BRINJAL IS THE NEW BLACK

DEAR READERS: We had very limited or no internet connections in Uganda and couldn't post anything for three weeks. Apologies to those who assumed the worst because of our silence on the blog. You now have plenty to read.

IN REHANA'S WORDS

Sunday, 10 November

Five days on the Ssese Islands in the middle of Lake Victoria put me back in the travelling groove. It reminded me what this journey is all about – going to the most beautiful places in the countries we visit.

We camped at Ssese Beach Resort under a mango tree riddled with monkeys in the mornings. Again we had a lawn as big as a park to ourselves. The lake lapped about three metres from our pillows. It’s been a while since I fell asleep to the sound of waves.

The island reminded me how lucky I am. It is hard to put up a home, up to three times a week, then pack it all up and move across a country. It’s always worth it when you land in a veritable paradise where there’s nothing to do all day except enjoy being there.

We had this HUGE campsite to ourselves, until the revenue arrived

The ferry to the Ssese Islands took three hours, but it isn’t far from the mainland and has tendrils of land sticking out in all directions.
We went to Bugala Island, the biggest in the Ssese group. It’s about 70km from one end to the other. We spent most of our last day driving across it. We didn’t see all of it but by all accounts we only missed the palm oil factory.

The island doesn’t have much infrastructure. There are about six resorts in Kalangala where the Entebbe ferry docks but we didn’t see more than 20 tourists in five days – local and mzungu. 

Main Road, Kalangala

At the other end of the island there’s another ferry terminal. We had a drink at the only restaurant there – sat on dirty plastic chairs with our feet in the sand and chickens pecking between them. A baby at the table next to us made a stinky yellow poo down his chair into the sand. After he was washed under a tap he did it again.

Day one on the island was hot and humid but the rest were noisy and wet. The thunder rumbled in every evening bringing splashings of rain and cooling breezes.
The lake was mostly silver but shimmered blue and was still as glass in the heat of one perfect day. We had a long, warm, mostly relaxed swim (there’s no crocodiles – we think).

We love tropical islands, camped on this beach

We were shocked at how many trees are being chopped down on the island, until we realised that a fringe was being created on the side of the road for wooden poles carrying electricity. More trees are making way as the narrow gravel road is being tarred.
Hundreds of hectares have been cleared to plant rows of palm trees.  The island’s remaining jungle is lush and loud with cicadas, birds and monkeys.

We cleared out of Ssese Beach Resort on our last day on the island. The Uganda Revenue Authority brought 120 people on their catamaran to the resort for a teambuilding session. We had two visits from taxmen, both singing their president’s praises and filled with optimism for Uganda.

One of them, Jean Paul, travels extensively but seems reconciled to coming home to power shortages, no reliable clean water, private education for his children, potholes in city and gravel secondary roads – while watching politicians and their families live the high life.

He says Yoweri Museveni joined all the roads in the country and people are so grateful they are going to give him a seventh term, or eighth, I’ve lost count. He said the lack of development is due to lazy MPs, the president can’t be held responsible. He gives the money to the MPs; what is he supposed to do when they don’t spend it?

Back in Entebbe, the political discussion continued with a young waiter, Eddie. It is the most interesting topic of discussion in Uganda, in most of the countries we’ve visited – it’s the story of criminals who live above the law; the shenanigans of a small elite who believe they are far superior to the rest; the saga of those who rise up from the muddy slums to raise their families in brick houses with electricity.

Eddie had a degree but I told him not to feel sorry for himself. In the richest countries, drama graduates worked as waiters. He says Ugandans are brainwashed. The government does so little for them, and has done so little for such a long time, that the people have forgotten the role of politicians. They have no expectations because they can’t remember what to expect.

Eddie says Uganda is more corrupt than Kenya but nobody knows because the journalists take bribes from politicians to bury their scoops. I dunno if that’s true but the newspapers are appalling in Uganda. They’re badly written and the stories are about nothing much at all.
The journalists and columnists reach for an apt word, phrase or quotation, but fail to find it a lot of the time. In a two-page attempt to analyse the rise and fall of the M23 rebel movement in the Congo, a journalist wrote that Museveni assisted the rebels who marched into the Congo wearing “gunboots” purchased at Bata in Kampala. His word seemed almost right for a second or two. This isn’t Engrish, it’s Enjurish.

