Home again Home again . . .

On Saturday we made the 2 hour drive through the hills of Rawanda from Ruhnegeri to the capital city of Rawanda. We left our stuff in a friend’s hotel room and then set out to explore the city on foot. After getting lost on our way to the craft market, we aborted that mission and proceeded onto the Kigali Genocide Memorial. The center is the grave site of more than 300,000 Rwandans who were brutally murdered during the 1994 genocide. The memorial also serves as an educational center with several exhibits that were very moving. Katie bumped into a friend from Bates doing research at the memorial. You can find Batesies everywhere!

After arguing with some taxi drives about fare prices in my broken French (French is the national language in Rwanda), we elected to walk back to the hotel. Unfortunately it was ~10kms away so we quickly had to re-evaluate our options. We found some motor bike taxis and climbed on. We roared through the city streets at 60km/hr clutching our drivers trying not to fall off and eventually arrived back at the hotel.



We said goodbye to our dear friends whom we had been traveling with for 2 months as we made our way to the airport. We thought our adventures were over but they had just begun.

Our plane left Kigali ~3 hours late and we had a short layover in Entebbe at 2am local time. After a long 8 hour trip north, we arrived in Brussels with less than 30 minutes to make our connection. We sprinted through the airport, back through security, had the beverages we purchased at Duty free confiscated and arrived at our gate 10 minutes late but luckily this plane was delayed too. We wiped the sweat from our brows in the restroom, and boarded the plane for another 8+ hr trip over the Atlantic. We arrived in Newark after 20+ hours of traveling only to find that one of our bags didn’t make the connection in Brussels. C’est la vie.

I was super excited to see my parents who had surprised me by driving down from Boston to meet us at the airport along with Katie’s parents. We climbed into the car for our trip back to Gladstone sleep deprived and euphoric as the magnitude of our 2 month adventure in Africa started to settle in.