Some 13 years after the horrors of genocide left the country devastated, the phrase ‘Rwanda tourism’ is no longer an oxymoron. Angus Begg reports
Enos Nzaramba is sitting on his haunches and staring intently up into the thick canopy of trees. With short flaps of his right arm he motions us to be still, and points through vines and scrub to a big fig tree some 30 metres distant. Straining our eyes, we can see two dark shapes. ‘Greybacks,’ he mouths as my guide, Aime, and I approach.
Every morning Nzaramba gets up early to be with his chimpanzees, here in the primordial forests of Nyungwe National Park, in Rwanda’s south-western corner. He begins his search for the animals at 4am, and stays with them until late afternoon when they make their nests for the night. It is a process of habituation that is repeated the next day and allows the animals to feel comfortable with a human presence.
The grand aim here is to allow the tourist an intimate experience with the primates; an experience that has paid dividends in Rwanda’s Volcanoes National Park – where visitors pay $500 per person, per day to get up close with mountain gorillas. Rwanda’s tourism authorities are banking on it working for Nyungwe, too; for Nzaramba represents the millions of Rwanda’s jobless, and the government believes that much of the country’s future success in fighting rampant poverty depends on its citizens making a living from tourism and the environment.
‘We saw that tourism [with coffee and tea] could work for us on a number of levels,’ says Rosette Rugamba, director general of the Rwanda Office of Tourism and National Parks (ORTPN), a poverty-reduction strategy being one of them – no small task for this, the most densely populated country on the world’s most densely populated continent
Rugamba says that by 2010, the year in which South Africa hosts the Soccer World Cup, Rwanda expects to have 70,000 visitors a year. That number may seem comparatively tiny, but is impressive when you consider the country’s horrific recent past. Most of those in the business of running this country look to 1995 – the year following the genocide, Rwanda’s Ground Zero – as its date of birth.
Given that French sits alongside Kinyarwanda and Swahili as one of this equatorial country’s national languages, the often misused term renaissance could hardly be more appropriate in describing Rwanda’s thus far phoenix-like rise from the ashes, with luxury lodges being built and cappuccinos frothed
Everyone has a story to tell, however. Seated opposite me in the foyer of the Hotel des Mille Collines (made famous in the film Hotel Rwanda) and wearing the serious expression of someone relating the events leading up to a traffic accident, 27-year-old Adelite Mukomana explains her personal experience of genocide in French, with touches of near-perfect English.
‘I remember it was about 8am on April 7 [1994], and we heard that the plane carrying the president had been shot down. Soon after government soldiers came to the compound… [in which she and other families were living] and ordered the 18 Tutsis living there [with two Hutus] back into the house…’.
The soldiers then ordered the Tutsis to sit down, seemingly to be executed. ‘They kicked a pregnant lady, then… hurriedly left, saying they would return to kill us.’
Everyone fled the house, scattering in different directions. Separated from her father in the panic, Mukomana took to the bushes with her younger brother. Some two weeks later, while moving locations during the night to avoid detection, they came across their father’s body at a crossroads.
After three months on the run (the 100 days of the genocide), Mukomana and her brother were eventually saved when they encountered a patrol of soldiers belonging to the rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front. Understandably, with so many stories such as this, the issue of ethnicity is still extremely sensitive for Rwandans
Down the road from the Hotel des Milles Collines, at the trendy Bourbon Café – in an equally up-market, brand-new shopping centre – tour guide Akim Gakwaya and I indulge in a cappuccino as good as any found in Milan
Gakwaya, 27, is a healthy product of President Paul Kagame’s new generation. ‘We are all Rwandans,’ he says. At the time of the slaughter he was in exile as a teenager with his parents in Bukavu, just across the border in today’s Democratic Republic of Congo. ‘There is no more Hutu, Tutsi… or even Twa. Today we are one people.’
‘Please, let’s move on,’ says Jacqui Sebageni, a tour operator and another exile whose family fled Rwanda, like so many others, after the Tutsis were subject to a massacre in 1959, eventually settling in Canada. Her business, she says, established after she returned post 1994, is doing well.
So is the business of another returnee, Doudou Katarebe, who wears a striped pink shirt, glasses and cream linen jacket. The slick 42-year-old is the owner of funky bar and African restaurant Republika, the social spot for Kigali’s elite, where English is the language of choice by the sounds of it, almost as common as Kinyarwanda and more so than French (another sign of the times in modern-day Rwanda). Katarebe opened his first Kigali restaurant in 1995, a joint-venture Chinese eatery – the first in this highland capital city – that he says fared very well.
‘There were no bars in Kigali then,’ he adds, so he opened Zanzibar and apparently made even more money. ‘With over 200 NGOs, there was lots of money around,’ says Katarebe, convinced that today the local economy is going one way: up.
