Three Ozzies, a Yank and a South African go into an Indian restaurant ...

Friday and we're free to be tourists for a week or so. After we finished the workshop - considerably later than we'd anticipated owing to the thank-yous and the gift-giving - we made a quick dash to the centre to pay for our tours.

That evening, Di was back in town so we arranged to go out to dinner again. She is a source of all knowledge on places to eat and drink in Kigali having lived here for about six year. She is a nurse educator and is now working in a new hospital in a town called Butaro, high up in the mountains in the north of Rwanda. She brought along two friends she'd been working with, who have just finished a two week volunteer posting with a program called Operation Smile, a worldwide children's charity organisation. Sue is a nurse from Cleveland, Ohio, and Tinus (short I think for Martinus) is an anaesthetist from Pretoria, South Africa.

We'd been thinking of Indian, having heard that they do Indian food quite well here. So Di suggested a new Indian restaurant called Shere Sardar, in a big hotel called The Manor, in a suburb called Nyarutamara. This is a very swank area and turns out to be on the hill we see from our balcony - we can actually make out the hotel by its distinctive canopy. It has three floors of restaurants - Italian on the ground floor, Chinese on the second and Indian on the third. Shere Sardar is open on two sides but covered with a huge and rather beautiful canopy. It's very nice and the view back across the valley to the city at night is superb, especially with lightning in the background as the daily storm came in.

The food matched the view. Quite mild (the hottest of the dishes we chose was rated three chillis out of five) which let the flavours of the spices come through.

Sue was very keen to hear about Australia and for some reason that I can't remember we spent some time telling her about the domestic habits of wombats.

So there we were - two Australians, one Irish-Australian, one American and one South African, perched in an Indian restaurant in Rwanda, drinking wine from Chile, discussing wombats. Just one of those magic experiences.

Everyone agreed that the meal was well worth the rather 'extortionate' price (by Kigali standards) of $40 USD each.