Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
BANDIT COUNTRY
Tanzania, December 2013 - January 2014
F
rom Kigali the river wound south and east. Two rest days in Kigali might have helped
heal the feet, but it had in other ways made me feel weaker somehow. Perhaps it was the
drying up of momentum, or the sobering thought of the city we were leaving behind. As a
parting gift, Amani had helped organise a local man who would walk with us to the bor-
der. We hoped to reach it by Christmas, but there was no telling if it was possible; here,
the river disappeared into miles of thick, sometimes impenetrable swampland. Vianey, the
porter Amani had organised, took to it without complaint - but, always, in the back of my
mind there was the memory of how Amani had first described him. 'Vianey,' he had said,
'is a genocide perpetrator.' I did not know whether I believed it or not, and Vianey himself
claimed to be only twenty-four years old, but occasionally, in the right light, I got the im-
pression that he could be much older, so perhaps there was some truth in it after all. Like
many Rwandans, I decided it was better to look the other way and not broach the subject.
I was sure it wasn't a tactic of which Boston would approve.
Outside metropolitan Kigali the country returned to its impoverished, rural state. We
built our days by trekking from village to village. Sometimes the river was kept at bay by
dense papyrus marshes. These were the true Rwandan wetlands and, where the papyrus
did not dominate, the villagers had turned the land into paddy fields and cultivated rice. On
a diet of painkillers and rice wine bought at every village, we followed the twisting river
south. The paths were virtually non-existent and we resorted instead to trampling down the
reeds and walking for miles on what felt like a water bed; the reeds held our weight, but
there was always the sensation that they might break at any moment, plunging us into the
stagnant marsh beneath.
'Do you remember the crocodile?' Boston kept asking. I laughed in reply, but in truth I
didn't feel like laughing at all.
We'd been walking now for two weeks and steadily become attuned to the environment
around us. That's not to say it was easy; in fact the constant shifting from swamp to field
