To be honest, I had no idea of what to expect from Bujumbura. I also had little idea of what to expect from Burundi, aside from the fact that it was green and mountainous. The ride up from Mabanda was among the most impressive we've had on the whole trip – through mountains of a deep green (and for the first time in a while, we actually had a tarmac road so we could enjoy what was around us instead of concentrating on not hitting heads of roofs!!) and small villages before dropping down to Nyanza-Lac where we got onto the road along Lake Tanganyika to Bujumbura. Burundian mountains on the right, Tanganyika and mountains of Congo on the left – the view for those 3 hours was far from terrible.
Burundi, I think, comes top of the “countries in which we get the most attention” list as well at the moment – in Mabanda we had been left alone for a few minutes by Hasani and his friend as they went into a shop and during this time a crowd of no less than 20 people had gathered, watching us have a chat with the guy who dared to talk to the wazungu first. On the ride up to “Buja”, the normal tidal wave of food sellers would calm rapidly as soon as someone spotted us sat in the back – half would then continue selling and the other half would just looking through the window and talk to us in Kirundi. It wasn't hostile at all and everyone was very curious, but I'd imagine similar scenes if a minibus pulled up to a town in Europe with a rare species of unicorn in the back. There's not much to be done except to smile and wave and pick your brains in vain to try and remember words in Kirundi that you never learnt in the first place, but there we go. You get used to it.
Generic Buja street scene #888028336739We arrived in Buja late morning as Hasani set about trying to find his brother (or at least it was a guy who he called his brother - “he's my brother but we don't have the same parents” - we only managed to ascertain that this guy was some kind of distant relative) and eventually we ended up sat in said brother Feruzi's front room, being eyeballed by his very young daughter and being greeted very warmly by his mother (in Swahili of course). After Hasani and Feruzi had had a bit of a chat, they called up a taxi and took us half way around the centre of Buja looking for a hotel which was up to (or rather down to) our budget. It's not a very cheap city when it comes to sleeping but we ended up at the Saga Residence, right in the centre, for $25 a night. No hot water but in a city as hot as Buja, who cares about that? We did get free wireless to compensate, plus a bar that served one of those huge 72cl bottles of Burundian Primus beer. We promised to get in touch with Hasani at least when we got to South Africa, if not here in Burundi. We didn't really want to intrude on his reunion with his family and country so we just sent him a text message when we'd got a Burundian number. The message was never delivered and so we left it at that, resolving to call him in a few months in Cape Town. And so there we were, alone in Buja!
The ferocious streets of Buja did not eat us alive, as predicted
Our faithful companion in Buja...The city itself is nothing like Kampala or Nairobi or Dar es Salaam – not many glass towers or modern soulless buildings here – apparently because the war, which ended just a couple of years ago, stopped any kind of “development” happening. We didn't mind at all – Buja probably looks quite similar to how it did 60 or 70 years ago (aside from the streets full of 4x4s and the occasional swanky nightclub with plasma TVs on the walls, obviously) and it's a great place to walk around, taking in the history. One block away from us was a place was a place called “Aroma” which we went into and sat down. “Oh my God!” cried out M in an excited voice. “They have real coffee! AND crepes! AND ICE CREAM!!”. I knew immediately that we'd spend a fair amount of time there. With this simple gesture, Buja endeared itself to M even more. I was already a convert. Even before the end of the first day, I was starting to regret that we'd only had a short while there.
Unfortunately we're not only here for pleasure – other business has to be taken care of so we spent the better part of the one of the days updating the blog, sending and reading emails which we hadn't taken care of for a while, preparing to M's parents visit to Zimbabwe, repairing broken clothes (again) and so on. Whenever we tried to do something more ambitious, it failed – our attempt to get out of Buja to the city of Gitega was foiled by us getting up too late, as we found out that the last buses leave back from Gitega early afternoon and it was already 11.30am. So we abandoned that. Taking pictures wasn't always obvious either, as we discovered on the main square, Place de l'Independence. It seems that Buja hasn't succumbed to outright selling off of all land for high-rise buildings and the central square features an independence monument and a large well looked after park. We'd just snapped a few shots when we were approached by a policeman who greeted us, enquired politely about our health and then asked if we had a permit from the Interior Ministry to take pictures in this area. We didn't we told him, and we didn't know that we needed one, and that we were tourists, you see, and that we'd only been in Burundi for two days so we didn't know the rules yet. “Only two days?? Tourists??” he said “OK! Well then don't worry about it. Come over here, you can get a picture of this monument from a nice angle...”. All was well that ended well. He told us that a permit was needed to take pictures of any “lieux publics” or public spaces which was be loosely interpreted to mean squares, public buildings and the like, although he assured us that just taking pictures in the street was OK, and that we should enjoy our stay in Burundi. We promised him that we would, and that we'd be careful about where we took our pictures.
