Day 251 / 16

Date: 19 December 2022
Sleeping location: Maison de Passage Philipo Neri, Bujumbura, Burundi
Distance (km today/total/total Part 2): 92 / 15643 / 806
Estimated climb (m today/total/total Part 2): 1400 / 133600 / 15600
Down/up: 1400m/10 degrees
Day in three words: Down to Tanga

I had a fevered sleep but felt a bit better come morning, though still not great. It was the kind of illness where you’d pop a couple of paracetamol and work from home, except my “work” is cycling and I can’t do it from home. I considered staying at the weird hotel another night but decided against it as a) I needed to extend my visa in Bujumbura, which was a day’s ride away and my visa expired at the end of the following day, b) it was weird. So I stuffed myself full of calories, caffeine and painkillers and set off.

 

Once I got into the groove it wasn’t so bad, I ground up the hills and conserved my energy freewheeling down the descents. It was cloudier and therefore cooler than the previous day, which helped. People-wise I got all the usual attention, and lots of kids running alongside up hills, but a curt nod and hello generally convinced them that I wasn’t going to start throwing money at them for their troubles. I also started to get people thinking I was Chinese, which was initially amusing but quickly got tired when people started doing over the top impressions of Chinese people as a joke at my expense. Is it possible that Burundians are kind of dicks?*

A few random observations from the road:

-Most of the minibuses have Christian slogans like “God is great” on the windscreen, but one had a banner saying “No beef” and presumably belongs to the only Hindu in the local area

-There are checkpoints with soldiers every 20km or so, which became pretty fun once I realised they would salute back if I saluted

-The kids on bikes grab onto the back of lorries going uphill, like in Ethiopia

-I briefly cycled behind a bike carrying an adult pig on its rear rack; alive or dead I am not sure

For lunch I stopped in a sort of snack bar and attempted to order some food without really knowing what was available. Six different dishes then appeared, most of which were nice, although there was a strange banana spaghetti dish which had an estimated ten ingredients but tasted of literally nothing. The language barrier is occasionally difficult. French is better than Amharic in Ethiopia or Arabic in Sudan, but I’m not great and I get the impression their French isn't materially better than mine. 

Mid afternoon came my reward for pushing on. I popped through a cut at the top of a climb and there was a sudden absence of anything this high ahead, the hills falling away into the distance. Time to drop from 2200m to 800m, and boy was it fun. The first ten kilometres in just over ten minutes, ears popping, rattling over the bumpy road, tea plantations giving way to palms and banana trees, temperature rising seemingly every minute until it was actually hot for the first time in Part 2. With 5km to go I came out of the valleys and there was the plain far below, Bujumbura spread out on it with Lake Tanganyika behind. It’s the longest lake in the world and I’ll be following it south for the next two or three weeks.

I found a room at a nice religious guesthouse in a residential neighbourhood via ioverlander. A small space but one advantage of my cold is that I can't really smell my shoes. The terrible internet and frequent blackouts suggest that Burundi really is a fair bit poorer than the last few countries. Everyone cheered when the power came back on though, which is nice. I went out for dinner at a nice place nearby and when I stepped out of the guesthouse two tiny children cried "mzungu" and hugged me round the legs, which was adorable and unexpected. As I was paying for dinner a waitress said something I didn't really understand about a telephone, and then demonstrated what she meant by putting her number into my phone as "Suzanne". She was pretty cute but I'm not sure the long distance, constantly cycling, different language thing really has legs, and her number didn't work anyway.  

*Given that these are written a couple of days after the fact, you can probably see where this is going.