Everything the president says gets coverage, in the papers and on television. Ugandan TV seems very dumbed down – many quiz shows with silly questions – and their music videos make Snoop Doggy Dog seem like a gender activist.

Entebbe didn’t appear to have much to offer so, after one night, we hightailed it through Kampala to the north. Another Nile and another lake awaits us.

We had better, nay fantastic, accommodation round the corner at the Kolping Hotel in Masindi

IN JULIA'S WORDS

Later November

I’m at a stage of my life (a recurrent stage) when I haven’t the foggiest of what’s actually going on, how I want to spend my time when I get home, who in fact I may be. When I’m feeling gatvol of this palava called Being on the Pitted Road, I think part of what gives me the chutzpah to keep me going is that I’d rather be Not Knowing Anything while discovering place after place after placeplaceplaceplace that are often times gorgiferous, sometimes not at all, but always filled with gawpables and their many fine, foreign friends. Mostly we’re treated to a mix of intriguing and damn beautiful.

It certainly makes a spiriting difference to one’s sense of OKness in perpetually new places when we’re both healthy (or thereabouts) and the BRC is ticking over like an accomplished ticker-overer. And when the place is divine – like the Ssese Islands, we’ve recently departed – well, then the Unbearable Fact of Travel is lightness itself. 

Luscious Lake Victoria. Click to enlarge

Ssese Islands must once have been a kingdom all of its own. Once I’ve finished designing my flag and amassing my thugs, it will be once again – I will plant my flag, uniform my thugs and make it my queendom.
It’s an island with three long arms to it – each 30-ish kms long, but thin. The frilly arms make inlets of Lake Victoria's waters. It looks much as I imagine Norway’s fjords do. Except these are palmy tropical wet season Uganda fjords.

Ssese is big enough to do something with – like grow palms to make palm nut oil, for example – yet small enough to feel manageable. It has nail-trimmings sized beaches, lush woods and lawns, and the kind of gentle hills on which one could set up one’s queendom’s palace.

The place I'll plant my flag

Ssese is also a study on the many tiers of flight. It is constantly abuzz with things winged. There are the blowyourmindzillions of albino “lake flies”, harmless blighters light as if made of ash and fairy thread. 

Then, possibly noshing these feeble beings, are the canyoubluddybelieveitbillions of dragonflies, these sporting wings with the look of twin-propellers whirring on them. They dash and about at shin height when we walk (that’s the royal “we”, of course, me warming up to the monarch role I have lined up for weself), miraculously never so much as grazing the skin.

Then are the feathered flyers of many different persuasions. I’m not too clued up on bird names, but I can confirm they are not penguins and they are not budgies. Some of them have heads that look like anvils and look a bit deranged, the way they stalk about in the shallow waters beaking for fish.

So you see why the air is always aflutter there on the islands. And all those wings beating about may account for one or two of the delirious storms we experienced.

Perhaps the antenna of the puff-flimsy lake fly will be my queendom’s national symbol. The name I’ll tweak just slightly – Ssissi will do just fine – and the island’s major sport will be the very infectious Echo-Me-Laugh. But all this must wait. First, we explorers must further venture.

My queendom will be the land of prosiperity and hygiene

We must be nearing 20 000kms in the near 7-and-a-half months we’ve been road-bound, and the experience of driving has typically been an adrenalin-junkies’ dream.
Often times I’ve felt like I’m playing a highstakes form of video game.  The levels of difficulty vary, but when the out-of-the-blue variables that call for do-or-die reflexes really get going, you can have a pitted sodden dust road with motorbikes and animals suddenly darting into your zone, to which can suddenly be added a skyfull falling on your head. 

And if you’re on the very, very, very high level of difficulty, you may have engine trouble and a vomiting passenger too. So far, though, we’ve not got to “Game Over” in this no-laughing-matter of staying alive on the Road Game. And we intend to keep our scorecard squeaky clean.

Rehana thinks it may be wrong to dip in and out of so many beautiful places one after another after another as we are. She’s worried that they’ll all blur together and each’s specific splendour elude our recollections.

She may be right, but I think that even if it’s a smear of general wuuuuuu we remember, it’s like finding the sherbet with the lollypop in a Lucky Packet.

