Since I have been firing off blog posts around dinner time for the last couple nights due to the Wi-Fi, I have not included much of our evening or night activities. Dinner is somewhat fixed. There are two options — and often a bit polarizing if I do say so. The first night was either stewed lamb or vegetable curry. Nicole struggled. Now it’s all fine and well to offer a limited menu particularly if the chefs have a rotation of specialties.
However, if we didn’t finish every little grain of rice, we were judged without mercy. As Nicole pointed out, when you’re a kid and don’t finish a meal, there’s the old cliché that there are “starving kids in Africa.” We noticed awkward conversations occurring at other tables regarding unfinished plates as the servers passed judgment. Food allergies, gluten issues, IBS, lactose intolerance, or frankly just not having enthusiasm for a dish you didn’t really want are apparently luxury problems, but the level of judging going on doesn’t really have a place in the hospitality and tourism industry in my opinion.
We were initially supposed to do another trek to see golden monkeys this morning, but Nicole was having knee issues after scaling the mountain yesterday. On top of her old football injury, she developed what is called “hiker’s knee” — mostly sustained from the stress of weight on the knee during downhill portions of hiking uneven terrain. The golden monkeys are endemic to the area, but it was going to require up to six hours more hiking up and down inclines, which wasn’t super appealing to people like me who didn’t even have hiker’s knee.
Thusly, we mutually agreed to sleep in, get some rest, have a leisurely morning, and just head back to Kigali. It’s not worth having Nicole injure it further. She developed a similar issue after our hike in Patagonia this year, and numerous follow-up visits to orthopedic specialists and purchases of medical boots ensued. Thanks to the excellent American healthcare and insurance system, this all cost her a modest $1400. So being out $200 for our golden monkey permits to save her knee instead seemed a bargain. Our focus of this trip had been gorillas, and as cute as golden monkeys may be, we didn’t even know they existed until about a year ago, so we can’t pretend to be devastated.
Furthermore, and I’m not even sure why I had this thought, but I had a feeling we missed something at the Kigali Genocide Memorial. As I looked into it further, we had missed the entire outdoor complex of rose gardens and mass burial sites. It seemed wrong to leave Rwanda without the complete picture — so we passed on all our concerns to Fred, our driver, and he said it was no problem to make a stop there on the way to the airport.
The border crossing between Uganda and Rwanda took a while today for unknown reasons. It always seems to be a convoluted process in these countries. It took our driver a while to get through with our vehicle. While we waited, a young man named Sam wanted to practice his English with us and we obliged. We all know his motives were to tell his mates that he met Bricole, everyone’s favorite celebrity couple, but his pretending not to know our fame was charming nonetheless.
He’s still in college in Rwanda, and was visiting his grandma in Uganda over the weekend and apparently in no hurry to get out of inter-border purgatory like we were. As an introvert, this was all a lot for me. Nicole said she was very proud of me nonetheless having tackled all kinds of topics ranging from the Manchester City football team to the Hillsong church. After maybe an hour, we were finally entering back into Rwanda. As Sam stated, Rwanda isn’t as dirty and unfriendly as Uganda, but he may be biased. That being said, I will say Rwanda does appear to be more “with it” than its neighbor.
As we approached Kigali, traffic picked up considerably. We eventually arrived back at the Kigali Genocide Memorial and explained the situation to the staff. In our defense for having missed it, signage isn’t great, nor are explanations. The memorial and gardens also seem to be a bit incomplete. Names have been placed on a memorial wall, but it is clearly not all the names. An incomprehensible 250,000 people are buried at this spot alone (of the estimated 800,000 total throughout the country) in multiple mass burial plots, but not nearly as many names are present on the wall. A wall five times the size of the Vietnam War Memorial in D.C. would need to exist to fit that. Perhaps DNA identification has been difficult and many are unknowns. During and for sometime after the genocide, many of the bodies that were relocated here had been left lying in the streets of Kigali or in nearby rivers before being gathered up, so the level of decay may have been problematic.
After confronting multiple security checkpoints just to enter the Kigali airport, we were informed that we were actually too early to check in. We killed about 45 mins at an outdoor café where I ordered a single Virunga Mist local beer for 1500 Rwandan francs (or the exorbitant sum of $1) to justify our presence at one of their tables. Eventually we were allowed to check-in, got seats together right away and went through passport control and security without any issue. We spent the next two hours in a priority pass lounge scrounging up some food to pass as a dinner. Then, as is often the case with Kenya Airways in particular, boarding happened abruptly and swiftly. 45 minutes prior to departure, our names were being called over the loudspeaker. Ever since being in Africa, Nicole’s last name has been pronounced correctly 100% of the time. I somehow became Brian Hussein. It’s a new pronunciation for me, but who am I to say which way is correct? We departed 20 minutes early in another E190 for the quick hop over to Nairobi.
We touched down just after 9pm and were listed for a British Airways flight at 1040pm. Having dealt with the customs hall previously and not been terribly impressed, I figured we’d talk to the transfers desk to see if we could expedite this process. One snag: we had to check our bags from Kigali. That being said, we were assured that all we had to do was go to gate 14, where British Airways was departing and tell them we were staff and give them our bag tickets. We gave it a go. After passing through the transfers security checkpoint, we went to gate 14. They told us to go to gate 11 and talk to the transfers desk there. Gate 11 told us to go to gate 12. Nobody was at gate 12. We walked back to gate 14 and explained. Shockingly, three or four different people appeared to be trying to help us resolve the situation. Our passports were handed to multiple people. We were given middle seats in the very last and second to last row of a British Airways A350. We settled in as much as one could for the long 8.5 hour flight up to London’s Heathrow. Though “lucky” to have seats, the biggest question was whether or not our bags stood any chance of making it there with us. We will find out tomorrow morning when we land.
passports & pepto bismol 