Dave's Rwanda Trip
Some random notes and pictures from my trip in case anyone is interested.
20081001, Wednesday night.
Leaving from Detroit Metro Airport (DTW) on a 9:30 pm flight. I'm already tired from packing and finishing up work and other stuff, so that'll make it easier to sleep soon. I'm getting my first warmup in French listening to the fellow passengers chatting next to me. :-)
I find myself spinning down from the usual pre-travel stress, worrying if I've remembered everything, finally relaxing now that it's too late to do anything about it. I can relax even more than I anticipated because it turns out they are able to check my bags (2 big roller bags, 36 & 46 pounds respectively according to my bathroom scale) all the way through to Rwanda, even though it's 3 different airlines (Northwest, KLM, and Rwandair) that I booked the tickets on separately myself. So no claiming luggage in Paris and re-checking it, and then repeating the process in Nairobi. I forget who suggested that recently, but thanks! My default assumption would certainly have been that I they were way too disorganized to do such a thing. :-) Curbside check-in was worth every penny of the $5 tip I gave her, since she figured it all out for me. So now it's just me and my backpack for the next 3 days, plus for however long they lose my luggage. Maybe I should have brought some spare clothes after all...
20081002, Thursday morning, 6:30 Ann Arbor time, 12:30 local time in Paris (CDG)
Smooth flight, except for one passenger fainting in the middle of the night. Video on demand is cool, first time I've gotten to use that. Watched Mongol, which was okay but not great. I think I slept for a total of about 2 hours. The total flight time was about 7 hours, plus half an hour or so on each end for taxiing around.
Charles DeGaul airport is airy and light. Lots of open spaces and all-glass construction. Very nice. Navigating the airport, and security, is pretty much the same as the US, even the security signs are the same. Though the guards have a better sense of humor- as the liquid container guardian asked the girl behind me for the passport for the large stuffed bear she was carrying, much to her consternation before she figured out he was joking. :-) I hear many languages around me, and lots of english in very different accents. But it's easy to get by here where they're expecting foreigners. The local cafe accepted dollars, at an exchange of 0.575 to the Euro. My bottle of water and coke cost $13.30 US. Good thing I brought snacks with me. Alas, no drinking fountains to be found so far, so far my nalgene just takes up space.
The approach was remarkable - as far as I could see, right up to the airport, everywhere was farmland, dotted with quaint villages connected by winding roads. A few forests here and there, small and obviously cultivated. But none of the grids and suburbia around DTW. Probably a very similar view from the air for the last several hundred years... minus the quarry and garbage dump. Didn't even see train lines until we were taxiing. I hope we depart to the east so I can see how it continues in that direction. Granted we also taxied for about half an hour to get to the airport - maybe amidst farmland was the only place they could find enough room for an airport.
As I set the time zone on my laptop (to CEST) I see that Paris is on the far western side, while Kigali is on the far eastern side. And that they drew this timezone almost as badly as we drew the eastern time zone. I can imagine the politics and stress that went on when they first set these up. Of course it makes sense not to have one half of the city an hour ahead or behind of the other half, but what cities wanted to be along with the rest of mainstream Europe. And now established doubtless nearly impossible to change. So my intellectual clock can stay in this time zone now, but my biological clock has another hour of adaptation to do. I also see that iCal has considerately shifted all my calendar entries 6 hours for me. Sigh.
Better keep these short for now- like our airports I haven't spotted any free power sockets yet either. So much for the adapter I picked up in DTW.
20081002, Thursday afternoon in Schiphol, Amsterdam (AMS)
Short flight. Customs sure are easy. Here they bothered to stamp my passport, but otherwise they just wanted to see my boarding pass and final destination. In Paris they didn't even stamp it. Pretty trusting so far. Looks like I may have to go through security to get on the airplane, right here at the gate, that's odd. And fortunately everything is in English, which makes it easy. Not even Dutch followed by English (as they did on the airplane). But looking around me I can see why, it'd be pretty hard to pick a language that was more prevalent, out of the dozen plus I can see represented by the travelers here.
