Visiting the obscure country of Burundi

Here are some things I learned or observed on our road trip through Tanzania to visit Burundi and Rwanda a couple of weeks ago. In all, we drove 3,707 km/2,303 miles from our home in Nairobi west through Tanzania to the capital of Burundi – Bujumbura – then north to the capital of Rwanda – Kigali – and back east again.

• Out of the four countries we drove in on this trip, Kenya, our own home/country, has the worst roads of the lot. This is surprising, given that it’s the wealthiest and arguably the most developed of all countries in East Africa. But this could be the very reason – this is why it has the most cars and trucks that use the roads and wear them out perhaps more than they do in Burundi, Rwanda or Tanzania. We took one route in Kenya west to go into Tanzania, but stretches of one road were so bad that on the way back, we chose to take a longer route once back in Kenya, hoping to avoid this stretch. But we happened upon another long stretch of road that was under construction, which meant we had to drive on a long, bumpy side road!
• Much more so than in Kenya, people carry things on their heads and ride bicycles for transportation and to haul things in Tanzania and especially in Burundi and Rwanda. Instead of carts for cargo or even wheelbarrows, people use their bicycles to haul all manner of goods, from huge bags of charcoal or bales of hay to people – using them as a town’s official taxi service (we saw a lot of women riding side-saddle, sitting over the back wheel on a carrier). And it just made sense to us – but apparently not to the bicyclist - the many times we passed a bike that the load they were trying to haul was just way too heavy. Several times we saw an overturned bike, the load obviously top-heavy, with two people standing next to it, scratching their heads, trying to figure out what to do next. Or we could never figure out how the bicyclist could balance such a tall or heavy load and ride their bike. And we’re not sure why, but we don’t see people walking and carrying things on their heads much in Kenya at all, but this is common in the other countries we visited.
• We visited the world’s third- and fourth-largest freshwater lakes – driving around Lake Victoria in Tanzania and stopping there both ways and visiting Lake Tanganyika at one of our destinations in Burundi. And we hail from the shores of the world’s largest freshwater lake – Lake Michigan/Huron (which are considered one lake together, since they are at the same elevation and water passes freely between them).
• Good thing we are flexible drivers. When we moved to Kenya, we had to learn to drive on the left side of the road again, and we are now quite adept at it. Tanzania also drives on the left. But as soon as we got all the way across Tanzania and crossed the border into Burundi, we needed to switch sides of the road. This was challenging in itself, but we had our right-hand-drive car with us, so the steering wheel was on the outside of the road. But both of us did quite well switching to the other side of the road there and also in Rwanda (and then back again in Tanzania and Kenya). It’s odd that neighbors like this in Africa drive on different sides of the road. It must be according to who the country’s colonial power was. For Kenya and Tanzania, it was Great Britain, which drives on the left side, and for Burundi and Rwanda, it was Belgium, which drives on the right.
• We are also grateful we have some fairly flexible skills in the language department as well, that we had previously lived in a French-speaking country. We didn’t find many natives in Burundi who speak English, and we managed to ask a few times for directions to the American embassy. In Rwanda, however, we found more English speakers, since they get a few more tourists there.
• Driving west from Nairobi, we passed through a wide variety of terrain. We went down into the Rift Valley and skirted Masai Mara game park, which is the Kenyan extension of the famous Serengeti in Tanzania. On the eastern side of Tanzania we passed through an area that had hills jutting up out of the plains and outcroppings of boulders that sometimes had interesting piles of balancing rocks. Much of Tanzania was very flat, but these plains varied from very dry to being hit by torrential downpours, which we got caught in a few times. Once we hit the western side of Tanzania, it becomes very hilly. Both Burundi and Rwanda are very hilly. In fact, Rwanda’s nickname is the “Land of a Thousand Hills.” The land is also very lush. We saw many kinds of trees in these countries, including banana, coffee, tea, palm, baobab, eucalyptus and pine.
• As much as Rwanda has been through, as concerned as it should be about racial tensions, the social atmosphere and alleviating poverty, it is also very concerned about its environment. Surprisingly, it has essentially banned the use of plastic bags in the country. In fact, at the border, a guard asked to see in the back of our car (our luggage) to see what we had in plastic bags, and then he asked us to throw at least one away (he didn’t catch all the plastic bags we had). They even had some free paper bags that we could have taken. In some places in many African countries, the land is so littered with thrown-away plastic shopping bags (I’ve seen this a lot around the refugee camps in Kenya). I’m not denying that plastic bags are bad for the environment, and it certainly is unsightly to see them discarded and blown away and stuck on bushes and trees in rural areas. But I’m just surprised that Rwanda would be so concerned about the role of plastic bags and that it would take such widespread action on a countrywide scale. Indeed, especially the rural areas – along the roads – are quite clean of such rubbish.