Letitia came for a visit at our Ssese island campsite. Rehana has serious hair envy

If Uganda was a woman, she’d be this insanely big-hipped, mega-buxomed banshee. Ridiculously fertile, she becomes pregnant just by you looking at her.
So damp, dusky and fecund, moss and ferns and orchids weave themselves into her dreadlocks, and spores the size of volcanic boulders fall from them when she shakes her hair. She pongs something special, a mix of distilled wet flannel, phenomenal BO and sheer rot.
And beware. Her simple excesses – belly laughter, grief’s tears, even a snort of derision through her potent nostrils – leaves the known world undone.

Swallowed by life in Uganda's forests

IN REHANA'S WORDS

Wednesday, 13 November

In the absence of ambient noise, night sounds from a distance away pierce your eardrums. Without traffic roaring, alarms pealing or loud passing pedestrians, it sounds like there are millions of crickets and frogs in the grass. Nightclub noise pollution travels far in rural towns and villages.

I can hear a hippo snorting. It sounds close, but it could be a couple of kilometres away. Do I get up and run or do I keep on writing? Jules and I slept through a pride of lions encircling our campsite and swam with crocodiles. We’ll probably also get the hippo thing wrong. Do we run uphill to avoid them or do we confuse them with zigzags?

We spent a lot of this afternoon staring at elephants. They cross the highway into the Murchison’s Falls National Park, walking past the Heritage resort where we are staying. We are outside Pakwach, our most northerly destination in Uganda.
We are camping on the Nile River again, the one that heads north out of Lake Albert.

The view from our campsite

Two elephant families were out for a stroll today, just a few hundred metres from our camp. Jules and I, armed with binoculars and a camera that only takes decent photos from really close up, found shade under a tree and kept very still while we watched them. 

They flapped their ears incessantly and wrenched out long grass with muddy roots that they tossed onto their backs.

We were scolded for getting so close to the elephants

We went for a walk along the dirt track, and on our way back a family of elephants were crossing the road. Most had made their way to a nearby puddle that they were trampling into mud that they spouted onto their backs. But one stayed on the road to glare at us and snort contemptuously. Three youngsters left the herd and joined her on the road to stare.

We had just caught up on the road with a group of young men. One of them, Ema, said he had been a guide at a lodge and advised us to keep our distance and our voices low. He was sure they would move soon, elephant herds stuck together.

But the four didn’t move, and their snorting rose in tempo and incidence. They were in no mood to cede the road; we were forced into the long grass above them. We must have made a sufficiently abject loop around them; the elephants had moved off the road when we reached it again, our shins lashed by the sharp grass.
There was a storm ahead of us as we drove to Pakwach, a wide curtain of dark grey. The sky darkened as we neared and within minutes of our sunglasses hitting the dashboard we had slowed to 40km/hour and our hazard lights were on.
We passed drenched children walking home from school. I felt sorry for them, but while I was trapped on the road by elephants I wished with all my might that it would rain down on me.

Trapped in the heat by the elephants

Despite the heat and the herds, Pakwach is the place for long walks

It is hot in Pakwach. The lizards spend most of the day in the shade. But that did not stop me from braaing yesterday – in the heat of the afternoon sun. Jules and I are tanned to the utmost edge of permanent skin damage.

We’ve spent most of our time here watching the weather. From our seats under our tent every night the stage before us is a patch of lawn, followed by a few metres of long grass and reeds, a river a kilometre or more wide, a savannah landscape of low shrub and mountains in the distance.
The mountains are in the Democratic Republic of Congo, about 20km away. To our right is South Sudan, about 80km away. We’re going to neither.

Storm watching at the Nile. Click to enlarge

It is the time of the short rains; they last until the end of November. Then there isn’t a drop until March, when the next digging season (as the locals style it) begins. Uganda’s so fecund that the country has two harvests each year. The heat must be terrific in the dry months. Despite the daily rains, sweat runs down my body most of the night and all of the day.

Every night there are storms to the left of us, storms to the right. They are heralded by dense masses of grey cloud and we can hear the rain thudding to the ground when they empty nearby.

On night one a brinjal-coloured cloud gathered to the right of our campsite. It threatened us for a few hours but emptied itself a few metres away. The pastel pink and blue sunset over Congo’s mountains paled in comparison, but was also compelling. We sat for hours and stared at the lightning that surrounded us.

On night two a jagged cloud emptied above our heads. The wind lashed our tent, making it a warm cocoon. Fat drops pelted on our roof and our awning hosted a waterfall. I slept like a placid baby in a boat bobbing gently on swells.