Amsterdam looks a lot more like the US from the air. This is a port town, it was cool to see industrial shipping and related infrastructure as we came in. Very modern looking - even the freeways & signs looked very similar, though the cars were much smaller. Ironic also to see a windmill farm alongside a coal dump with mountains of black coal, coming? going? Not sure. I guess if it's there for export it makes it all the more fun. But the windmills were ubiquitous- at least along the industrial sector. I also realized part of what looked so quaint about France from the air- the farmland was divided into many small polygons each clearly with different crops, or perhaps crop cycles, if the colors are any indication. Here it was huge perfect rectangles, like in the US (or sometimes you see the huge circles- particularly out west where you're limited by water rather than available land).
Before we hit land, it was a bit intimidating watching the water below us. What I first took for whitecaps was actually chunks of ice floating on and just under the surface. With whitecaps as well from time to time. Bad time for a swim in the north Atlantic. I found myself calculating how long it would take one of the numerous freighters passing by to get to us if we did have to make a water landing, and if we'd last that long in these temperatures- probably not- have to hope for a rampant engine fire to keep us going. I guess I've always found oceans to be a bit intimidating.
Convenient currency exchange between gates, with a fixed maximum fee of 7 euros, so I exchanged $1k to Euros. They didn't do Rwandan Francs, but she said they take Euros there too, and I also figure Euros will be easier to exchange than dollars in Rwanda anyway, and also useful in Paris at the end of this trip. And they have a free exchange back policy if I have most of it left upon return. Plus they threw in a free pretty blue "collectible" ceramic tile which I now have to stress out about not breaking for the rest of the trip. :-)
Not entirely sure how I'm still conscious at this point. The dark chocolate I got along with some water will help. I'm also (thanks to Mandy) enjoying reading "When Victims Become Killers", by Mahmood Mamdani. The first chapter was pretty dense with unnecessarily academic writing, as he talked about what he was going to talk about, but once he got into actual facts and ideas it's going pretty quickly and is fascinating. So much history. Turns out the Tutsi historically accumulated quite a bit of bad karma along the way. So did the Belgians. And the Germans. The whole situation in 1994 is not so clearcut as it might seem just from watching "Hotel Rwanda".
20081003, Friday morning, 6am, Nairobi time (Paris/Amsterdam/Kigali time +1, ET +7)
Uneventful flight out. Again a passenger became ill, but again when they called for a doctor there was one, and all was well. Watched "The Happening", which was okay but not great - interesting to see what was obviously about one generation older video system in my seat. Still custom controllable by me, but not video on demand, just a repeating loop of all the channels, limited therefore by Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull, since that was the longest movie by about half an hour. :-) Alas apparently they hadn't cycled in the October films yet, so I wasn't able to see The Hulk or Get Smart. I did get some pictures and a couple movies of a sweet thunderstorm we passed rather close to (probably many miles, but from my window it looked close).
Now there's some confusion as to how I actually acquire my ticket- apparently Rwandair Express doesn't have an actual desk here. But the info desk person spoke English, both with me and the other 6 people from 6 different countries and probably 3 different continents who came to ask her for gates while I was standing there, and suggested I speak with the Kenya air transfer desk - as they usually do the ticketing for Rwandair, and perhaps will do so now even though I did not book through them. Otherwise I'll have to track down the Rwandair folks when they show up for the flight. I've only got 12 hours to resolve this dilemma. :-)
The airport is much like any other- small, only a dozen gates, but very familiar looking shops and such along the way, just some different words on the signs. I guess the real challenge would be traveling to Asia, where they don't even use the same characters. Usually I can piece it together from the signs even if I don't speak the language, that's been true at all of these airports so far. Not that everything isn't also dual listed in English on the signs too. Actually the more I look around, I note that everything here is written just in English. Odd. Is the Kenyan language irrelevant here. Thank you to British colonialism? Clearly the tourist trade is the most significant reason for this airport to be here, based on the touristy shops etc., but I do see a fair number of African travelers who do not necessarily seem to be Western or Easterners (are they Southerners then?) on vacation.
