Darren's Travel and Other Rants: Getting up close and personal with mountain gorillas

I had wanted to make this trip ever since seeing the film Gorillas in the Mist and now it was a dream coming true.

I was flying over verdant hills and descending into Kigali international airport and my heart was racing. The lush green valleys were peppered with glinting mirrors in the sparkle of the African sun: these were the little houses of the locals with their corrugated iron roofs. It was almost like the Rwandan countryside was bejeweled and glistening to welcome its visitors.

The valleys sometimes led to lakes fed by muddy ochre rivers, which wound their way in and out of the land of a thousand hills. One winding curvy river reminded me of the now defunct Mongolian script, which the soviets erased during their imperial occupation of the said plains.

The plane's nose dipped and we were moments from landing.

Hotel lobby - Mille Collines

Having been to quite a few airports in Africa recently, I wasn't expecting too much of Kigali, not least since it hadn't long been out of an horrific internal genocide and its GDP is relatively low. But I was pleasantly surprised with the airport and indeed the city overall.


Busts in my hotel room

The former was quite new, with clear signage and a prompt baggage retrieval system - the only slightly amusing thing was the customs channels where the "red" and "green" channels had arrows on either side of a single pillar, behind which about 2m away was the same exit though the same door....I wondered why they bothered. However, I must confess I was pleased when I didn't need to purchase a visa to enter the country - I learned afterwards that the government had waived them for donor countries who'd shown generosity in their aid. Thank you Paul Kagame; this is more than can be said for many an ungrateful developing entity.

The city was spick and span, with good roads and traffic signals the vast majority of the population appeared to obey. Take heed Kenya...!

My driver, Vincent, was hurrying me off to Hotel des Mille Collines, where I was spending a night in Kigali before heading to the Virunga National Park to the north. This hotel was the theatre for what was Hotel Rwanda: the film about the bravery of some fairly solitary souls trying to mitigate the carnage what happened here in 1994. This said, you wouldn't have known it. There were no plaques, no information in the rooms, in fact it wasn't mentioned at all.