Tonight’s been relatively peaceful. The sunset was vermilion pink and the towering clouds were white and puffy. The lightning’s outlining mountains in the distance. There isn’t a breeze.

The hippo’s still snorting and I haven’t a clue where it is. I’m going upstairs now, where we’re relatively safe from our four-legged neighbours.

Zeynab and Charles rowed us across the Nile to their village

On the shores of the Nile. We saw many hardworking children on our journey

STILL REHANA'S WORDS

ODOMETER READING: 258 649 (We’ve driven 19 877km since April)

Monday, 25 November

After Pakwach our GPS was a joy to behold. We are travelling south constantly, pointing home hallebloodylujah. I don’t think I want to travel for a year again, not unless I can afford a higher measure of comfort.
I am getting increasingly angry about the poverty and lack of development we’re encountering everywhere we go, and that’s no mood for a holiday. Jules and I are considering a trip to Scandinavia next.

We had a couple of short stays and short hops after Pakwach, but we didn’t camp all the while, so it was okay. In Hoima, a small town where we spent one night in a cheap hotel, we did little except go for a walk and talk to teenaged girls coming home from school.

More than half of Uganda’s children attend private schools and most of them are boarders. Everyone we speak to says the private schools are better than the pathetic, fee-demanding government schools but we’ve driven past some where it appears the children are crammed into any empty building available.

Many of the private schools have the same names. In Uganda you can matriculate from Strive Secondary, Victorious, Aspire or even the Competent Secondary School. The churches invest in preschools and that’s obvious in their names, like Glorious Divine Preschool.

What's in a name?

Next, we spent a night in Fort Portal, a town with huge potential. They have parking attendants, who run and wave ticket books within seconds of you coming to a stop, but the streets are clean, they have wide pavements and hideous public art.
The Hillton Hotel resembled a prison. It had a well down the centre of its five floors, enclosed with steel barriers. We discovered in the wee dark hours that voices echoed horribly.

Julia and I must be among a small handful of people in a same-sex relationship who have gone on honeymoon to Uganda. Thanks to the generosity of our friend Prospero Bailey, we were at Semliki Lodge for our first anniversary, enjoying a supper set out for two in the seclusion of the bush with our generous fire glowing.

The drive from Fort Portal to Semliki

Uganda has ringfenced most of its beautiful places with national parks that demand up to $80 per person per day. Some also demand fees for cars, and ours is heavy. Almost all of them have airstrips and that’s how most of their guests arrive, according to our host in Jinja who was also a pilot for a charter air company.

At the Semliki Park we saw antelope, buffalo, monkeys, baboons and a host of birds. Weirdly, birds were called bandts (emphasise the “and” in the middle) by our guides in Kenya and Uganda.
We had another gorgeous forest walk but encountered Tstetse fly for the first time, and hopefully the last, in the tangled wetness. They’ve eradicated sleeping sickness but the flies are still horrible pests. They took a liking to my shoulders – which must have been salty with the litres of sweat dripping down my head – and their bites raised welts that itched for days.

Jules in Semliki forest waving flies off her neck

We slept in a tent that was worlds apart from ours. The bathroom with its spacious shower and twin hand basins was encased in stone; the rest was covered in canvas. Our bedroom had two double beds, a couch, a table, huge wardrobes and still it had a generous helping of butter-soft, warm wooden floor.

Our butler Ishmael brought us coffee in bed. Jules kept handing him dirty washing, he handed back her "confidentials", said he didn't do them.
The food was high class and we had pudding after every lunch and supper. I spent most of the weekend lolling on a huge soft daybed and a lounger next to the swimming pool.

Our hosts were Souf Effericans, Dane and Konica. We left with a huge bag of spinach, mint, dhania and green beans.

The balcony of our tent

The communal balcony

At our next destination we were back in our small tent, but spent all our waking hours outside, staring in awe at the Rwenzori Mountains that loomed above and the terraced hills encircling the rest of the landscape.
Again, the weather was fascinating. There’s a lake on top of one of Rwenzori’s peaks that fed fat, bleach-white tropical clouds that grew above us every afternoon. When it seemed that the clouds had collected tons of water, they rolled ominously down towards us, but most dissipated or emptied elsewhere.