Success! The Kenya air folk were able to print me a boarding pass, with the assistance of my checked luggage stickers from DTW. And I'm now chilling in the Kenya Airways lounch, which has a nice little table, and a tantalizingly close power socket, for which I don't have the right adapter- apparently the "Europe and parts of Africa" doesn't include Kenya. Maybe I'll explore later and find an adapter here. Until then, back to reading. Almost finished with "When Victims Become Killers", but I think I'll take a break and hit Perdido Street Station for awhile now. Wait- update- turns out I was at the wrong plug, and my adapter does work, with the minor addition of a surrogate paper grounding prong simulator. I got the 2 prong version, and this one has some sort of safety feature that prevents plugging in if the 3rd prong is missing. But then I see from the number of scratches that I'm not the first one to fool it. In fact the variation of colors of the scratches would seem to indicate that the implement of choice is disassembled pens. But I've got power! And no internet. So soon, for a brief moment in time, I'll actually be caught up on email!
The layover is hard, I haven't slept well on these flights- too uncomfortable, too much noise. So now after almost exactly 24 hours on the go, (since 9:30pm ET Wednesday, it's 4:30pm here now, I think that math is right), and 2 nights, I'm nodding off just sitting still, not really able to read for more than a page or so at a time. But I'm not alone. Lots of other travelers sleeping around here- on benches, in lounges, in the prayer room. Apparently long layovers are the norm. And no hotel connected to this section of the airport anyway. Some of the first class lounges appear to have more amenities, but that's not me. :-) At the same time it is nice to wander back and forth several times and explore things, and pick up a cool leopard print scarf for Mandy, who was talking about all the nice ones in Paris, and also, amusingly enough, to watch the vice-presidential debates on some version of CNN that was playing here. Interesting, and often embarrassing as usual, as any political debate usually is. They really need to set up a system in the audience with buttons or buzzers so they can vote off their microphone if the politician is not answering the question, and instead just hitting play on their standard platform speech items. But some good parts too, and the real time opinion pole of undecided Ohio voters was certainly interesting, especially as it was divided amongst women & men. My observation was that women were more approving than men in general. I also observe that the general populace seems to respond well to generic trite platitudes that everything will be better for free and that we're number one, obviously non-substantive, and obviously just hitting emotional trigger topics that they've discovered and both sides are hitting, but they seem to work anyway. They've clearly both done the same national polling about what generica is thinking right now- or more accurately feeling. I was particularly disappointed at both of their willingness to outlaw gay marriage, even though they are willing to support an obviously inferior huge pain in the ass version instead. Sigh. I also observe that they were both blinking at a furious pace- supposedly a sign of lying- though also a sign of bright lights directed almost straight into your eyes.
Clearly I'm rambling on, the other effect of long layovers. Future entries will doubtless be more interesting as I have a higher ratio of things done to time to write about them. :-)
Some fun pictures - here's where you smoke at CDG (Paris airport).
20081004, Saturday
The rest of the trip yesterday was uneventful. Small plane from Nairobi to Kigali, and unfortunately it was cloudy & dark (always feels odd to me how early it gets dark this close to the equator- Kigali is just south of the equator), so I couldn't see Lake Victoria as we flew over. Maybe on the way out, at 5am. :-)
Fortunately security wasn't too tight at the airport, so I was able to sneak out and chat with Mandy who I could see waiting for me on the other side of the barriers, during the half hour we were waiting for our bags to come out. Unfortunately my bags never did come out. Not too surprising I guess, with all the transfers. So I filled out all the forms and am waiting for a call, and will be calling them to check.
Crazy taxi ride to the hotel - my impression of this place is very similar to Peru, or Acapulco. Smaller scale, large populations, but otherwise similar to our big cities like Chicago, where the Taxi drivers also drive as if they have no respect for the rule of law or life and limb. :-) But we made it there alive and without killing any passersby. Then I proceeded to sleep like a rock for about 12 hours.
The hotel is a bit run down- there's no shower curtain, the hot water comes from an add on water heater at the shower head rather than the defunct hot water heater right over the tub. There's only one power outlet in the room that works. But it works, the cleaning lady is really nice, and it feels safe. And there's wireless nearby - the help email address for which is mit.edu. Fun public works project I'm guessing. It appears to be some city based thing, not the hotel. Mandy's computer picks up the wireless fine. Mine only gets glimpses of it. Stupid metal instead of plastic computer. Fortunately I can share Mandy's connection via an ethernet cable that was tucked in my backpack.
