Sunday, June 15, 2008
Headin' Home
The drive to our hotel was the first time we'd been out of the airport in Kenya. Cars drive on the left side of the road, like in England. On the way to our hotel, we passed through a particularly poor neighborhood, and didn't see any foreigners anywhere. This, coupled with our guidebooks depiction of the city as "Nairobbery", enforced our decision to stay in the hotel and not wander around the streets. Our hotel was nice, and the attached restaurant served good food. We watched the Germany v. Croatia match in the EuroCup (soccer). We were not too excited about the long flights ahead of us, but we are ready to go home. We had a great time and all of us are leaving without illness...the elements of a successful trip!
The next day we got up early to catch our flight from Nairobi to London. Again, this leg of the trip featured a partially-full flight, so we got to stretch out and relax. I sat next to a Canadian guy that had just climbed Mt. Kilmanjaro. He had some altitude sickness and said he was glad he never had to do that again. The cool thing about our flight was that it was during the day, so I got to watch the African continent go by out the window. I saw the landscape transition from the Kenyan scrublands to the Sudanese sahel to the Libyan desert. We flew right over Darfur, and I thought about the fighting going on down below us. The Sahara looked sandy, flat, and hot, a far cry from the lush hills and cool temps in Rwanda.
I saw the African continent disappear into the Mediterranean Sea. We flew next to the tiny island of Malta, which looked like every foot of land had a road or a building on it. We flew over Sicily, next to Corsica and Sardinia, and over the Alps. Some of the highest peaks still had snow. The views were beautiful! Finally we passed northern France and the English Channel. I thought about that woman that swam the English Channel, and it looked like a crazy-far distance from my vantage point at 25,000 feet. We flew into London, it was cloudy again and very green. Josh J. left us to catch his flight to New York that night. We had a night here in London too, and Alvin got us set up at a hostel. We took the Underground (subway) from the airport, a 1.5 hour trip. Elliot and Josh A. were staying with friends in town, so just 3 of us were at the hostel. We stayed at Saint Christopher's, which is ranked the best hostel in England (I don't know how we ended up there!). It ended up being very loud here (music playing till 2am!) and the adjacent bar encouraged drinking. We walked across London Bridge, which was cool but didn't look that old. The buildings were all very cool. We passed a church that was rebuilt in 1212 after a fire! Old building in the US don't hold a candle to old buildings in London! We wished for another few days to further explore the city. We ate dinner at the bar, which was very tasty but pricey (thanks to the crappy exchange rate). I tried to sleep early, but the bumping music made it a little difficult. We woke up early to head to the airport and made it no problem. The flight was full and lasted 10+ hours, but the entertainment was good.
Again, the daytime flight was nice...I saw Greenland with its mountainous, glacier-covered shores. I could see the glaciers entering the sea. We flew over the Hudson Bay, but it was covered with clouds :( I saw the farmlands of Saskatchewan and Alberta. We crossed the Rockies in Montana, which had totally awesome views of snow-capped peaks. I also saw some of the western Cascade volcanoes, including Mt. Baker and Mt. St. Helens. We flew really close to Mt. Shasta and Lassen Peak. I also saw Tomales Bay and Point Reyes. Finally we reached the SF Bay and familiar landscapes.
We got all of our luggage without any problems, and all of our gifts made it home without breaking. Hooray! Now we have to get back on schedule and post some photos. Thanks everyone for following our adventure in this blog and for supporting our trip!
-Maureen
Friday, June 13, 2008
Yay...bike work!!
On our last day in Rwanda we hoped to finish the job, and we almost did. We got through about 80% of the bikes in the warehouse, and we could've easily finished if we had another day. Achille (our Project Rwanda coordinator) was very pleased to see our handiwork and tried hard to convince us to become expats ;) We considered it after having some amazing Indian food in Kigali. We thought it may have been the best Indian cuisine in the world! It was a great end to our trip. We've seen so much beauty here in Rwanda! We will definitely get some photos out soon.
