Waking up in Rwanda

Dawn from my bedroom window:

Bits and pieces

I’ve got a few odd photos which might interest you.

Below are two men sawing hardwood planks by hand using a two-person saw.  You do occasionally come across a chain saw being used to fell really big trees, but the vast majority of work felling and cutting wood is done by hand.  I’ve seen a man chopping down a tree I couldn’t have reached my arms around, just with an axe. 

And here’s a man doing something else with a tree – climbing it.  His friends pointed him out to me and he said he didn’t mind me photographing him.

This picture gives you a good idea of the terracing that covers most Rwandan hills:

No, I'm wrong - there's often terracing but this photo shows instead how fields are often at a steep angle, which can cause erosion.  The government is insisting that areas like these are converted to terracing.

My bedroom wall, complete with gecko: 

Baby Nice

If you’ve taken an interest in Nice, you will be pleased to hear that by the time I left Rwanda, she weighed 2.4kg and was approaching the date on which she should have been born.  Her umbilicus has finally healed.  She still has an umbilical hernia, which they repair here in the same way as they do in the UK.  It looks as though, against the odds, she’s going to make it.

Nyungwe Forest

Everyone’s heard of Rwanda’s mountain gorillas, but Nyungwe Forest is a well-kept secret.  It is the largest remaining medium altitude forest in Africa and has massive bio-diversity including 12 species of monkey and 400 chimpanzees.

I had never set foot in rain forest before this holiday and, after the gorillas, our walk in Nyungwe was the high point of my week with Gillie and Kevin.

As we drove to the start point for guided walks (you are not allowed to walk in Nyungwe unaccompanied), we passed the Nile-Congo divide.  A rain drop on one side ends up in the Mediterranean and a rain drop on the other...etc etc.  We stopped to watch a family of baboons:

Gillie took the best shot of a mountain monkey:

Our guided walk took us past towering mahogany trees:

 

Here’s our guide showing us a mahogany seed:

Here’s a tree with buttress roots.  Our guide said chimpanzees drum on the buttresses to communicate across distances:

Now for some of my attempted arty shots.  First a view up into the canopy:

And here are...some trees:

You can see the rain threatening in that last picture.  Two minutes after we finished our walk, the heavens opened.  The guides said it rains every day here except for July and August when it only rains some days.