Today Mandy and I wandered around Kigali for a couple of hours. Again my impression is similar to Peru or Acapulco. It's a city... there are tons of people, they generally don't make eye contact, there are beggars from time to time though not too pushy, just like any American city. But unlike ours, things are smaller. The buildings, the shops, the cars, the roads. And the roads/sidewalks are beat up. And things are a bit more chaotic, as to who's walking or driving where. The language is different, but I still feel like people are people and I knew what was going on. Not that I feel terribly comfortable in any big city myself, but it didn't feel much more so here because it was Rwanda.
People stared at us, which isn't surprising since we were two of only about 12 white people amongst hundreds to thousands of Africans we passed. I'm sure my mirror shades didn't help either... but I'm sure I'll have a sunburn anyway - this close to the equator I'll accept standing out more as a stranger to protect my eyes. But we weren't complete oddities, or accosted other than by street vendors, who would follow us along for tens of yards trying to convince us to buy little ebony candlestick holders, or maps or postcards, or to exchange money. Obviously there's enough of a tourist population to live off of. Most people speak English well enough for basic communication too- the vendors, and the folks at the bank/Western Union where I did exchange money, and the place where we rented a telephone to call and check on my still missing luggage. It was really nice to be out and moving around after so many hours cooped up. We visited the tourist bureau too, to look into gorilla tours and other such things. Those apparently are good to set up well in advance since they only allow a limited number per day. 15 days left for general exploration.
More napping this afternoon, and then soon to head out to dinner somewhere.
Later
Had dinner at a nice restaurant called "Heaven". Excellent view overlooking a valley, and live guitar bluesish music. :-) Wandered back, hit the 24 hour supermarket, which is much like a Meijer though on a bit smaller scale. Also borrowed some kid's cellphone (& bought him some airtime from the many airtime vendors selling cards on the street) to call the airport and found that my bags had arrived! Apparently they went to Entebbe. All seems safe and sound. I'll post some pictures here, though we've been shy about photographing people as apparently that's not so common here, so it's mostly scenery. I just have to figure out how to link them properly. I'm an LJ noob. :-)
Okay, here goes:
Mediterranean Lightning
Clouds stuck against the mountains on the eastern coast of Africa (approaching Nairobi)
The edge of the wastelands approaching Kenya Nairobi airport
KenyaAirport
Rwanda-SkyHotel where Mandy and I are staying.
Views from the empty lot right by our hotel.
20081001, Wednesday night.
Leaving from Detroit Metro Airport (DTW) on a 9:30 pm flight. I'm already tired from packing and finishing up work and other stuff, so that'll make it easier to sleep soon. I'm getting my first warmup in French listening to the fellow passengers chatting next to me. :-)
I find myself spinning down from the usual pre-travel stress, worrying if I've remembered everything, finally relaxing now that it's too late to do anything about it. I can relax even more than I anticipated because it turns out they are able to check my bags (2 big roller bags, 36 & 46 pounds respectively according to my bathroom scale) all the way through to Rwanda, even though it's 3 different airlines (Northwest, KLM, and Rwandair) that I booked the tickets on separately myself. So no claiming luggage in Paris and re-checking it, and then repeating the process in Nairobi. I forget who suggested that recently, but thanks! My default assumption would certainly have been that I they were way too disorganized to do such a thing. :-) Curbside check-in was worth every penny of the $5 tip I gave her, since she figured it all out for me. So now it's just me and my backpack for the next 3 days, plus for however long they lose my luggage. Maybe I should have brought some spare clothes after all...
20081002, Thursday morning, 6:30 Ann Arbor time, 12:30 local time in Paris (CDG)
Smooth flight, except for one passenger fainting in the middle of the night. Video on demand is cool, first time I've gotten to use that. Watched Mongol, which was okay but not great. I think I slept for a total of about 2 hours. The total flight time was about 7 hours, plus half an hour or so on each end for taxiing around.
Charles DeGaul airport is airy and light. Lots of open spaces and all-glass construction. Very nice. Navigating the airport, and security, is pretty much the same as the US, even the security signs are the same. Though the guards have a better sense of humor- as the liquid container guardian asked the girl behind me for the passport for the large stuffed bear she was carrying, much to her consternation before she figured out he was joking. :-) I hear many languages around me, and lots of english in very different accents. But it's easy to get by here where they're expecting foreigners. The local cafe accepted dollars, at an exchange of 0.575 to the Euro. My bottle of water and coke cost $13.30 US. Good thing I brought snacks with me. Alas, no drinking fountains to be found so far, so far my nalgene just takes up space.
