Amy in Rwanda : Mount Bisoke

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…….

My fellow hikers

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.

At the start - can you even see the mountain?

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.

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!