Our purpose in making this trip was to see some other countries and parts of the East Africa region while we are living here. I had never been to Burundi and Rwanda before, but Sarah had for work when we were living in Geneva.

I wrote about our time in Rwanda in an earlier entry on this blog, so here is a bit about our time in Burundi:

In Burundi, we stayed at the home of one of my former coworkers from the ELCA in Chicago in the capital, Bujumbura. Her husband has been stationed with the State Dept. at embassies in Bangkok and London (we visited them there once when we lived in Geneva). A while ago, he bid on a post in Burundi and got it, and they arrived there in August. So we were their first visitors. My former coworker is also now working at the American embassy in the capital.

The Kleibers lucked out and were given an embassy-owned house to live in that used to be occupied by the deputy chief of mission (the #2 in charge after the ambassador). It’s located in the hills above the downtown area, and it has a spectacular sweeping view of the city, with Lake Tanganyika beyond that and the hills of the Democratic Republic of Congo on the horizon. It’s an enormous house with a huge terrace that is great for entertaining. It also has a large garden filled with tropical plants and flowers that is well-cared for (by their hired gardener, paid for by the taxpayers of the U.S., of course). The house is definitely designed for wealthy expatriates who have domestic servants and who like to entertain – a huge dining room with a well-separated kitchen, two large bedroom suites plus a couple of other smaller bedrooms, a cold-storage room, etc. It’s a lovely place to relax.

Because Tony has lived in Bangkok, all of their house’s décor is Asian – many objects from Thailand, Burma, China and the region. As soon as I walked in, I thought, “It’s a little corner of Bangkok right here in the heart of Africa.” All of these same decorations were there in their American-style apartment in London, where it also seemed a bit out of place. The Kleibers are in their early 50s and have never had children, so all the delicate statues and shiny lacquer ware from Vietnam were definitely not toddler-friendly. So we really had to keep an eye on Lexi, but she really loved running around on their front lawn.

Burundi isn’t exactly a well-known country, certainly not as well-known as its neighbor to the north, Rwanda, which has a notorious reputation for its genocide. As such, it doesn’t attract many tourists because there isn’t much to do there. None of the countries that border these large lakes seem to really take advantage of the lake as a resort destination. We know some people do have boats and use the lake for recreation, but they’re white. The day we arrived in Bujumbura, we had been driving for two and a half days, and we arrived in time for a late lunch, and we spent the rest of the day just relaxing outside on the terrace and enjoying the view and the garden.

That night the Kleibers invited some other expatriates over for dinner. We met the director of the counterpart to Sarah’s organization in Burundi. He’s got Dutch nationality but grew up in Tanzania the son of missionaries and has an American wife. All the other couples were American and worked for the embassy or the U.N. (except for the wife of one man, who is French and West African; she was awfully outgoing and bold, eating the olives from my salad, which I don’t like, off my plate at dinner). It’s always fun to meet other expats but ones who have lived for many more years outside the country and to hear about how many places they have lived and how much stuff they have collected.

The following day was a holiday in Burundi, so the Kleibers were able to spend some time with us. In the morning, we took a drive to try to find the monument marking the spot where Livingstone met Stanley, but as I said, the country doesn’t get many tourists, and like in Kenya, these sorts of haunts aren’t marked well or at all. So it ended up being just a drive only along the lakeshore south of the city. We stopped at a couple of small handicraft markets. They had the same stuff we see in Kenya and Tanzania. And in the afternoon we went to a fancy hotel (for the tourists they do get) that has a large pool and a beach on the lake. So we swam in the pool and walked along Lake Tanganyika. Lexi was afraid of the waves again.

So our visit to Burundi wasn’t marked by many tourist highlights like our other recent trip to South Africa was, but at least we saw a new country and one that has a different sort of past than Kenya.