The approach was remarkable - as far as I could see, right up to the airport, everywhere was farmland, dotted with quaint villages connected by winding roads. A few forests here and there, small and obviously cultivated. But none of the grids and suburbia around DTW. Probably a very similar view from the air for the last several hundred years... minus the quarry and garbage dump. Didn't even see train lines until we were taxiing. I hope we depart to the east so I can see how it continues in that direction. Granted we also taxied for about half an hour to get to the airport - maybe amidst farmland was the only place they could find enough room for an airport.
As I set the time zone on my laptop (to CEST) I see that Paris is on the far western side, while Kigali is on the far eastern side. And that they drew this timezone almost as badly as we drew the eastern time zone. I can imagine the politics and stress that went on when they first set these up. Of course it makes sense not to have one half of the city an hour ahead or behind of the other half, but what cities wanted to be along with the rest of mainstream Europe. And now established doubtless nearly impossible to change. So my intellectual clock can stay in this time zone now, but my biological clock has another hour of adaptation to do. I also see that iCal has considerately shifted all my calendar entries 6 hours for me. Sigh.
Better keep these short for now- like our airports I haven't spotted any free power sockets yet either. So much for the adapter I picked up in DTW.
20081002, Thursday afternoon in Schiphol, Amsterdam (AMS)
Short flight. Customs sure are easy. Here they bothered to stamp my passport, but otherwise they just wanted to see my boarding pass and final destination. In Paris they didn't even stamp it. Pretty trusting so far. Looks like I may have to go through security to get on the airplane, right here at the gate, that's odd. And fortunately everything is in English, which makes it easy. Not even Dutch followed by English (as they did on the airplane). But looking around me I can see why, it'd be pretty hard to pick a language that was more prevalent, out of the dozen plus I can see represented by the travelers here.
Amsterdam looks a lot more like the US from the air. This is a port town, it was cool to see industrial shipping and related infrastructure as we came in. Very modern looking - even the freeways & signs looked very similar, though the cars were much smaller. Ironic also to see a windmill farm alongside a coal dump with mountains of black coal, coming? going? Not sure. I guess if it's there for export it makes it all the more fun. But the windmills were ubiquitous- at least along the industrial sector. I also realized part of what looked so quaint about France from the air- the farmland was divided into many small polygons each clearly with different crops, or perhaps crop cycles, if the colors are any indication. Here it was huge perfect rectangles, like in the US (or sometimes you see the huge circles- particularly out west where you're limited by water rather than available land).
Before we hit land, it was a bit intimidating watching the water below us. What I first took for whitecaps was actually chunks of ice floating on and just under the surface. With whitecaps as well from time to time. Bad time for a swim in the north Atlantic. I found myself calculating how long it would take one of the numerous freighters passing by to get to us if we did have to make a water landing, and if we'd last that long in these temperatures- probably not- have to hope for a rampant engine fire to keep us going. I guess I've always found oceans to be a bit intimidating.
Convenient currency exchange between gates, with a fixed maximum fee of 7 euros, so I exchanged $1k to Euros. They didn't do Rwandan Francs, but she said they take Euros there too, and I also figure Euros will be easier to exchange than dollars in Rwanda anyway, and also useful in Paris at the end of this trip. And they have a free exchange back policy if I have most of it left upon return. Plus they threw in a free pretty blue "collectible" ceramic tile which I now have to stress out about not breaking for the rest of the trip. :-)
Not entirely sure how I'm still conscious at this point. The dark chocolate I got along with some water will help. I'm also (thanks to Mandy) enjoying reading "When Victims Become Killers", by Mahmood Mamdani. The first chapter was pretty dense with unnecessarily academic writing, as he talked about what he was going to talk about, but once he got into actual facts and ideas it's going pretty quickly and is fascinating. So much history. Turns out the Tutsi historically accumulated quite a bit of bad karma along the way. So did the Belgians. And the Germans. The whole situation in 1994 is not so clearcut as it might seem just from watching "Hotel Rwanda".
