We had a final breakfast and fruit shake at Bancafe, then stopped at an ATM for a topup of cash. Most machines don’t take MasterCard, which appears to far less widely accepted than Visa. Said goodbye to Chris and the guards at the Prestige, and were off to Entebbe to begin the vacation portion of the trip.
We arrived at the airport, checked in to our flight, and then the power went out. Not an auspicious start to a flight, but also not entirely unexpected given the general level of infrastructure development. Had a very short flight to Kigali, but it cut off two days of driving, and we were happy to see the country of a thousand hills from the air. Seemingly every hillside was terraced for cultivation, which is fair for a small country with such high population density.
RwandAir
Milles Collines from the air
The Kigali airport is clean and modern, and there are sidewalks and traffic lights that count down until cars can go. Apparently the influx of western guilt and NGO assistance has been put to good use. This is actually part of why we wanted to come to Rwanda, since reading a fascinating profile of President Kagame in the NYTimes.
My French is actually useful, and I was able to converse semi-fluidly with our taxi driver, a young design student, who we chose due to his sharp-combo of green tie and purple pants. We were dropped off at a nice hotel, and our AirBnB host picked us up. She was kind enough to change dollars to francs for us, and we walked around the neighborhood in search of beer and dinner. The goat brochettes and Primus (from Congo) did not disappoint.
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