The Sweaty Pied Piper: Hiking the Congo-Nile Trail
As Em has mentioned before, we strongly believe that walking is the speed of perception. When you walk you have the time to see and smell, look at the dirt, check in the shops, experience. And so, I look for a long walk everywhere we go. In Rwanda, that walk is the Congo-Nile Trail (CNT). The CNT follows the eastern shore of Lake Kivu in the far west of Rwanda and nominally stretches about 140 miles, covered over 10 days of hiking (or fewer by bike). There are guesthouses every ~10 miles that serve dinner and breakfast and typically allow camping for a very modest fee. Perfect. For a more child-palatable excursion, we opted to hike just the northern 40 miles that remain unpaved from Gisenye to Kibuye with a return by boat (the previously pictured ‘Best Boat in Africa’). Rwanda has taken a very upscale approach to tourism; for example there are two hotels near the national parks (The infamous ‘One and Only’s’) that cost $4k-10k per night and just a hike in the national parks cost our family $240. The CNT is decidedly not upscale, with many of the villages having little or no road access and the guesthouses typically not having hot water. As a result, we hoped that this would allow us a less curated view of the country. It did. Boy howdy.
I should say that the pictures in this post aren’t really reflective of the experience we had on this trail. I’m generally reticent to take pictures of strangers, partly because I feel like it’s just intrusive to get your camera in someone’s face and partly because travel photos are ogling by another name. As a result, I didn’t take many pictures of the epic crowds we attracted on this trail and which really defined the experience. It may look like a serene mountain/lake hike, but I assure you it was not.
At almost all moments of our four days on the trail, we were attended by a crowd that was amazed by…us. Staring is apparently completely socially acceptable and both teenagers and adults would stop their journey to watch us in silence while we ate our lunch on the side of the road. 30 minutes, an hour? Sure, let’s watch. Up to 50 children (yes, 50!) followed us for miles until they hit the inevitable, parentally defined but invisible barrier that was the limit of their free roam.
While the adults watched in silence, the children were boisterous, yelling a series of questions that is apparently the only sequence of English they study in school: “Good morning! (regardless of time of day) How are you?! I am fine! What is your name?!” Fortunately, I knew the answers every time. Typically, this would be followed by “Give me money!”, which, I noted, sounds a lot like “Good morning” in the Kinyarwanda accent, a fact that can be used to divert the constant request, resulting in either: (a) peals of laughter or (b) abject consternation. In truth, the unrelenting attention was very hard on us, especially Joe, who received the lion’s share because of his long blonde locks (which made grown women die with laughter for some reason). Joe dealt with the harassment by gazing steadfastly at the ground. Sam dealt with it by sprinting ahead of the group. I walked, profusely perspiring under the equatorial sun through the land of 1000 hills, all the while leading a gaggle of hollering children out of their village. The Sweaty Pied Piper.
