Hello Rwanda and Uganda
Day two - We landed in Rwanda, Kigali at around 22.00 and checked in at Hôtel des Mille Collines. The hotel became famous after 1,268 people took refuge inside the building during the Rwandan Genocide of 1994. The story of the hotel and its manager at that time, Paul Rusesabagina was used as the basis of the film Hotel Rwanda. The movie wasn't filmed at the hotel but somehow you could feel it was an important place in Kigali.
The day after we took a walk through town and stopped at a nice restaurant for some drinks and coffee. Kigali is a very modern city, extremly clean and felt perfectly safe. All in all a nice place to stay.
In the afternoon we just chilled out by the pool getting prepped for the next day when we would be picked up by our guide for the rest of the trip.
Day three - We were picked up at the hotel at 09.00 by our guide/driver Faruk who would be our company on the rest of the trip. We wanted to visit the Kigali Genocide Memorial Centre, so we had a stop there before leaving Rwanda. We did a tour for about 2 hours and got an audio guide headset which helped guiding us through the center. The experience was very thoughtful, horrible, educating and also beautiful. The memorial is the final resting place for more than 250,000 victims of the Genocide against the Tutsi, and its main purposes are 5 things:
To provide a dignified place of burial for victims of the Genocide against the Tutsi
To inform and educate visitors about the causes, implementation and consequences of the genocide, and other genocides throughout history.
To teach visitors about what we can do to prevent future genocides.
To provide a documentation centre to record evidence of the genocide, testimonies of genocide survivors and details of genocide victims.
To provide support for survivors, in particular orphans and widows.
In the end of the tour there was a display of other genocides throughout history and what was scary is the pattern; they have many many similarities and you should be surplices how easily history repeats itself. We came out from the memorial sad and shaken, but we were glad we did the tour, its important to spread the word and make sure it never happens again.
A few hours later we crossed the boarder to Uganda, we got out of the car and walked over the border and was told by Faruk to stand in line for the migration office. The office was a small yellow brick house, quite worn down and with no staff. We stood in line for a while when a nice man told us we were in the wrong lane so we quickly switch to the next but still no staff. Faruk came back to us after maybe 15 minutes after parking the car and started to look for the officer but he was nowhere to be found, haha. Having no rush we stood nice and kind in line (as Swedish people do) and eventually we were done with our border control and finally in Uganda.
Another interesting thing was when we wanted to exchange some dollar to Ugandan Shillings, Faruk took us to a little shop, just a hole in the wall with some dresses and this was the money-man, haha. At first it seemed very dodgy but since we had big dollar bills we got a good exchange rate and everything went smooth. Christians pockets on his pants now looked like pigvin wings, haha.
A couple of hours later we finally came to our lodge Nkuringo Bwindi Gorilla Lodge!
After a long day in the car we went to bed early, eager to get up in the morning for our first Gorilla Tracking, and tomorrow it was the habituation experience on the schedule! I was a bit nervous with all kinds of thoughts spinning in my head, would we make the hike? Would we even see them...? We had decided before that we would TRY to keep our expectations low, NOT hoping for the encounters we seen on youtube ;) but one can dream right?