Burundi

Dr. Livingstone, I presume?
-Henry Morton Stanley


Burundi was always the biggest question mark of the countries on my Africa itinerary, partly because the little information on travel within the country is limited primarily to State Department warnings, warnings I should add that exist for nearly every country in Africa that most everyone discounts, telling travelers that the best way to enjoy Burundi would be to simply not go there. I looked Burundi up in a Lonely Planet Guide to East Africa that I borrowed from another backpacker but out of the entire book Lonely Planet devotes only a few pages to Burundi, half of which talks about the capitol of Bujumbura and the other half of which pretty much repeats over and over again that nobody goes there.

This was backed up by my Thorn Tree online travel forum, which offers a country-by-country break-down for people to discuss. Whereas a normal African country may receive up to six new topics a day, until the last few months it wasn't uncommon for Burundi to go for half a year without a new post. The reason for this is largely because Burundi shared a lot of the same problems as Rwanda did in 1994 but failed to resolve them as quickly. (It may also be because Burundi is a giant swamp and their food tastes like crap, but hey, it's always easier to blame the civil war for tourism problems.)

Both Rwanda and Burundi are of comparable geographical size and population density, they also both have similar Hutu/Tusti population ratios, thety were both colonized by the Belgians as part of the Congo colony, both experienced ethnic massacres in the post-colonial decades, and both lie next to the geopolitical mess in the Congo.

In 1994, when the plane carrying Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana was shot down starting the Rwandan Genocide, it is often forgotten that Burundian president Cyprian Ntayamira was also on board. His death started the same ethnic killings in Burundi as Rwanda, but this fact has been largely ignored by pretty much everyone. Ultimately some 300,000 were killed in the same period as the Rwandan Genocide. While the Rwandan Tutsi rebels, the RPF, drove their adversaries into the Congo for a protracted mess which has lasted until this day, the Burundians have been left with a civil war that ended officially only four months ago. The real fighting stopped a couple years back but one rebel group in the east held out enough to cause problems. You might occasionally have read about a mortar shelling in Bujumbura or an ambush of government troops up until late last year, but by-and-large the rebel group only lasted so long in order to have a seat at the table of political power once they were disbanded. Once they signed the peace agreement a few months back, the Burundian saw peace for the first time in a generation.

The capital city, Bujumbura, lies across from the Congo and at the top on Lake Tanganyika, the world's second deepest lake and a body of water that stretches 700 kilometers from Burundi, down the borders of Tanzania and the DR Congo, and ending up at the top of Zambia. Zambia was my desired destination but I didn't want to travel overland to get there. For one thing, by this time I had driven on a ridiculous amount of buses and my butt was beginning to permanently mold into a bus seat shape. I was also a bit pissed at Tanzania for raising their visa fees only for Americans to $100 and it was rainy season there, so I wanted to skip it if possible. Traveling through the applicable region of the Congo was out of the question because of security concerns, so I decided I would jump on a boat to take me down the lake to Zambia which would let me bypass both countries. I figured that I had eleven days to make it down to Lusaka, Zambia for my flight to Johannesburg, so it wouldn't be a problem.

Well! Talk about foolish!

My very first day in Bujumbura I ambled down to the pier and started asking around for ships. Within ten minutes I was talking to a captain of a cargo ship which was heading exactly where wanted to go in Zambia. It would take two days, he said, but would be leaving within the next three days and he could take me along no problem. Definitely, he said. But he didn't know when exactly, so I had to stick around and call him every morning and run to the ship in order to get a spot. Great, I though.

We all know what happened - the ship simply stayed in port. Every ship did, actually. For some unknown reason not a single cargo ship left for nearly two weeks from Bujumbura. I didn't know it was going to be two weeks, of course, so I stayed loyally in Bujumbura, calling every day and being told every day that, no problem, it was DEFINITELY going to leave tomorrow.

It wouldn't have been so bad if I would have been in a city like Addis Ababa or Kisumu, but Bujumbura is a hole. I was there in the rainy season and that meant that it was humid as hell my entire stay. I could have taken day trips into the mountains to hike around, but I was tired of little children following me by the dozen and screaming "Muzungu!" and didn't want to mess with any potential rural dangers so I stayed in that swamp-of-a-city Bujumbura the majority of the time. And let me tell you, even a day there tries your patience.

