Land Of A Thousand Views

Rwanda is small. You can easily “do” the country on one tank of petrol. It’s also a small miracle, where you’ll see things you won’t see anywhere else in Africa.

- Toast Coetzer

 Rwanda is a banana-and-a-half south of the equator. Crossing the border from Tanzania, the landscape immediately becomes greener. Workers in emerald rice paddies seek shade under colourful umbrellas and terraced fields go all the way up steep hillsides. Almost every square metre of soil seems to be devoted to agriculture.

Rwanda is smaller than Lesotho and just as mountainous, which means that you’re forever traversing some kind of pass or winding road. It’s rare to find a straight, flat section of tar. However, it’s also about five times more populous than Lesotho so you’re always sharing the road with pedestrians and cyclists. Driving fast is out of the question.

One of the first things you notice is how clean Rwanda is. Plastic shopping bags are illegal: Soldiers who searched our Fortuner at the Rusumo border confiscated most of ours. On the last Saturday of every month, every citizen participates in community work, which includes cleaning the streets near where you live. This system is called “Umuganda”, and it’s universally adopted. You’ll even struggle to find a taxi on an Umuganda Saturday.

The city in the hills

Our first destination is the capital city, Kigali, which has a suitably tropical average annual rainfall of 950 mm. We drive through the odd light shower – refreshing after a dusty three weeks spent in northern Tanzania. There, the plains stretched to the horizon. Here, the landscape feels closer, more snug. (See go! #131 and #132 for Toast’s articles about Ngorongoro and the Serengeti – Ed.)

I last visited Rwanda eight years ago and since then, Kigali seems to have grown rapidly. My GPS map is often incorrect, with newly built streets and traffic circles everywhere.