Today was just a travel day, from Kigali to Lake Kivu. I’m now settled into the amazing Umutuzo Lodge, and I’m looking forward to a couple days of exploring.
This morning, I decided to try Move, which is a ride hailing service by Volkswagen which operates in Rwanda. I was curious to see how a country specific ride hailing service from a German car company would work. The answer is not especially well – the app is flakey and the driver might have scammed me into paying twice (not actually sure if it was a scam or bad software).
Once I was back at the airport to pick up my rental car, there was another faff, when the Europcar credit card reader wouldn’t process the temporary deposit. In the end, I was able to withdraw some US dollars via the Forex place to give a cash deposit (I didn’t want to be stuck with a ton of Rwanda Francs at the end of the trip). Eventually all was sorted, and I got my rental car.
The drive to Lake Kivu is around 160km, and everyone said it would take around three hours. Which feels optimistic. It’s a country of 1000 hills after all, and each one of those hills has a semi truck going under 5mph. After about an hour of absolutely crawling, then about half an hour of pretty intense road construction, I was treated to almost two hours of gorgeous twisting mountain roads on fresh asphalt. Not especially sporty in a Toyota Rav4, but fun nonetheless.
The last half hour was some serious white knuckle driving on dirt and rock “roads” with big gullies and seriously sketchy terrain. I don’t have any useful photos, but maybe I’ll grab some (on foot) tomorrow.
It was all worth it in the end – I’ve got a gorgeous bungalow at the lodge. I’m the only guest tonight (more are arriving tomorrow) so I had dinner with the owner, a Belgian named Phillipe. He built the lodge starting about 5 years ago, after falling in love with Rwanda. I’ll share more about the setting once I’ve had some time to explore.
Lovely place, though hard to get there. At first I read the title as “falls and white knuckles” so was glad to learn it was “faffs” though they don’t sound pleasant either.
Hi Colin. I’m sure we were on some of those same or very similar roads in Rwanda but as you, I loved every minute of my visit ( except for the bug I brought home with me so be careful)
I would make Africa a yearly visit if I physically could.
Please keep your blogs coming – I love reading them !