Adventure of the month

.... here are some more photos from my visit to Akagera National Park earlier this week.

This past May , I had a chance to do a one-day safari in Rwanda's Akagera National Park and it was fantastic. I believe I even posted some pictures that meagerly attempt to show just how special that park is. On that day I saw everything that I had hoped to see, that is, with one significant exception. In all of my safaris (including South Africa, Botswana, Zambia and of course, Rwanda) I have always wanted to see a hippo out of the water and I have always failed miserably. Consequently, all my hippo pics look suspiciously like photos of gray boulders peaking out of the water. Even the best of all the photos inspires the thought "Wow, that rock almost looks like a hippo". So, with that in mind, some stubborn determination and a lot of wishful thinking, I headed back to Akagera two days ago. So, how did it go? Well, I think it is unseemly to brag, so I will allow this photo to do it for me, but suffice it to say that I was very giddy that day. I have some other cool...

As I mentioned in yesterday's post, Shawn and I got a chance to visit Nyungwe National Park , which is about a four hour's drive from Kigali. Nyungwe boasts a large tract of untouched mountain rain forest, home to thirteen species of primates, loads of mammals that they tell you right off the bat you are not going to see and something like 400 species of birds. It is also home to some ridiculously difficult hiking trails. We set off on one of these "trails" (or as I call them impossible vertical trudges through thick ravines with vicious man-eating ants thrown in for fun) in search of chimpanzees. We tried for about two and a half hours. Our guide, Jean Claude, did his best with a faulty radio, trackers that were in his words "not serious" and an avowed non-trekker slowing him down, but there was simply no finding the chimps, so he switched tacts. He decided that we should visit the mangabey monkeys which his trackers told him wer...

I am back home from Kigali. I should be preparing for our upcoming month-long trip to Peru, which kicks off just 5 days from now, but my mind is still bumping along the dirt roads of Rwanda. Since it is a relatively small country, we got a chance to cover a lot of ground; we saw most of the northeast section of the country when we visited Akagera Nat'l Park and later a big chunk of the south when we visited Nyungwe Park. All along the way, two things were all but guaranteed. One was stunning vistas; I was constantly fighting the urge to ask our driver, Modeste to stop for photo ops, since I knew the goal was to actually get to these parks in a somewhat reasonable amount of time. The second sure thing was the chorus of cries from the children everytime we would drive through any of the villages. Sometimes, we would hear them before we saw them. "Muzungu! Muzungu! ( something unintelligible in Kinyarwanda) Muzungu!" We quickly lea...

It feels like it has been quite a while since I posted anything, but I blame this on a totally uneventful week at home, which gave me nothing to post and an action packed one on the road, which has given me no time to write. For the past week, I have been staying in Kigali, Rwanda. Like many people, originally, my only association with this country was the movie, "Hotel Rwanda". I expected the ravaged, war-torn country I had seen on film. This perception was greatly diminished on my first stay back in Feb. 06. During that visit, I was able to go to the Volcanoes National Park and visit the mountain gorillas (of "Gorillas in the Mist", Dian Fossey fame), spend some time at the heart-breaking Genocide Museum, and more importantly just wander the streets of what turned out to be a really nice city with incredibly kind, open people. This time around, with an approximately two weeks stay, I look forward to getting to know both ...