Tag Archives: rwanda

Hi folks!

And the news and tales from Rwanda go like this:

1. We’ve just opened a new office here! Our business is doing really rather well here, so we needed local specialists for the local market. Maybe we’ll need some for the neighboring countries too. For now though – our Rwandan office is on the fourth floor of this building:

Read on…

Hi folks!

Back just before a busy business schedule in Rwanda the other week (more on that in a few days), we had a half-day spot of tourism scheduled. We’d heard great things about the Volcanoes National Park – those great things being gorillas! So we decided to get on over there for a look…

Gorillas! Large, muscular apes with black fur that inhabit the forests of central Sub-Saharan Africa. The males are huge, reaching body weights of up to 250kg, but they’re vegetarian, and also rather unaggressive beasts; that is – unless you provoke them, as our guides told us: 250kg of muscle and sharp fangs are not something you want to get angry. (Interestingly, on the Russian Wikipedia page for gorillas it states that ~ “if an enemy decides to bottle it and turn and run, the gorilla will catch him/her up and take a bite out of the back or bottom thereof. In some African tribes the most shameful of scars one can have are those from a gorilla: it means that the person ran from one; therefore he/she is a coward.”!

Our expert guides told us how wild-cat predators like leopards and also other powerful and fearsome thuggish beasts like buffalo tend to steer well clear of gorillas. Gorillas are just too strapping and brawny to mess with.

(Regarding their strength, I quote my travel companion, A.S., btw: “Woah! I just saw a young female who was slowly, calmly building up a nest (I think). She grabbed the branch of a tree some five centimeters thick and simply snapped it off without any effort at all! And that was a wee lassie”:)

Did you know that gorillas (and also chimpanzees and orangutans) are the closest species to Homo sapiens? We made a genetic split from them some seven million years ago. Apparently our DNA is just slightly different to theirs – by just two percent! That’s why they look so much like us the fitness trainers in our gym ).

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Hi folks!

Well, I’ve sorted my pics from my recent Africa trip, so it’s time for a brief intro-report on my impressions of the Republic of Rwanda!

For an African country it’s rather a tiny one, toward the mid-to-southeast of the continent. With a population of around 12 million, area-wise it’s a little smaller than Belgium, which by some strange coincidence Rwanda happens to have once been a colony of.

Now, to someone who knows little about Rwanda, that’s probably where the similarities with Belgium would end. But it’s not the case! In fact Rwanda fairly amazed me by how much it differs from other African countries I’ve been to. Sure, there’s the inevitable poverty, but the differences are many. I’ll start with climate…

Rwanda is around 150–300km south of the equator, so yes, there’s plenty of sunshine every day. However, it’s about 1500m above sea level, so the climate is most comfortable: Not too hot, and not too humid either like places near the equator but down by sea level.

Another largely atypical feature: how the countryside looks – green, rolling hills, beautiful (btw: in the northwest of the country there are volcanoes and jungles with gorillas, and in the southeast – savanna with all sorts of interesting African wildlife).

Here’s the view of the Rwandan capital, Kigali:

Read on…