20081003, Friday morning, 6am, Nairobi time (Paris/Amsterdam/Kigali time +1, ET +7)
Uneventful flight out. Again a passenger became ill, but again when they called for a doctor there was one, and all was well. Watched "The Happening", which was okay but not great - interesting to see what was obviously about one generation older video system in my seat. Still custom controllable by me, but not video on demand, just a repeating loop of all the channels, limited therefore by Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull, since that was the longest movie by about half an hour. :-) Alas apparently they hadn't cycled in the October films yet, so I wasn't able to see The Hulk or Get Smart. I did get some pictures and a couple movies of a sweet thunderstorm we passed rather close to (probably many miles, but from my window it looked close).
Now there's some confusion as to how I actually acquire my ticket- apparently Rwandair Express doesn't have an actual desk here. But the info desk person spoke English, both with me and the other 6 people from 6 different countries and probably 3 different continents who came to ask her for gates while I was standing there, and suggested I speak with the Kenya air transfer desk - as they usually do the ticketing for Rwandair, and perhaps will do so now even though I did not book through them. Otherwise I'll have to track down the Rwandair folks when they show up for the flight. I've only got 12 hours to resolve this dilemma. :-)
The airport is much like any other- small, only a dozen gates, but very familiar looking shops and such along the way, just some different words on the signs. I guess the real challenge would be traveling to Asia, where they don't even use the same characters. Usually I can piece it together from the signs even if I don't speak the language, that's been true at all of these airports so far. Not that everything isn't also dual listed in English on the signs too. Actually the more I look around, I note that everything here is written just in English. Odd. Is the Kenyan language irrelevant here. Thank you to British colonialism? Clearly the tourist trade is the most significant reason for this airport to be here, based on the touristy shops etc., but I do see a fair number of African travelers who do not necessarily seem to be Western or Easterners (are they Southerners then?) on vacation.
Success! The Kenya air folk were able to print me a boarding pass, with the assistance of my checked luggage stickers from DTW. And I'm now chilling in the Kenya Airways lounch, which has a nice little table, and a tantalizingly close power socket, for which I don't have the right adapter- apparently the "Europe and parts of Africa" doesn't include Kenya. Maybe I'll explore later and find an adapter here. Until then, back to reading. Almost finished with "When Victims Become Killers", but I think I'll take a break and hit Perdido Street Station for awhile now. Wait- update- turns out I was at the wrong plug, and my adapter does work, with the minor addition of a surrogate paper grounding prong simulator. I got the 2 prong version, and this one has some sort of safety feature that prevents plugging in if the 3rd prong is missing. But then I see from the number of scratches that I'm not the first one to fool it. In fact the variation of colors of the scratches would seem to indicate that the implement of choice is disassembled pens. But I've got power! And no internet. So soon, for a brief moment in time, I'll actually be caught up on email!
The layover is hard, I haven't slept well on these flights- too uncomfortable, too much noise. So now after almost exactly 24 hours on the go, (since 9:30pm ET Wednesday, it's 4:30pm here now, I think that math is right), and 2 nights, I'm nodding off just sitting still, not really able to read for more than a page or so at a time. But I'm not alone. Lots of other travelers sleeping around here- on benches, in lounges, in the prayer room. Apparently long layovers are the norm. And no hotel connected to this section of the airport anyway. Some of the first class lounges appear to have more amenities, but that's not me. :-) At the same time it is nice to wander back and forth several times and explore things, and pick up a cool leopard print scarf for Mandy, who was talking about all the nice ones in Paris, and also, amusingly enough, to watch the vice-presidential debates on some version of CNN that was playing here. Interesting, and often embarrassing as usual, as any political debate usually is. They really need to set up a system in the audience with buttons or buzzers so they can vote off their microphone if the politician is not answering the question, and instead just hitting play on their standard platform speech items. But some good parts too, and the real time opinion pole of undecided Ohio voters was certainly interesting, especially as it was divided amongst women & men. My observation was that women were more approving than men in general. I also observe that the general populace seems to respond well to generic trite platitudes that everything will be better for free and that we're number one, obviously non-substantive, and obviously just hitting emotional trigger topics that they've discovered and both sides are hitting, but they seem to work anyway. They've clearly both done the same national polling about what generica is thinking right now- or more accurately feeling. I was particularly disappointed at both of their willingness to outlaw gay marriage, even though they are willing to support an obviously inferior huge pain in the ass version instead. Sigh. I also observe that they were both blinking at a furious pace- supposedly a sign of lying- though also a sign of bright lights directed almost straight into your eyes.