The forbidden (but not really) picture
While the cheeky model celebrates getting away with permit-free photographyFortunately, we're also not only here for business and hardcore touristing, and we compensated for our walking around and not following photography rules by refreshing ourselves in a few different places. In one, we had cold Primus in a garden a few metres from the edge of the lake, listening to the hippos grunting loudly from the nearby reed bushes (which should have been slightly concerning but somehow isn't any more. We've become indigenous I suppose).
I tried to snap the noisy hippo but it didn't want to come out and play for some reason...In another, we took a taxi driven by a guy who was probably quite drunk (not that he smelt it or really looked it – just slurred quite a bit and had a penchant for driving on the wrong side of the road when the fancy took him), and went to Saga Plage at the northern edge of the lake. In proper beach resort style, we sat in a cafe/bar on poles over the water, looking down on the view of the two neighbouring countries and their mountain ranges, and sometimes scrambling to pick up our stuff which had been blown off the table by the strong wind. Buja was definitely a sitting on terraces kind of place.
We also had company on that evening in the form of Pastor Frank from Kabale, who'd come down for the weekend on church business and so we were only too happy to finally get him the drink we'd offered him! He told us that he was a day late as he'd been spotted giving a sermon in Kampala by a priest from Kisangani, in Congo, who had recognised him from a previous sermon he'd seen in Bujumbura some time before, and Pastor Frank had invited the guy over for dinner. As the guy arrived, Pastor Frank wasn't home and his wife opened the door, and the two realised that they were long lost relatives! As such, an impromptu family reunion took place. “As a Christian, I believe everything happens for a reason” he said.
Left to Right: Burundi, Lake Tanganyika, CongoWe also ate skewered meat and good chips for the first time in a while. The lingering effects of colonialism are clearly seen in the chips when you cross from ex-British Tanzania (warm soggy chips served with cheap ketchup) to ex-Belgian Burundi (hot, crunchy and served with mayonnaise), spent time sitting around in “Aroma”, M's favourite coffee shop and the Centre Culturel Francais's good (and surprisingly efficient) restaurant/cafe/bar. That's the kind of time we had in Buja. Much walking, much relaxing, nothing in particular done but lots seen. Exactly the way I like it!
The CCF at night. Buzzin'.Finally the morning came when we'd have to ship out of Burundi and try to get back to Kigoma. I was sad to leave and I'd love to come back to Burundi some day, to spend more time in Buja and also to see some more of the country. For now, though, we had two major challenges – firstly, get out of the country with our dodgy visa and (more difficult) find a Tanzanian dalla-dalla which wouldn't break down on the rough road between the border at Manyovu and Kigoma. First up was a little session to put things in perspective – we came up a hill to a sharp bend where a minibus coming the other way had completely flipped onto its roof, which had caved in and all of the windows had blown out. Another minibus had arrived straight after and its passengers were out on the road, and people from the area were probably standing around too, so we weren't sure who had been in the flipped minibus, although M's first reaction of “is everyone alive??” sums up how serious this crash looked. Our door was flung open and a guy climbed in with his arm covered in blood although – call this the African spirit or stoicity or whatever you will – he was still blabbering with the other passengers as if nothing had happened. As this was happening, M said “hey... isn't that Hasani?”. I looked around and it was, called to him and he seemed as happy to see us as we were to see him! I asked straight away if he'd been in the crash. “No, I'm very lucky to be in the other one. I was supposed to be in that one though – just that I was late to the station, so I just missed it”. As Pastor Frank would say, everything probably happens for a reason.
Running the immigration gauntlet after all was simple – M went first and was interrogated a bit about why she overstayed her visa, which was eventually sorted out after she pointed out that the visa was valid for one month and not for 3 days. Sometimes I have to wonder who actually trains these people – their job isn't all that complicated but they manage to get confused with impressive regularity.
The final glimpse, for nowAnd the dalla-dalla didn't break down as we bounced over the road back to Kigoma, even if we changed a tyre for a reason I couldn't manage to work out. With the sight of the crash fresh in my mind, I suddenly didn't mind the state of the Tanzanian roads and dalla-dallas so much.