Our campsite with Ruwenzori's peaks sheltering us

Once again we couldn’t afford the best Rwenzori had to offer; we’d need a walletful of US dollars for that. A lodge in the national park, 200m up the road from where we were staying and funded by USAid (wtf??), charged $180 per person per day excluding park fees.
But at the Rwenzori Mountaineering Safari Camp we paid Ugx15 000 per day (R60 for both) and hired a guide who took us on one of our best walks on our travels.
Jacob walked with us for one hour through his community’s fields planted mostly with banana, coffee and cassava that reached up to the highest slopes of the hills.
Then we walked through the community’s indigenous forest that fringed the national park. I have never before seen such lush green undergrowth under trees growing so thick and high that they block the sun.

For once, the paths weren’t smooth or landscaped. They were skinny and steep and when we reached the forest they were boggy and black.

We made way for people bent almost to the waist under the weight of the produce they grew on the steep hills. I finally got footage of the sight that’s been bothering me since I left home – a barefoot old woman carrying a huge sack on her head, anchored to her back with a strap across her forehead.
The young woman with her had a huge bunch of bananas on her neck, a sack of something on her back and a collection of wood strapped on. (No internet in Uganda, I wish I could post the footage online. Later)

We saw a three-horned chameleon. It was quite a sight – one of the most surprising and best animal encounters I’ve had on this trip.

Then we crossed the equator for the last time – southward bound are we – drove slowly past Lake Edward and through Queen Elizabeth National Park on the potholed pockmarked roads that took us there.
We had another encounter with a truck on our side of the road but Jules was driving and this time we dodged it. We came very close to the border with Congo but decided not to visit.
Last we heard, and this was some weeks ago, the M23 rebels were being flushed out nearby by peacekeeping forces.

Queen Elizabeth Park with Lake Edward gleaming in the distance. So colonised

Then there was tea, tea far as the eye could see

Those strange Ugandan names

Our Ssese island experience had made us hungry for more lake islands, so we made for a tiny one in the middle of Lake Bunyonyi. Marta, an Italian we met at Semliki who had worked as a travel agent, told us about a community-run resort where we might be able to afford a banda.

We managed two nights in what was called a Geo-dome on Amagara island before we gave up. We had no front door; our banda was open to a generous balcony and stingy weather. When we awoke and sat up in bed we looked onto the lake that was as grey as a fjord.
I know I said we were longing for a Scandanavian holiday but not in the middle of our Africa adventure. We didn’t enjoy shivering a few kilometres from the equator.

A room with too much of a misty view

Lake Bunyoni's dotted with islands and very pretty when the sun comes out for a few minutes

We met a very interesting couple on the island. Jennifer and Remy are both marine biologists and we spoke about climate change and religion most of the first night we spent together. They were going to Kisoro and we wanted to leave the cold island, so we took them and ourselves to the small border town. Our first passengers!
Both Congo and Rwanda are a hop and a skip from Kisoro and I saw a refugee camp for the first time. White and blue plastic tents and outhouses crowded in a field of mud and branded with the UNHCR’s name and logo.

Kisoro residents say they heard the shelling a few weeks ago during the final push against the M23 rebels. They’re used to seeing people fleeing into the town – it used to be Rwandans during their long years of conflict and genocide, now it’s the Congolese. Kisoro is a mishmash of peoples and languages. It also has an army base and a UN compound.

Allegedly, Kisoro is ringed by volcanoes but we didn’t see one because it rained almost all of the time. But we had good company and a crowd large enough for me to make my first pot of briyani on this trip – a veggie one, not lamb – but it was good.
Jennifer and Remy took shelter from the rain in their tiny tent (they're backpacking) under our awning. We were the only people at Three Gorillas campsite and there was a huge lapa to hang up dripping mattresses and hand washed clothing.
As we drove out of town a man came towards us, stumbling on the white line, his arms outstretched, his eyes blank. Not going to Congo, although we could walk there.
We saw the volcanoes as we left. The clouds had lifted and four of them were visible as we drove 13km into Rwanda. 

IN JULIA'S WORDS

26 November

First stop in Rwanda

In Uganda which we’ve just exited, and Rwanda where now we are, many faces sport visages a slight purple the colour of charcoal. Sometimes, as a wandering mzungu, the brinjal poker faces that stare at me as I pass slightly scare me; when one bursts into a smile in response to my greeting, I’m as relieved as content.

