After two weeks in Kigali, I decide to go to Lake Kivu in the west for a swim. I go to the main "bus" station, a chaotic confluence of dozens of Toyota mini-vans - the "buses". 1300 RWF (1 pound 30) buys me a 3 1/2 trip, jammed into a van designed for 16 small people (max!) but carrying 20 average sized ones. It's not so bad, if a bit pungent. Water for washing is scarce here.
The countryside is very pretty, ALL terraced very tidily, right to the tops of hill/mountains.
Not much chat in the bus, though the driver keeps up a 3 hour monologue in Kinya-Rwanda. All I notice is that he uses the word "Mazungu" a lot: 'white person'. First I get a bit paranoid. No-one answers when I ask what he's talking about. Then I guess that actually there must be another common word like Mazunga but which means something else. He just can't be talking about me for 3 hours.
I seem to specialise in turning up at african lakes, in the pitch dark of night in the rain. It is so here. Kibuye is the town I was aiming for but it turns out to be pretty much just a petrol station. I get a moto-taxi to a lodge I've booked on the lake shore and I eat dinner beside the lake, looking at the orange glow from an active volcano over the lake in Congo. Surreal. Early night under a full mosquito net, at 1400m it's low enough to worry about malaria here.
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