I like our chances, even as the front tire throws rags against the highway and the dusk-soaked hills wobble and shrug their silhouettes. The taxi driver steers the motorcycle into the shoulder and we slide to a sprawling stop in the dirt. I extract myself from the mess, filthy and unhurt. Unbelievably – because this is East Africa – I'm wearing a helmet. But this is Rwanda, and they do things differently here.
A farmer rushes over to see if we're all right. It wasn't a bad crash, but the bike's front rim is a mess. The driver hovers mournfully over his taxi. I can see the curve of electrified shoreline where the towns of Gisenyi and Goma meet on the Congolese border. Lake Kivu is a lurid mirror.
“If this was Uganda, our heads would be on the other side of the road,” he jokes, in a sudden fit of good humour.
You arrive in Rwanda with certain ideas about the place. If you work in the region, as I sometimes do, then you've heard the stories about the country's “miracle” recovery from the 1994 genocide. When I told my Ugandan colleagues about my holiday plans, they were enthusiastic. Rwanda, they said, is safe, orderly, prosperous. In spite of the accident, I'm inclined to agree.
But it's also place of oppressive beauty and roiling cultural complexity. Post-genocide Rwanda is an experiment in social engineering. In recent years, the government has enacted new laws on everything from Rwandese identity (Hutu/Tutsi distinctions are discouraged) to the use of plastic shopping bags (they're banned). There are speed laws, laws against littering and bribery, and yes, a law mandating helmets for motorcyclists.
I'm transfixed by this spectacle of a society striving to remake itself. For a week, I make a point of avoiding the memorials, but there's no escaping the genocide's legacy. Highway billboards inform citizens of their duty to remember. Villages commemorate their dead with humble monuments. Prisoners bury fibre-optic cable by the roadside, wearing cheerful jumpsuits – orange for convicted genocideurs , pink for those who await trial.
Yet, it's these reminders of human catastrophe that make poignant Rwanda's extreme physical beauty. As I travel high into the hills above the capital, Kigali, the forest thickens. Conifers line the immaculate switchbacks and farming communities dribble down the valley walls.
Cabins replace mud and wattle huts. Crop terraces lash every hillside, yielding to plots of silvery pyrethrum lower down. The wilds of Africa's most densely populated country have been tamed, picturesquely, but in this, too, there is the intimation of tragedy: Overpopulation was, and remains, a source of conflict.
On Mount Bisoke, in the Parc National des Volcans, I encounter a different kind of ghost. Halfway up the liquefying mountainside on a day beset by rain, my guide, a park ranger named D., lingers over a pile of gorilla dung. I'm hoping for a fugitive encounter. But the dung is old, and D. is more interested in the path running perpendicular to ours.
“Walk here,” he says, “and you get to the grave of Dian Fossey.” Fossey, the patron saint of the mountain gorilla, was murdered in the 1980s. Today, the organization that bears her name leads the country's exemplary conservation effort.
We plod on, up a trench of volcanic mud that sucks and farts at our boots. It's hard going. From the trees I can hear the crackle of radios. Three soldiers have been assigned to us for protection, I'm told, “against buffalo.” Clouds scud the crater lake, which gives off a mineral shine.
“This,” D. says, “is the Congo border. You cross it, and all bets are off.” Rwanda takes great care to protect the critically endangered mountain gorillas, who number less than 800 in the wild, but their range extends into the anarchic Democratic Republic of Congo, where they're poached for meat, hides and fetishes.
The next day, I sign up for one of the park's dedicated gorilla treks. I'd balked at the price – about $555 for an hour-long visit – but now I feel like I need to see them. At dawn, one of D.'s colleagues leads me and three other excited tourists into the bamboo forest that circles the slopes of a neighbouring volcano.
