Nightfall over Nyungwe

Wednesday 5 October

Josien picked us up again to take us to the Nyungwe National Park, in the southwest of Rwanda. This was to be an all-day trip, not so much because of the distance but because of the road, and also because we were going to stop off at a couple of places.

First stop was in Butare, which we reached about midday. Butare is the largest city in the Southern Province and is regarded as the intellectual capital of Rwanda, while Kigali holds the political power. Butare has the National University of Rwanda, the National Museum and a number of other cultural and scientific institutions. It is quite an attractive city, more so than Kigali, I thought. We visited the National Museum which was excellent. Only had time for an hour but it's well worth a longer visit. It is often referred to in tourist brochures as the best museum in East Africa.

Then lunch at the Hotel Ibis in a very colonial setting.

Next stop was the Murambi Genocide Memorial, not far out of Butare. This is the site of one of the worst massacres of the Genocide, where 30,000 people were slaughtered while taking shelter in a technical high school. It's difficult to describe the impact of visiting this centre. It has a permanent exhibition, which describes the history of Rwanda in four displays - pre-colonial, colonial, the genocide period, and post-genocide. It is smaller than the one in Kigali, and, like the one in Kigali, has a mass grave containing 25,000 people (the one in Kigali has a mass grave of 279,000).

But the really chilling part is yet to come. When they exhumed one of the mass graves, they discovered that, because of the depth of the trench and the heat generated by the decomposing bodies, the bodies on the bottom hadn't decomposed and were quite well-preserved.  The National Museum preserved these bodies using lime, and about 800 of them are on display in one of the old classroom blocks. The detail is astonishing, and you can clearly see the expressions on the people's faces as they were killed and the brutal injuries they sustained from machetes and clubs. Particularly chilling was the room devoted to bodies of children and babies.

The spot was also marked where French soldiers, supposedly sent in afterwards to protect survivors, played volleyball on top of the mass graves to help disguise the fact that they were there. The complicity of the French (and other countries and institutions) in the genocide is very frightening.

While it was very confronting, it brought home even more than the centre in Kigali just how brutal the Genocide was, and how important it is to make sure it never happens again.

Murambi Genocide Memorial Centre

 After that, we made our way up to the Nyungwe National Park, through extraordinarily pretty countryside. Again, steeply terraced hillsides and in the valleys small farms and rice paddies. As we climbed higher, the plantations of bananas, sugar cane, corn and vegetables gave way to tea plantations, which was even prettier than it had been further down.

We entered the park just before 6pm, and our first sight was a family of Olive Baboons playing in the middle of the road. They weren't at all worried about the traffic and they obviously thought it was our responsibility to avoid them as we made our way past them. Apparently these baboons don't venture far into the park, preferring to live close to the villages so they can steal food.

Olive Baboons just inside Nyungwe National Park

We were soon driving through dense forest, and not far into the forest night fell. At the same time a big storm came over with some spectacular thunder clearly audible above the noise of the truck. As the weather deteriorated, so did the road. Perhaps the second-worst road I've ever been on, but maybe it was just the darkness and the rain. There is a lot of roadwork going on, which didn't help, and lots of trucks going to and coming from the Congo border which is not far away.

It took an hour to cross the park but it seemed like three. We arrived at the guest house we were booked into just after 7pm, just in time for a hearty meal. Excellent vegetable soup, and a pretty reasonable dinner including some of the best potato chips I've ever had, and quite a tender chicken dish and a very reasonable house red wine. The guest house was basic but comfortable with a bathroom and toilet down the other end verandah and lots of hot running water.