Last weekend, I visited the Virunga Mountains in the
Northern Province of Rwanda. This is the home of the mountain gorillas, which I
have been fortunate enough to visit twice already. However, this time, we were
not tracking gorillas, we were climbing Mount Bisoke which has a summit of
3711m. Two of my VSO colleagues are climbing Kilimanjaro in 2 weeks so they
wanted to get a bit of altitude training in. Naturally, Rwanda, the land of a
thousand hills, provides a good environment for training and the girls had already
been doing lots of local walks to get their fitness levels up. Being a good
friend, I decided to join them on the Bisoke hike, having done no hill-walking
or preparation…….
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| My fellow hikers |
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| Photo taken because I was very purple! Little did we know that the purple was soon to become brown! |
The walk took us 7 hours as Rwanda decided to show us a
rain-day (we did choose to walk during the rainy season so not much of a
surprise!). We all had waterproof coats and trousers and didn’t let the rain
get us down. Although it did make the whole experience a lot muddier than we
had anticipated.
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| At the start - can you even see the mountain? |
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| Every now and then we needed a helping hand so we didn't fall in the boggy ground! |
With the help of Deo, my wonderful porter, I managed to
reach the summit and made it down again. Unfortunately the view at the top was
no more than clouds and we were unable to see the crater lake at the top but
the sign proves that we were there.
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| THE TOP!- V. Chilly! |
At the end of the day, we returned to Gisenyi on Lake Kivu
for lovely hot showers (still a luxury we appreciate here). Unlike the
Kilimanjaro girls, I was left with aching limbs which stayed with me until
Tuesday. I’ll be thinking of them as they do their big climb but I’m happy I
didn’t sign up for that one!
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| Damp mist |
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| Korean hikers with the rainforest behind them |
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| Celebratory waffle! Can you see how muddy my feet were? |
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| View on the way back down when the rain had stopped |
