bugsonmyboard

We left Nairobi with a plan to circle Lake Victoria, which meant crossing into Tanzania for a third time since we entered east Africa. We blazed southwest along the edge of the Serengeti towards the town of M’wanza.   At one stage Jamie tapped me on the shoulder and pointed to our left and I turned to see the grassy plain dotted with Acacia trees filled to the horizon with zebra and wildebeest. This was our the view of the Serengeti Plain spreading to our south as we rode along. The wildebeest and zebra paid us no mind as we gazed across the scene in the subdued light of the late afternoon. It was one those unexpected, enchanted-feeling moments that happen from time to time on the road that leaves you beaming a stupid grin inside of your helmet and removes any doubt that there’s any place else in the world you’d rather be than right where you are.

We camped along the shores of Lake Victoria by night and picnicked on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches by day.   The road turned to rich red earth and short showers came and went as we rode, but we didn’t mind, they felt good, like the landscape was alive and we were part of it. The comfort and familiarity that we enjoyed temporarily in Nairobi was gone, we were out in it again.

At the campsite in M’wanza we met the proprietor of the local yacht club who coincidentally had provided some assistance to two Aussie guys on bikes who we’d met before leaving Nairobi.  One of the Aussie guys had cartwheeled his BMW GS1200 avoiding a kid that darted unexpectedly into the road.  The rider walked away virtually unscathed from the crash and the kid was untouched, but the bike was in awful shape when it arrived in Nairobi.  As the helpful yacht club owner tells it, he helped keep the Aussie guy out of courtrooms and jail after the incident.  It was a stark reminder to us that all of this joyful adventure comes at the cost of some risk and that we should keep our wits about us if we want it to carry on.

As we neared Burundi, the hills erupted into granitic domes and fortress-like piles of boulders, which made for some excellent picnic spots. We didn’t have visas for Burundi and weren’t sure whether or not they would let us in, but they welcomed us warmly and we found all of the people we met incredibly friendly. We encountered a corridor of people walking along the roadside so thick that I virtually had to ride right in the middle of the road most of the time. The roadside crowd persisted for almost all of our route through Burundi. Thankfully, there was very little traffic, since I had become so used to riding on the left side of the road in southern Africa. I couldn’t seem to remember to stay on the right hand side as they do in Burundi and Rwanda. People aren’t so used to tourists in Burundi as they are in Kenya and Tanzania. When we stopped at a bakery for some breakfast one morning a massive crowd gathered, curious about the strange white visitors on the big motorbike.

We rode a perfect tarmac road with no traffic to the border with Rwanda leaning in and out of sweeping turns that seemed never to end. Cultivated fields and a silty brown river flanked the road as it climbed and dropped from one hill to another. All along, we met the waves of kids and their cries of ‘Muzungu!’ (Swahili for white man). My speed crept up as I was having fun railing through one turn after another, and on one right-hand sweeper I felt the rear tire just barely start to break traction under throttle.

It wasn’t until we reached the Rwandan border that Jamie realized that she’d left her Kindle at the guest house we’d stayed at the previous night in Burundi. I got mad at her about it since it meant 3 hours more riding to backtrack to the town of N’goza to retrieve it. Riding the twisty road through a beautiful landscape filled with friendly people managed to dissolve any upset feelings pretty quickly. Along the way we passed very few motorbikes, but lots and lots of people on bicycles, either racing at high speed down the hills or arduously pushing up a slope. Often, the bicycles were loaded heavily with bananas and after passing some of these folks for the third time heading back to the border, I began to feel as though it was wrong not offer help. Here is this guy sweating and pushing a bike up a hill and we go zipping by on this powerful motorbike over and 0ver again, feeling just fine about it because we’re insulated by a cultural separation. If I wasn’t such a lazy selfish bastard, I would have tried harder to span that cultural void between us, stop and pile a load of bananas onto the bike.

