Bujumbura

I'm writing this post from the capital of Burundi, Bujumbura.

First, I wanted to write something I forgot to add in the last post, but it was so long anyways it's probably better I forgot. As I wrote I was on a pretty awful fishing boat for 20+ hours from Mahale Mountain park to Kigoma. Well, there was one memorable experience outside of just being on the damn boat for so long. That night was the Champions League final between Man. United and Chelsea, and a few people had brought along radios just to listen to the game. So for quite a few hours, I think the game ended close to 1am our time, I sat with a few folk moving radio antennas around constantly trying to get a faint signal of the game. Since it was a BBC broadcast in English, and I was the only person on the boat with anything remotely close to decent English it was up to me to let them know when goals were scored by who, when it was half time, the extra times, and finally each penalty result. Most people were Chelsea fans, so they were quite dissapointed with the result. For me it was just cool to listen to the Champions League final from a fishing boat in the middle of Lake Tanganyika.

Well, I spent a few days in Kigoma before making a half days set of bus rides over to Bujumbura. At the border they issued me a visa for three days only, so I have to leave tomorrow for Rwanda, despite wanting to have stayed here for a few more days. Apparently tourists get three days. From Kigoma you have to go a little east up into the mountains to the border, and than you go back down the mountains on the Burundi side to the lake which you than take north all the way to the capital. The ride is absolutely spectactular with some beautiful mountain scenery, especially on the Burundi section and than being on the lake is always amazing.

Burundi is a very poor country, possibly the world's poorest. GDP is estimated at less than 100 dollars per person per year!, and you can tell that it's just really, really poor. The GDP figure is misleading in my opinion, because of Bujumbura, but I'll get to that in a second. Outside of the capital there is pretty much just subsistence agriculture, fishing, and I think most people just feed themselves and make less than the 100 dollars figure. The country is very small, but is densely populated with a population around 9 million. Only Rwanda is more densely population in Africa. It has no mineral resources, has pretty much deforested the entire country for agriculture, which will lead to serious problems, and has no strong infrastructure for anything. It's not in the best shape to put it extremely mildly. Much of this is because since independence from the Belgians in the 60's its been fighting an on again off again civil war. The roots of the conflict are the same that caused Rwandas, ethnic violence between Hutus and Tutsis. Most people know quite a bit about Rwanda's violence, but just in the mid-90's more than 100,000 people were killed in Burundi too, and almost nobody's even heard of the country let alone its ethnic and political violence. The final ceasefire was implemented just in 2006, and there has been occasional attacks, including one about a month ago south of the capital. Things are considered in general to be pretty stable, and people think politically its headed in the right direction.

Alright, so now to Bujumbura. Bujumbura kind of sprawls down the hills to the lake at the northern end of Lake Tanganyika. The hills are beautiful, and across the lake you can see the towering mountains on the Congolese side. It's a very pretty natural setting, and the only thing more I could ask for would be beaches. The coast is very marshy in this area, and you have to go further south for beaches.

Bujumbura, despite being the capital of possibly the poorest country in the world, is by no means cheap. There is no cheap accomodation, I'm paying 30 dollars a night in a fine hotel, but one that is considered on the low end of the spectrum here. In Lusaka, for example, I paid five dollars a night, and Zambia's a much richer country. Apparently, the main reason for this is absolutely insane numbers of foreign aid organizations that have operations in Bujumbura. Kigoma, in Tanzania, I thought was a pretty NGO happy place. Bujumbura is on speed and crack together with the amount of NGO's around here. Every possible UN acronym group is here, and so many other groups from the US and every European country you can imagine too. Basically they've single handidly made the city pretty expensive, especially accomodation. For someone like me, here for only a few days, its no big deal, but for the average Burundian I can't even begin to imagine what its like to live here. All of a sudden you have this pretty large foreign population that can pay ten times for more for all basic services and products, and like any market it reacts and adjusts accordingly, screwing over the poorest folks.

There is also a small population is extraordinarily wealthy Burundians. There are ton of villas in this city, some areas remind me of Beverly Hills, and not all belong to foreign aid workers. The 100 dollar figure is off because you have a population in the capital making millions of dollars, meaning to get to the 100 dollar figure most people make nothing during the year, which would make sense based on the small farms you see most people living on everywhere outside the capital. There is some hope though, and its coffee. Burundi apparently produces some of the finest high end coffee in the world, and its now the biggest export of the country. Hopefully it can bring in enough money to help out some portion of the population. I'm not the most optimistic.

During my time in Buj, I've walked around from the top to the bottom of the city, eaten pretty well, and just relaxed. There's nothing in terms of sights to see at all for the place. No museums, no monuments, nada, but that's fine since I'm not a huge museum and monument person. Healthwise, I'm still trying to get back to where I was before I got malaria, and I'm pretty close, basically 100 percent. I do want to mention how good the food is here. There are bakeries everywhere, lots of tropical fruits, and the food is very influenced by the Belgians. There's also a wide variety of asian restaurants from the small, but culinarily active south asian community in Buj, and what I had heard before coming here was true. The food in Bujumbura is the best I've had in East Africa.

So tomorrow I have a bus to Kigali, Rwanda. I'll spend a few days there before going on to my next rift valley lake, Lake Kivu. I haven't seen another traveller yet, although plenty of aid workers in Kigoma and here in Buj, and will see if this continues in Kigali. I'm pretty sure I'll meet other folks on Lake Kivu though, and while its been cool to be the only traveller in these parts the last few weeks, I'm ready to meet some other folks.

Hope everyone is doing well, and I imagine I'll write again after a few days being at Lake Kivu. Tchau, B