Such a face was our last Ugandan goodbye. It was the face of Francis, the Ugandan Revenue Authority’s man in the custom’s office at Uganda’s border. His desk was alone in a very big room with clean linoleum floors and a mission statement written on a whiteboard. The “motto” was “We are small drums – making a big sound”. He waived the fine he could have given us for not noticing that only 14 days had  been granted the BRC (our visas were for 30), and wished us a good journey with a massive set of teeth in his gorgeous face.

Rehana and I drove the 30 metres to the Rwandan border chatting merrily about our fabulous time in Uganda, what a splendid farewell Francis had given us, and how – up until that point – our experiences at borders had been unexpectedly smooth. Sometimes even wonderful.
If you keep in mind that entering Rwanda would be our 28^th border post since we began our journey (that’s counting two per border), never had we experienced the corruption or obstructivization of officialdom as we had expected. Hot and harassed and even fleeced we may have been, but only ever (relatively) slightly.

At the border of Uganda and Rwanda we change again from driving on the left side of the road to the right (the only other country we’ve been in driving on the right is Ethiopia). Perhaps for this reason they’ve attached big metal letters spelling out the names of each country on the booms that separate the two. I drove BRC to the boom on the right, spelling R W A N D A.

A brinjal-shaded man in green fatigues with “P O L I C E” written on his green cloth cap instructed me to turn off the car, and come with Rehana and all our documents. He was curt and unsmiling and scared me.
We did as instructed. Rehana entered the shed of a police station just over the Rwandan border. I stood clutching my passport amidst darkly loitering policemen outside. Two of them asked me a hundred questions – mabbe just curious – was it the language issue, or their interrogative manner, that made me so nervous of them?

Whatever it was, it went from slightly disconcerted to out-and-out freaked when I heard cries of pain and pleas for mercy. The woman was on the floor of the narrow corridor that lead to the police station’s single door; a policeman prowled with the saunter of a predator over her, sneering as he prepared to deliver the thud of his next punch, next kick.

Just inside that door Rehana had disappeared as instructed. The room had a small window; I pressed my face to it to see inside, and scanned until I caught sight of Rehana. I mouthed, “You OK?”, and she mouthed back, with eyes rolling but sort-of smiling, “Yes”.

I saw several of the loitering policemen noticing that I was noticing the brutalising of this woman. By the time I had finished checking at the window that Rehana was OK, the beaten woman had gone from the corridor. I choose to believe that she was let go. As Rehana emerged from the police station she said, “sê niks”. “OK”, I replied.

Perhaps the other official faces at the border meant well, but I will never be sure. I was scared of them all – of arbitrary violence they may just decide to serve us. The immigration man and the customs man let us through without hassle, but scared I remained.

Such clear evidence of a brutal police state shivers me. Not least because I had just waved a cheery goodbye to an official of one state, and was now in the chilly environs of a dodgy new one (dodgier than the last? Hmm).
Add to that the nearby history of the savagery of genocide that you can superimpose at a mental instant on the visage of the ring of five volcanoes where we currently sit, and I’m shaky.

Three of the five volcanoes

That bloody butchering of Rwanda’s 1994 can plain taint everything. A million (or so?) deathed in 100 days’ frenzy. A 40ish-year-old manager at a hotel has voluminous scars on his face and neck. What was his experience?
At our campsite four men of different ages slash the grass with machetes (what a lawnmower wouldn’t do for our continent, the labour it could save!), and I get the grille at what the same forceful motion with a sharp blade meant a short 19 years ago. Even children far too young to know anything about it, I look at them and heavily wonder how they will wear these genocidal facts.

I had been prepared to witness the horror of this when visiting dedicated memorials. I think, perhaps, I’d conjured simpleton visions of healing when I’d read of successes of reconciliation processes, of new economic growth, of a damaged nation moving fast-forward.
But how – ever – can such an event recede? How can you ever not know the shattering excesses that people are capable of, once you’ve experienced them?
There’s no unforgetting. Those who lived the savagery will one day die, but the event will never. 

We are camping in a cleared space among mielie fields surrounded by five volcanoes, often invisible in the rainy seasons cloud. 
It is spectacular. I’m hoping to learn how to digest in the month or so we plan to be in Rwanda the three-in-one: the raw of the not-far slaughter, the realities of today’s people, the magnificence of the theatre of all of this:

Here's four volcanoes. Click to enlarge