were not very promising. Mostly my pictures just look like trees viewed from below with roughly chimp shaped blotches on them, if you squint your eyes and think chimpish thoughts. When they came onto the ground it was difficult getting a good advantage due to the number of visitors. Ours was not the only group there so the grounds were littered with tourists, rangers, photographers, and nuisance loiterers.
After chimp channeling we had lunch at a Bigodi community center, the proceeds benefit the local population, and then had a choice. We could take a nature walk through a swamp or visit a wetlands sanctuary and see a community of people who live there. Since I had already seen a fair bit of nature, I opted for the human habitat.
It was interesting. It had several huts pursuing several activities. There was someone making banana gin and banana beer. People always, everywhere, and with gusto know how to take nature and turn it into booze. There were some women dancing and demonstrating basket weaving. There was a dark hut of the village herbalist, the skills taught from father to son and include things like healing burns or stomach ailments, how to inflict impotency on someone who has seduced your wife, and a potion to draw snake venom from a bite. And a woman grinding coffee beans and brewing coffee-coffee was first domesticated in Africa not far away, after all. It started to rain and a traveler and I got some banana leaves to hold over our heads and walked back to the entrance where we awaited our jeep back to the camp site, dinner, and a relaxing evening.
After dinner some travelers spent some time with the resort owner talking about classical music from the 1960’s and drinking at the bar. I was still too far out of it and just showered and turned in, glad of a place to stay where I could shut the world out and not worry about my next steps.
In the morning, somewhat rested and relaxed, I wandered around the compound taking pictures with one of the new travelers, an Austrian woman named Jana (pronounced ‘Yana’) and letting myself absorb the moment.
Tomorrow we pack up and head out for the Kibali and the Queen Elizabeth National Parks.
Kibali, Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, and Rwanda
With the conundrum of currencies, along with the admonition, American only-No card, came another Kafkaism. It seems that the bank of Uganda decided they had a problem with counterfeit American currency. To counter this monetary mischief we were told that no one would accept American bills that were printed earlier than 2013. Or maybe it was that they would only accept bills printed after 2013. Did this mean that 2013 bills were acceptable or were they in a legal tender limbo? Except that sometimes we were told the cutoff date was 2009 and once it was 2017. Again, not saying whether the anchor date was within or without the acceptable limit.
We stopped at an ATM on our way south. Peter, a fellow traveler from Australia, got cash at his machine while the ATM I was at told me that my visa card would not work at this machine. It gave me back my card at least. If a card fails to be valid too many times the machine keeps it and shreds it into oblivion while you look on, weeping. Franz Kafka, George Orwell, and Aldous Huxley walk into a bank…
So I had some American cash, not nearly as much as I had a week earlier, some Kenyan and some Ugandan shillings, several euros, and still about a week left on this trip.
Great.
We were scheduled for a boat ride on Lake George. I had some Ugandan money that I got earlier out of an ATM which accepted my card’s legitimacy and wanted to use it before leaving the country. We were told that the cost would be 80,000 Ugandan shillings (why wasn’t this included in the cost of the trip?) and they would take 30, you guessed it, Yankee dollars-Mp card. I had shillings, so I decided to use them. Once we arrived at the dock we were told the price was now 100,000 shillings, then 110,000, then 111,500. Did I have exact change? Did they have change in return? Of course not. I had an extra thousand shilling bill tucked in my wallet, which was acceptable, paid my fare, and boarded a motorboat. The ride was about two hours and showed us quite a lot of wildlife.
The boat ride was interesting, though the lull times between sites left most of us drowsing. Myself in particular since I was still recovering from my weekend in Nairobi and 30+ hours of catnapping to get here now. I found that if I could get a few minutes’ peace I could close my eyes and imagine that the nightmare dialog in my head was stilled. Perchance to catch some quality sleep and to push my battery from one bar to barely two and gain a few hours of wakefulness. It was not very satisfying but at least it kept the hallucinations at bay.
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| Camping on the edge of the Impenetrable National Park. |
Except he got it wrong. The south bowl has the lines going counterclockwise and the North bowl has it going clockwise. I knew it looked funny. When the operator poured in the water, he used the path of the painted lines as a guide, pouring the North bowl on the left side and the South bowl on the right whereas he poured the water directly in the middle of the equator bowl. The water, being an inertial mass, dutifully followed and accelerated as the water drained out the bottom like an ice skater drawing her hands inward. An accommodating leaf fragment showed us the miracle of angular momentum.
It plays well for the plebeians.
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| Which way is it supposed to go? |
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| Some dancers near the Gorillas in the Mist. |
We ended our camping sojourn at the edge of the Bwindi Impenetrable National Park. The next morning brought us into the park along with a ranger and a few trackers who were following a family of gorillas for us. We had the choice of easy or medium group to follow, but obviously these are wild animals who follow the food each day so we couldn’t be sure what we would get.
The hike was not as taxing as I feared. I chose the easy hike, along with three other pilgrims from my company. We were pretty high up in the mountains. Maybe 2000 meters. It wasn’t until later it occurred to me that this might explain my fatigue. Checking with maps I discovered that Kenya, Uganda, and Rwanda are from 1600 to 1900 meters above sea level. Where I was now in the mountains was obviously even higher than that.