Most of the valleys and hillslopes are cultivated.  As it turns out, 85% of the land area of Rwanda is either used for some type of cultivation or fallow. The rest is mostly occupied by Eucalyptus groves that were planted mostly for harvest as firewood.

Everywhere in Rwanda, we’re reminded of the tragedy the world allowed to happen here not so long ago. The genocide of 1994 claimed more than 1 million lives within only a few months time and touched nearly everyone in the country in one way or another.  Peoples’ stories of that time are wrenching to hear. Monuments like the one in the photo above can be found throughout the country, even in the remote countryside.   It seems as though nowhere was safe from the carnage brought by those who slaughtered grown men and schoolgirls alike based on an ethnic categorization scheme that was formalized by Europeans during colonial times. Many of the monuments prominently bear the simple proclamation that seems to embody Rwandans’ attitude about what happened in 1994: ‘Never again’.

We headed west towards Lake Kivu, from where we hoped to explore the headwaters of the longest River on the planet. In Sudan, the Nile splits into the Blue Nile and the White Nile, the latter being the longer of the two branches. The source of the White Nile was one of the most hotly debated geographical enigmas of the 19^th century, leading a sequence of expeditions and explorers claiming that they had identified the ultimate source of the mighty river. In 1858, with very little evidence available, the English explorer John Hanning Speke proclaimed Lake Victoria, jointly ‘discovered’ by himself and Richard Burton a year prior, to be the source of the mighty river. One expedition followed another over decades of exploration that attempted to provide compelling evidence of continuity of waterbodies stretching from upstream away from Lake Victoria through Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia, to find the ultimate headwaters of the Nile. By the year 1874 and the death of the famed Scottish explorer Dr. David Livingstone, the riddle still remained unsolved, when Henry Stanley embarked on a three year expedition that finally confirmed relationships of potential sources identified by previous explorers and the Rukarara river as the most distant headwater of the worlds longest river

In 2006, a crew of three New Zealanders made a bid to ascend the entire longitudinal distance of the Nile all the way to its most remote source by boat. After months of hardship and surviving an assault by Ugandan rebels when a good friend of the expedition was killed and the others injured, they finally reached the most remote tributary deep in the Nyungwe forest of Rwanda on the slopes of Mount Bigugu which turned out to be 107 kilometers longer than the previously identified most remote source. They provided the coordinates at the termination of their journey, and having been trained as a hydrologist, I could hardly resist the opportunity to go find it, so off we went.

Immediately upon leaving Lake Kivu the road turned to mud. As we climbed higher above the lake, the track degraded to a rocky mess. We nearly took it down a time or two when Dyna Rae’s rear wheel spun for traction on a few loose uphill sections or I took the wrong line through a nasty rutted section, but for the most part, we slowly tractored our way up the hillsides. After 10 miles of this, we stopped and considered whether this little expedition was really worth the trouble as dark clouds gathered overhead.

The pattern in the days leading up to this one were for the storms to start dumping rain in the afternoon, but the dark clouds gathering overhead told us that the rain may come early this day. If it did, the track would quickly become much more difficult to ride.   We decided that if the Kiwi explorers survived rebel attacks, the least we could do was to carry on in the face of some rain. Thirty miles of rough track led us to the Gustavou tea plantation and their vast fields of tea plants.

The location specified by the Kiwi ‘Ascend the Nile’ expedition wasn’t far off, but the sky had finally started to let go the rain. We were too deep in now to stop, so we carried on and identified the location reached by the expedition. It was just over the hills in a Eucalyptus grove in the distance, but the tea fields barred our way from following in their footsteps to reach it.

We found the small tributary on the map closest to the coordinates marked by the expedition, traced it downstream and headed to where we could access the stream. We stood along the hydrologic divide between the Congo and Nile river basins, the two largest drainages on the African continent. By our reckoning, just 2 kilometers upstream of the flow that you see below is the most remote headwater of the Nile River.