Day 250 / 15

Date: 18 December 2022
Sleeping location: Auberge Kayanza, Kayanza, Burundi
Distance (km today/total/total Part 2): 59 / 15551 / 714
Estimated climb (m today/total/total Part 2): 1300 / 132200 / 14200
Bigger than: Jesus
Day in three words: Burundi is confusing

The demented bird alarm clock was welcomed this time as I had somewhere to be: Burundi. I was feeling a little under the weather, not ideal when Burundi requires a Covid test for entry. The nice coffee place wasn’t open and the other coffee place I’d been recommended didn’t have any coffee, or something, so I just asked for hot water and made my own with my aeropress. Gotta have coffee.

It was Sunday and the roads were very quiet, and it turned out these two things were connected when I heard live music coming from a building and went to investigate. There turned some kind of fun sounding church sermon going on so I parked up Maggie and poked my head round the door, which was a mistake as all of the hundreds of faces in there immediately turned to look at me and I briefly became a bigger draw than Jesus himself. I wanted to watch it for a bit but I had to leave for fear of upstaging the minister or, worse, being dragged up on stage as guest of honour to give my thoughts on God. 

Thoughts on Rwanda then. A beautiful and lush place but hard cycling; it’s known as the land of a thousand hills and I reckon I cycled over 950 of them. My rough maths suggests about 8% of the total trip climb in about 3% of the distance. And a polite and kind but shy people, they usually greet back when greeted but will often not make the first move. I wonder if this is somehow related to the genocide. Something so major and so recent must ricochet down through generations and affect even those who weren't alive. Even the younger people seem very clued up on it and, like Germany with the Holocaust, the country is not shirking from the past.  

The border was relatively quiet and painless, and I enjoyed a kid in the Covid test centre ripping the paint off the walls in some kind of political protest against borders and regulations. Thankfully I was Covid free although the test only took about three minutes so who knows how thorough it was. Burundi is another new country, a lot less travelled than the last two and officially the poorest country in the world on a gdp basis. This may be a return to the days of "nice things" being less readily available and the first impression, a toilet that was just a big hole in the ground, suggested this might be the case. I was annoyingly only allowed a three day transit visa which I could extend in Bujumbura, which is faff when I probably only need to be here for about six days. 

 

I'd heard about the staring and the begging being intense here and up the first hill a load of kids did follow me, but after that it just felt like a poorer version of Rwanda really, lots of staring and murmering about me with the occasional hello (or actually bonjour/bon soir as they speak French). I kept my head down and said hello to some people and it wasn't too bad. I was feeling weak from the illness and from the border there was a lot of climbing to get to Kayanza only 21km away. It was slow going and a bit of a grind. I'd thought about pushing on from Kayanza but didn't arrive there until 1.30 and, with the world cup final starting in three and a half hours, some admin to deal with, my weakened state and the amount of hills ahead I opted to stop there and head to Bujumbura the next day. 

I went to a hotel listed on ioverlander which seemed ok, although I had no idea what things should cost in Burundi. When I tried to have a shower the head was covered in ants, then when I tried to wash them off the plughole didn't drain quickly so I created a kind of ant soup in the bath and couldn't stand in it. Whilst I was attempting to wash myself whilst bending over the bath I realised that the ants were living in the tap mechanism and ants were coming out of the shower along with the water, including onto a place that ants should not be. I got bitten by the little bastards on both of my feet. Initial thoughts are that hotels in Burundi are a) not frequently visited, and b) shit.

 

After some brief bed rest I went out looking for a SIM card. The first guy kept trying to sell me these little scratchcard things even though I kept saying “carte SIM” in a variety of ways. Eventually I showed him the place in the phone where they went, and he went “Ohh, une carte SIM” in exactly the way I’d been saying it. It was then a long process to get the carte SIM (AKA “carte SIM”) registered, during which I usually had no idea what was going on and half the town came by to look at me. On the short walk to a place to eat and watch the world cup final some kids followed me, talking nonsense and asking for money, I saw two soldiers inspecting bags of potatoes whilst one carried a rocket launcher and two men carrying a table stacked high with tiny fish. Burundi is weird. Football was good though.