We hiked maybe an hour into the jungle and then waited for notification from our trackers. They told our ranger that they had found evidence of our family in a deposit of the trackers friend; scat. The gorillas had not settled on a bivouac for the day, so they were still following them. About 20 minutes later and they called with a location.
It was not very far ahead, but still a difficult climb. We had been following a path, but now we turned off the path and directly up the side of a mountain, our guides wielding machetes to clear a path. The ground was covered in a mat of vines that appeared to be sexually attracted to ankles. Each of us almost fell into a ditch at least once. Our guide admitted that our trek was now to be rated as medium. The other group didn’t get back to the camp site until nearly 4:00 O’clock, so theirs had been upgraded to hard.
And finally, we found gorillas.
Some were up in the trees, but many were just parading around in the underbrush. One made a ruckus when a tracker got too close. Our guides told us not to stare or make eye contact. Or act aggressive. Or think too loud in an unfriendly, anti-gorilla manner. Some of the younger ones were more curious of us hairless primates. A few walked within inches in front of me-too quick for me to take a picture.
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| Primate in the Mist. |
I found out that this is where Diane Fossey worked. When I hear her name I can only think of Sigourney Weaver and Gorillas in the Mist. This was not a disappointment.
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| And off we go. |
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| Showing all his profiles. |
This marked the end of our adventure. The next morning we traveled to Rwanda, where I got to discover that the expensive visa I ordered while in Nairobi and which wouldn’t come for three days, so I had the tour group get me a single entry visa instead. That visa? Well, they wouldn’t honor it because it said I had to first enter in Uganda. Of course it did. And of course they didn’t.
This time I was able to get a transit visa since I was just going to the airport and it only cost 30.00, American-No card. Expenses always expand to fit the size of the wallet. Whatever. Just let me out of here.
Of the three countries we visited, Rwanda was the most prosperous and modern, followed by Kenya and then Uganda. This was because it was the most developed or exploited. We crossed the border without incident, sort of.
And in another nod to colonialism, our driver crossed over from the left side of the road to the right. Rwanda was colonized by the Germans in the late nineteenth century. Kenya and Uganda by the Brits. Rwanda is a progressive country. Our guide told us that half of government agency heads are women. We had lunch at the house of a woman who runs an organization to help Rwandan women and was somehow associated with National Geographic.
The day we entered, which was the last Saturday of the month, was cleaning day in Rwanda. They have a law that everybody must engage in cleaning on that day. Noone is allowed to drive except for tourist vehicles, emergency, police, and military vehicles. We saw people outside their houses sweeping the sidewalks and roads. People were supposed to spend time cleaning their houses. If a neighbor thinks you were shirking this legal obligation they can turn you into the authorities. Rwanda was the cleanest of the authoritarian countries we visited.
We visited a museum to the Rwanda genocide of the Tutsis by the Hutus in the 1990’s, which didn’t open until 1:00 O’clock due to cleaning day. A hundred years earlier the Germans had colonized Rwanda. That was news to me. I never heard that Germany was one of the European colonizers. It was always Spain, Portugal, France, the Netherlands, and Great Britain, each squabbling over which parts of the world were theirs. And America, of course.
In Germany’s case, they decided to divide up the population into economic groups. People who had more than 12 cows because Tutsis. The rest, the poor in other words, they called Hutus. This guaranteed a rivalry and resentment between the haves and have-nots. The results were the mass extermination of the minority Tutsis by the majority Hutus. Empires are always about divide et impera, divide and rule. But now all has been forgiven and they are all Rwandans, at least that’s what we were told. Just don’t bring up the whole Hutu vs. Tutsi thing with anybody we talk to, we were also told with more emphasis. OK. Sure.
One last incident involved getting to the airport. Two of us were on the same flight to Brussels and Lufthansa had emailed us both the day before that their luggage checkin would be abbreviated to from 4:15 to 6:45 and our ride would not arrive until 5:00. It was a one hour ride to the airport, after which who knew how long the security checks would take? I did not want to be stuck at the airport security with too many bags to carry on with me. I advocated just taking a cab when the scheduled transport was almost 10 minutes late and we all started for the airport. The driver stopped to get gas on the way. Oh, for the love of…
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| Lunch in Rwanda. |
We finally got to the airport, through another level of security, boarding passes printed, luggage checked through to Tampa, through another passport check, bought some water since no liquids could accompany us into the airport, and then the wait to board, taxi, accelerate, and take off.
I deplaned in Brussels and felt my head clear for the first time in two weeks. That’s when I checked the elevation above sea level for Kenya, etc. Let's see, Nairobi, Entebbe, Kibali... 1600 to 1900 meters-Ah. That explains a lot.
The rest of the journey home was lengthy, yet uneventful.
I must admit I have never had such a difficult time on any other trip I have taken. I wish the travel agency had made a visa a prerequisite instead of available at the port of entry. They did reimburse me a substantial amount when I informed them of what happened since they were responsible, so I have no complaints with the local agency. Well, just a few complaints.
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