Butare Coffee Washing Station
We got a tour of the washing station, which is entirely outside on a steep hillside. Our tour guide was a young woman named Alice; her job involved recording the different lots of beans on the drying rack. Here's a short version of the tour:
After the cherries are purchased, they are placed into a pool of water for soaking, which makes it easier to separate the flesh of the fruit from the coffee bean. Then the cherries are run through a machine that pulls the flesh off. The machine looks kinda like a millstone. We didn't get to see this machine in action. After separating the beans, they are placed onto huge mesh trays, where the beans start drying and workers sort them again. At this point, the beans are pale green and have a thin outer coat. The beans turn dark brown during the roasting process (which is not done at the washing station). The sorters are looking for the following imperfections: overripe, under-ripe, worm-damaged, and machine-damaged. The overripe are a little brown and under-ripe beans are a little green. The worm-damaged beans have little bore holes in them, and the machine-damaged beans have knicks on the edges. After sorting, the beans are sent to drying racks, which cover the hillside and consist of the same mesh trays. The weather today started out cloudy with a threat of rain, so the beans on the drying racks were covered with black tarps. While we were there, the sun came out. Then we saw the workers remove the tarps. We also saw some workers checking the water content of the drying beans using a legitimate scientific instrument (it stood out because everything else was handmade from wood or other locally-made materials). It looked like there were at least 30 people working at this station, and many of them were older women. We saw some coffee farmers using their coffee bikes loaded down. It was awesome to see the early stages of coffee and how Project Rwanda has helped and will help coffee farmers.
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
Sunday: Rainy in Ruhengeri
Instead of doing recon, we visited the new Ruhengeri home of Team Rwanda, the national cycling team. The home was previously used as the veterinary clinic for Mountain Gorillas. We took a bus back to Kigali and arranged to work on Project Rwanda bikes tomorrow. This is the work we have been trying to do for several days now. It turns out that trying to help in Africa is oftentimes mired in bureaucracy. We are working with Project Rwanda, a project affiliated with SPREAD. Project Rwanda sold/donated hundreds of coffee bikes to WorldVision, a micro-finance company. The coffee bikes are stored in a warehouse owned by WorldVision, and we are having trouble accessing this warehouse. It sounds like WorldVision is worried we plan to 'borrow' some of the bikes permanently, which, of course, is ridiculous. Our main contact at Project Rwanda, Achille, is one amazing dude that has been working hard to get access to that warehouse. After 3 days of false starts, it looks like tomorrow is the day!
Monday, June 9, 2008
Ride Report: Kigali to Ruhengeri (92 km)
On Saturday, June 7, we went on a great adventure to deliver mountain bikes to Ruhengeri. The bikes will be used in August during the Wooden Bike Classic. They are very nice bikes, GT Marathon Pro Carbons, and some of them were used in the Absa Cape Epic earlier this year. Our route was the standard ‘black road’ (African term for paved road) that we took last weekend during our travels around the country. We faced two significant climbs; the first was just a few miles into the ride at the edge of
After the rollers we had an awesome descent into a beautiful green valley. The vistas were amazing, with rolling hills as far as the eye could see. During our ride in the valley, we were joined by some bike taxis that rode with our group for a while. Their bikes were singlespeeds, and many of them had busted pedals with only a small spindle to pedal with. Soon we crossed a brown river that looked like chocolate-milk, which meant we were heading toward the second big climb. Our support vehicle passed us near here, and we stopped for some
Thanks for reading!
-Maureen
Kids, Books, Rain
While most of the books were textbooks, we did have some fun revisiting our youth while sorting through children's books. We had a bit more fun trying to find the "wackiest" religious text. In the end, "God's got your number" and "Satan is alive and well on planet earth" were close ties. My personal vote was for a textbook that attempted to "debunk the myth of evolution". While we only had a few hours to sort books, we made significant progress in the massive pile of books.
Later that evening, we met up with our driver from earlier in the trip, Abdul, for dinner. He took us to a very fancy Italian restaurant, which served some incredibly authentic Italian (especially when considering where we are). The meal was great, the view over Kigali unbeatable, and the company fine. The only drawback was that it started to ABSOLUTELY POUR about 10 minutes before we were going to leave. We tried to wait it out, but ended up scrambling into a taxi and then back to our rooms. In the maybe 20 seconds I was outside between the taxi and front door, I got completely soaked through. The force of the rain was downright impressive. We all went to bed tired from the days work, full from a good meal, and eagerly anticipating the coming adventures of the next day.
Saturday, June 7, 2008
Thursday, June 5th - Bike Work and Meetings
-Elliott