To begin with, because no backpackers have been traveling there for decades there are no cheap lodges or hostels. This is compounded by what I call the NGO Price Ceiling. That is when the UN and NGOs flood a city or a region that is in some sort of protracted humanitarian crisis. They are willing to throw down hundreds of dollars per room at the local hotels. What this means for the off-track backpacker is that in cities like Juba, Kigali, Harare, and Bujumbura to name a few, the local hotel prices have been dramatically inflated to the point where they are unaffordable. In the end I ended up staying at this run-down "hotel" near the city center for a price that seemed about three times too high. It was on a tree-lined street that may have been pleasant, but "tree lined" in Africa doesn't mean pleasant - it means "place to take a piss every time you walk by." You may think I'm exaggerating when I say this, but I'm not - every time I walked this stretch of maybe a hundred yards there was a minimum of two people using it as a bathroom. Every time. You toss in a humid climate and you have the most god-awful stench you can imagine that grew even worse in the hours after the daily rains.

And Lonely Planet was right - there isn't much to do in the country except get gawked at by the locals. Bujumbura a flat, undeveloped city with no high-rises and little in the way of entertainment. The government, to it's credit, seems to be trying to follow Rwanda's efforts in building ht country up, but these effort have been partially hampered by the ridiculous corruption in the country, exemplified best by the murder of the leading anti-corruption figure of the country while I was there.

The flood of aid and NGO money coupled with the illegal mineral flow from across the lake in the Congo has created a climate that made me nervous, and the dodgy-looking camo pick-ups with guys in fatigues and AKs casually slung over their shoulders that were constantly driving around was an ever-present reminder that up until very recently the country had been in civil war. I've been told that an incredible 25% of the adult population is employed by the defense sector of the country, and with the number of soldiers I saw I believe it. This is a country that needs to find a way to demobilize, and fast.

So I didn't wander about too much. One day I took a stroll down to the point on Lake Tanganyika where a sick David Livingstone had been discovered by the pompous jack-ass Henry Morton Stanley after he tramped across the continent in search of Livingstone. But I was so uninspired I couldn't even bring myself to take a picture. There was just a simple plaque there and a lot of trash. Plus the "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" line that Stanley allegedly tossed out when first meeting Livingstone was probably apocryphal anyway, made up afterwards by Stanley. (Don't think it doesn't bug the hell out of me that it's the most famous line in African exploration.) Even if it was actually said, Stanley's assertion that he though of it only at the moment is pure crap - someone as obnoxious as him would have been figuring out for months what he would say.

(As a side point, I find it humorous that once Stanley "rescued" Livingstone, Livingstone stayed on the lake anyway and eventually ended up dying. A similar fate awaited the recipient of Stanley's next "rescue" on his third and final major expedition into the heart of Africa, a British Lieutenant Emin Pasha who was under siege by the forces of the Mahdi from the north. Though the Pasha allowed himself to be brought back to Zanzibar, he also refused to leave Africa and soon returned back into the interior and eventually had his head lopped off by the locals, thus depriving Stanley of yet another partner for his planned money-making lecture series around the world.)

Other than that, I pretty much stuck to hanging around Internet cafes putzing around on the Internet and drinking passion fruit juice. The Burundians in Bujumbura seemed a bit more acclimated to whites than those in the rural areas and I frequently found a partner to chat with for a couple hours here. The men of Bujumbura were good-natured and enthusiastic and the women were stunningly beautiful and when they laughed at my jokes it actually seemed genuine, so I had a good time with all (except the little kids who I hated, but I hate little kids everywhere).

My extreme frustrations with my housing and the lack of movement from the port were overwhelming for a few days, but eventually I mellowed out. This was helped by advice from my friend Liz who reminded me that frustrations were everywhere; would I rather be frustrated traveling through central Africa, she asked, or frustrated in Minnesota? It was a prescient comment, as after so much travel I had maybe forgotten how lucky I was to be able to complain about being in Central Africa. Buoyed by this advice, I tried to make it a point to calm down and enjoy where I was.

After only a couple days in Bujumbura I discovered that sunsets beyond the lake over the Congolese mountains were sites to behold. They also offered a refreshing break of routine, so every night I wandered down to the lake shore and relaxed while the sun dipped below the ever-tantalizing Congo. I never swam in the lake because of the presence of the waterborne disease bilharzia, but the beach was nice enough to chill out on for hours at a time. I also found a couple local cafes that served non-greasy food and had decent prices, so that improved my spirits as well.

Even so, the lack of a way to get to Zambia was worrying me. Finally, after a week and a half of waiting, I called the Captain one Saturday and he said "Not today, call back on Monday." With the calculations I had made, there was no way that if the boat left on Monday I would have been able to make it in time to my flight from Lusaka. It was at this point I made an incredibly stupid mistake; I decided to forgo the cargo ship and overland it through eastern Tanzania. I'll get into my overland travels in the next post, but suffice it to say that I missed my flight and had a series of travel experiences that ensure I will never again even consider travel through a region during their rainy season.