Karin Wright
SSTUNNING Karin enjoys sunset at the Emeraude Kivu Resort. Right: Pushing jerrycans of banana beer uspended 200ft above Rwanda’s forest floor, I felt on top of the world. The towering trees and dense jungle of the Nyungwe Forest National Park stretched out below me in all directions as I swayed on the walkway, at eye level with the monkeys and the birds.
While the Volcanoes National Park in the north west of the country is home to the mighty mountain gorillas, there are chimpanzees, colobus and rare golden monkeys vying for attention in Nyungwe to the south.
Nicknamed the
Land of a Thousand
Hills, this central East African country may be tiny, but it manages to cram an awful lot in.
The start of the canopy forest walk is only 125 miles from the capital Kigali but, thanks to all those hills and continuing road upgrades, it takes about four hours to get there. This ancient rainforest is home to 300 bird species, dozens of orchids and butterflies, as well as 13 primates.
With 80 miles of trails across its 386 square miles, it’s easy to spend a few days here, exploring the verdant valleys and steep mountainsides, trekking to waterfalls, spotting the elusive Rwenzori turaco bird, tracking chimps or swaying from suspended canopy walkways.
We were ferried here in the comfort of Toyota Land Cruisers, and there’s never a dull moment as you pass through undulating tea COOL
Giraffe in Akagera National Park plantations, subsistence farms with ubiquitous banana trees, scattered colourful villages, vast lakes and pristine forests.
On the side of the roads is an endless procession of people walking to and from markets balancing produce piled high on their heads, or pushing bicycles heaving with bulging yellow jerrycans of potent banana beer or buckets of precious drinking water drawn from wells in the valleys. Children are in charge of little flocks of goats and sheep, or tend to the prized family cow, shouting “mzungu!” (a friendly term for a foreigner) with a wave and a smile as we chug past. Rural schools have staggered class times for older and younger kids, so there’s always someone available to take care of the animals.
Everywhere I go, I am constantly in awe of the people of this country. Just 24 years ago a million of them were slaughtered in one of the worst genocides the world has ever seen. But, in a remarkable triumph of the human spirit, they have rebuilt their nation, turning it into an African powerhouse.
Nobody refers to themselves as Tutsi or Hutu – they are simply Rwandan. As my new friend Jullesse told me over a Mutzig lager at the Cocobean club in Kigali: “We learned the hard way that unity is our only option.”
A visit to the Kigali Genocide Memorial is a harrowing experi-