Clearly I'm rambling on, the other effect of long layovers. Future entries will doubtless be more interesting as I have a higher ratio of things done to time to write about them. :-)
Some fun pictures - here's where you smoke at CDG (Paris airport).
20081004, Saturday
The rest of the trip yesterday was uneventful. Small plane from Nairobi to Kigali, and unfortunately it was cloudy & dark (always feels odd to me how early it gets dark this close to the equator- Kigali is just south of the equator), so I couldn't see Lake Victoria as we flew over. Maybe on the way out, at 5am. :-)
Fortunately security wasn't too tight at the airport, so I was able to sneak out and chat with Mandy who I could see waiting for me on the other side of the barriers, during the half hour we were waiting for our bags to come out. Unfortunately my bags never did come out. Not too surprising I guess, with all the transfers. So I filled out all the forms and am waiting for a call, and will be calling them to check.
Crazy taxi ride to the hotel - my impression of this place is very similar to Peru, or Acapulco. Smaller scale, large populations, but otherwise similar to our big cities like Chicago, where the Taxi drivers also drive as if they have no respect for the rule of law or life and limb. :-) But we made it there alive and without killing any passersby. Then I proceeded to sleep like a rock for about 12 hours.
The hotel is a bit run down- there's no shower curtain, the hot water comes from an add on water heater at the shower head rather than the defunct hot water heater right over the tub. There's only one power outlet in the room that works. But it works, the cleaning lady is really nice, and it feels safe. And there's wireless nearby - the help email address for which is mit.edu. Fun public works project I'm guessing. It appears to be some city based thing, not the hotel. Mandy's computer picks up the wireless fine. Mine only gets glimpses of it. Stupid metal instead of plastic computer. Fortunately I can share Mandy's connection via an ethernet cable that was tucked in my backpack.
Today Mandy and I wandered around Kigali for a couple of hours. Again my impression is similar to Peru or Acapulco. It's a city... there are tons of people, they generally don't make eye contact, there are beggars from time to time though not too pushy, just like any American city. But unlike ours, things are smaller. The buildings, the shops, the cars, the roads. And the roads/sidewalks are beat up. And things are a bit more chaotic, as to who's walking or driving where. The language is different, but I still feel like people are people and I knew what was going on. Not that I feel terribly comfortable in any big city myself, but it didn't feel much more so here because it was Rwanda.
People stared at us, which isn't surprising since we were two of only about 12 white people amongst hundreds to thousands of Africans we passed. I'm sure my mirror shades didn't help either... but I'm sure I'll have a sunburn anyway - this close to the equator I'll accept standing out more as a stranger to protect my eyes. But we weren't complete oddities, or accosted other than by street vendors, who would follow us along for tens of yards trying to convince us to buy little ebony candlestick holders, or maps or postcards, or to exchange money. Obviously there's enough of a tourist population to live off of. Most people speak English well enough for basic communication too- the vendors, and the folks at the bank/Western Union where I did exchange money, and the place where we rented a telephone to call and check on my still missing luggage. It was really nice to be out and moving around after so many hours cooped up. We visited the tourist bureau too, to look into gorilla tours and other such things. Those apparently are good to set up well in advance since they only allow a limited number per day. 15 days left for general exploration.
More napping this afternoon, and then soon to head out to dinner somewhere.
Later
Had dinner at a nice restaurant called "Heaven". Excellent view overlooking a valley, and live guitar bluesish music. :-) Wandered back, hit the 24 hour supermarket, which is much like a Meijer though on a bit smaller scale. Also borrowed some kid's cellphone (& bought him some airtime from the many airtime vendors selling cards on the street) to call the airport and found that my bags had arrived! Apparently they went to Entebbe. All seems safe and sound. I'll post some pictures here, though we've been shy about photographing people as apparently that's not so common here, so it's mostly scenery. I just have to figure out how to link them properly. I'm an LJ noob. :-)
Okay, here goes:
Mediterranean Lightning
Clouds stuck against the mountains on the eastern coast of Africa (approaching Nairobi)
The edge of the wastelands approaching Kenya Nairobi airport
KenyaAirport
Rwanda-SkyHotel where Mandy and I are staying.
Views from the empty lot right by our hotel.