Rejoicing in Rwanda…!

The ride from Bujumbura to Kigali went off without much ado, except for all the citizens of every village being out in full force, waving election banners representing the various parties they supported… Each village seemed to favour a different party, and at the border I was told that there are over 40 separate parties registered in Burundi… Naturally every government voted in here is part of a coalition…  Perhaps this is part and parcel of Burundi’s problems.., How can so small a country have over 40 different political parties? Clearly there are too many “Chiefs and not enough Indians” in this part of the world…

I was feeling better this morning, and decided to try and ride through Rwanda and into Uganda, to make the next leg of my run to Kampala more than 125 km shorter… I arrived in Kigali at lunchtime, and tried to get in touch with Emmanuel, the taxi driver who had taken me to see the Gorillas… I had left my raincoat in the back of his car, and was hoping to get it back… I arranged to meet him at the Dream Inn Hotel, and rode there to wait for him… I was greeted with much enthusiasm by the staff, and offered a cold Coke while I waited… By 2.00pm, Emmanuel had still not arrived, and I decided to spent the night in Kigali, rather than ride another two or three hours to Kibale in Uganda…

I was given a room at a MUCH better rate than a few days ago, and I think my “official” status had something to do with it again… I sat in the same room that I had written the Gorilla story in and thought about doing a re-write… I hooked up to the hotel’s wireless internet, and first downloaded my mail…

I cannot describe how happy I was with the content of a  mail from Andrew Freeborn, an I.T. specialist whom I had met in Cape Town… His mail read as follows:

Hi Ronnie

I have continued to derive much enjoyment from your travels. Thanks for sharing all of this.

I enjoyed your Gorilla story so much that I, too, was gutted when I found out that it had been eaten by the computer. I set about doing some digging through the Google cache and found the complete entry, still intact! Unfortunately, the Google cache can be a mysterious thing, and not all of the pictures are included. The text, however, seems to be complete.

Because I don’t know what sort of Internet connection you have available in Burundi, I am going to paste the text and images straight into this E-mail. I will also send it as a text file attachment in a separate E-mail.

This deserves to go back up. It is a valuable record of an extraordinary day, and will be one of the highlights of your entire journey.

Cheers!

Andrew

I have reloaded the post, so for those of you who did not get to read it the first time around, you will find it listed under the the 2nd of May posting…

Thanks a million Andrew, you’re a wizard !!!