Week 11 - As the saying goes - good things come in small packages.

Last weekend I crossed the border into Rwanda through one of the most modern and best organised border crossings I've ever used. Everything clean, new and well signposted, with just one small exception - they fail to mention that due to the Belgian colonial past you swap sides of the road,  an interesting experience as I wonder why that truck is coming straight at me.

Rwanda was a country I knew little about other than a vague idea it was small and supposed to be hilly and pretty - and of course that it had suffered the appalling genocide of 1994.

Hilly and pretty both proved to be substantial understatements. I had not realised Rwanda bills itself as " le pays de mille collines" (the land of a thousand hills) and by the end of the week I feel I've driven up and down a substantial proportion of them - not that I'm complaining,  with mostly good and bend filled roads the country has provided some of the best roads I've ridden in a long time . Combine that with some stunning scenery and you have some of the best motorcycling roads I have done - in fact there is one 300 km stretch through the Nguwye National Park and up the edge of Lake Kivu that has to rate as one of the best rides of my life.

View from my $25 a night hotel room - stunning.

$3 - haircut,  wash, face massage

Did I mention it is the rainy season

and that does add a few hazards to the roads. 

Sunset over Lake Kivu - with the Congo in the background. 

Not everyone has as many horse power as me

It hasn't been all pleasure here - I spent a couple of days in Kigali organising the shipping of my Australian passport home to get an Ethiopian visa in it. Their rules say they will only issue it in your home country (something I've verified by trying in some of the embassies here in Africa) and the validity period was too short for me to have got it before I left Australia. With courier charges this is going to be one very expensive visa. This is a time I'm very glad to be a dual national; I'm now able to keep traveling on my UK Passport and am not stuck for 3 weeks waiting for the Australian one to return.

Motorcycle taxis - the main form of transport in Kigali (and most of the rest of the country)

Sprawled over multiple hills it can't really be called a pretty city. 

 Whilst in Kigali I also visited the main genocide memorial - a million people filled in a hundred days - its a terrible fact and needs to be remembered, but I've realised it shouldn't be my defining memory of Rwanda. The people have (or maybe that should be "are"? ) put it behind them,  just as we in other countries have done the same with our atrocities, and the country deserves to be remembered for what it now is, not what it briefly was. It appears (and I had a long, interesting, chat with a visiting American law professor doing research on this) to have done a remarkable job of reconciliation and reintegration of the society in a comparatively short time frame.