You might not necessarily agree if you were to visit the rural areas of the country. Driving through Rwanda for the first time since 1994 I saw no overt signs of poverty, but I did see people working very hard to make a meagre living.
Well aware that tourism needs to be fast tracked if it is to have the desired effect in reducing poverty, Rugamba says the government’s 2003 Tourism Strategy Plan decided to position Rwanda as a ‘high-end eco-tourism destination’, as Botswana has done (with much success). But to achieve this goal, lofty mission statements apart, it is aware that is must provide the necessary quality accommodation – the type that befits a ‘high-end’ destination, and that means going beyond mosquito nets and creatively folded napkins.
Eyeing both Rwanda’s remarkable growth and activity, and the potential for future profit, the Nairobi-based Serena hotel group, the dominant chain in Kenya’s and Tanzania’s up-market sector, has waded into the top end of the market, with its Kigali Serena Hotel and Lake Kivu Serena Hotel in Gisenyi – the country’s premier offerings. Serena’s country manager Mugo Maringa says its hotels had 81 per cent occupancy for May and is turning away conference requests; he also believes investor interest in Rwanda is growing. He says Serena would like to buy an existing hotel below Volcanoes National Park, home to Rwanda’s almost legendary gorillas
Rugamba says the Rwandan government expects to have earned $100m from tourism by 2010. ‘We are expecting tourists to stay for at least a week by then, spending $1,400 during their stay,’ she adds
Rather than competing with typical savannah safaris such as the Serengeti and Masai Mara, Rwanda is focusing on the primate experience. ‘We have 13 species in Nyungwe,’ says Rugamba (also mentioning the impressive endemic bird count), citing the chimpanzee, mangabey and a massive colony of 400 Angola colobus among them.
Across the road from our rustic accommodation at the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) offices at Gisakura village is a tea factory, where a troop of around 30 Angolan colobus monkeys sit in the branches of a grove of eucalyptus trees, oblivious to our presence. ‘But the big colony is truly amazing,’ says Aime, who has been ‘working’ Nyungwe’s forest for three years. ‘Nowhere else will you see such a thing
WCS is assisting Rwandan tourism in its long-term conservation of Nyungwe forest, and its project programmes, supported by skills from around the globe, include research, community outreach and support, tourism development and capacity building.Peter Nizette, the project manager for a related WCS tourism programme, says he is in the process of designing activities for the National Park – zip lines, canopy trails and boardwalks among them. Back in Kigali, tourism boss Rugamba says the contract for the first lodge at Nyungwe has been signed with a US developer and work is to start soon. She promises it will be small, luxurious and eco-friendly, the sort of offering that is sorely needed in the Volcanoes National Park, a three-hour drive from Kigali and – along with Bwindi in Uganda – the last remaining refuge of the mountain gorilla. In today’s world of luxury game lodges, there is a dearth of good accommodation around the Park, although between Serena and a respected former South African tour operator building an ‘eco-lodge’ on the slopes, there does appear to be movement on this front
More tourist accommodation, more jobs. The hour’s drive from Ruhengeri, the nearest town to the Park, to Lake Kivu reinforces the country’s desperate need for employment; virtually the entire stretch is populated. Granted, the fertile, dark volcanic soil on which any and everything is grown will support life, but only with work will the people be able to support themselves.
I think back to the head and neck massage at the Lake Kivu Hotel, the perfect cappuccino in Kigali, Nzaramba and his chimpanzees and my first arrival here in June 1994, with refugees streaming out of the country. Thirteen years on from that horror, the transformation in this beautiful land has been little short of remarkable.
How to get there
Direct flights between Nairobi, Entebbe, Bujumbura, Kilimanjaro and Johannesburg on Rwandair Express www.rwandair.com Nairobi on Kenya Airways www.kenya-airways.com Brussels on Brussels Airlines www.brusselsairlines.com Addis Ababa on Ethiopian Airlines www.ethiopianairlines.com
Where to stay
There are currently only three hotels of international standard in Kigali: the Kigali Serena, Hotel des Mille Collines and Novotel Kigali. www.serenahotels.com www.millecollines.net www.novotel.com
What to see
Gisozi Genocide Museum Like Poland’s Auschwitz and South Africa’s Apartheid Museum, it is powerful and demands at least three hours
Nyungwe Forest
Largely virgin and said to be the largest remaining tract of mountain rainforest in Africa. Five star for birds and primates
Volcanoes National Park
The gorillas surely qualify as contemporary wonders of the world.
Useful links
Thousand Hills Expeditions
www.thousandhills.rw
Rwanda Investment and Export Promotion Agency
www.rwandainvest.com
Signature Coffees of Rwanda
www.rwandacafe.com
Rwanda Tourism
www.rwandatourism.com
Department of Immigration and Emigration
www.migration.gov.rw/
