Gisenyi

On Friday night, after work, we hopped on a bus out of Kigali and headed northwest to Gisenyi, a small town on the northern coast of Lake Kivu, just on this side of the border with the DRC. It was about a three hour drive to Gisenyi, so since we left late, it was dark for most of the ride. However, we were lucky that there was a full moon, so we could still see the outline of the volcanoes and the landscape around us. Perhaps the most incredible view, though, was of Nyiragongo, an active volcano just across the border in the DRC.While in Gisenyi, we were truly on vacation. There's not much to do in the town, so we spent the weekend laying on the beach, swimming in the lake, enjoying good food at the Kivu Sun Hotel, reading, listening to music and just generally relaxing. As hard as it was while we were on the beach to believe that we were still in Rwanda (and just a few kilometers from the civil war in the DRC), there were plenty of reminders throughout the weekend of just where we were and what was going on around us. Probably the reminder was the collection of the military boats we spotted out on the lake, practicing border patrol exercises.
As we left Gisenyi to drive back to Kigali via Ruhengeri, we also passed through the areas of the country that had been affected recently by serious flooding. Although the waters in this picture may not look particularly bad, there are still several buildings and a lot of valuable cropland that are underwater in some of these towns.
Perhaps the most stark reminder was a transit center that we passed just outside Gisenyi. This camp is run by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees (UNHCR) and houses refugees who have recently escaped from the DRC.