So one day when we were still back in our village house in Uganda, I decided that I wanted to go to Rwanda. Initially Kat (one of my housemates) wanted to come along and the two of us planned to go together. But as we neared the day of departure she fell ill and contracted pneumonia, and it seemed like my trip to Rwanda was going to be cancelled, 'cause our organisation did not encourage solo travel due to safety reasons. So I was getting all ready to spend four days alone exploring Kampala (the capital of Uganda) while the others headed back to Jinja, when Monique (the coolest in-charge ever) calls me and says she's going to let me go to Rwanda alone, 'cause why not? I'm a sensible girl and she's sure I can handle myself. She said it in more colourful language of course, but that was the gist of it.
I was SO EXCITED, but also very anxious, 'cause I had to depart early the next day, and I had no plans at all, and this was my FIRST TIME TRAVELING SOLO. Sure, I've flown here and there by myself before, but I was always meeting a friend or an organisation rep; there was always someone to meet me at my destination. But this time I was going somewhere alone, to explore and see a new place by myself. The thought of it was so exhilarating, but also terrifying. I guess it was also partly because I would be travelling alone in Africa, which is not exactly the safest place on earth.
So I took the boda-boda (the term for motorbike taxi in Uganda) to the bus park early the next morning and bought myself a bus ticket to Kigali, Rwanda. Got some food and water to last me for the supposedly 8-hour journey, boarded the bus excitedly...and ended up sleeping pretty much the entire way. I've lost count of the number of long-distance bus journeys I've taken in the 4 months we were there, and let me just tell you that buses are a pretty darn uncomfortable way of travelling.
The journey ended up taking 10 hours, and I got more anxious by the minute towards the end, 'cause the sun was setting and it was getting dark. By the time we arrived in the bustling bus park in Kigali, it was past 8 and the sky was dark. I had no idea where I was, no local currency, no accommodation and no mobile connection. I tried to play it cool and look like I knew where I was going, 'cause there were people everywhere, offering their services as guide as driver etc. Followed another lady out of the bus park ('cause I had no idea how to exit the place) and found myself by the side of the road, with no idea where I was. So I approached the most threatening-looking person on the street, a soldier presumably on patrol duty because he was carrying a huge gun, and asked him where the nearest ATM was. Now the organisation had warned that we should never withdraw money at night, because there had been incidents of past volunteers getting robbed the moment they stepped out onto the street. But I had no choice; I needed money for transport and accommodation. Thankfully the area around the ATM was brightly lit, but I was still very jumpy and paranoid about getting money out.
Then I had to figure out a way to get to a hostel. The night before I had saved the addresses of two hostels that I could try my luck at, and so I made my way to a crowd of motorbike taxi drivers chilling by the roadside to ask if any of them could take me there. But nobody knew where it was, even though tripadvisor had said it was a pretty well-known place in Kigali. And it didn't help that Rwandans are generally more fluent in French than in English, so we weren't exactly communicating effectively. Before I knew it, a huge crowd of men had gathered around me, motorbike drivers and even random passersby, to try and help me figure it out, and I was trying not to panic at the thought of having no place to sleep for the night, because no one seemed to know. After about 10 minutes I thanked the crowd and walked off to try my luck with some other drivers. Finally I found a guy who knew where the place was, and even though he was going to overcharge me I was just so thankful I climbed onto his bike without hesitation.
It was pretty late by the time I got to the hostel, and lucky for me there were two beds left in the entire hostel, so I managed to get a bed in the smaller dorm. I was so exhausted by the events of the day, the long journey, arrival in the dark in an unknown place, getting money and locating the hostel, that I pretty much just crawled into bed after a quick dinner.
And so that was my (pretty harrowing) first step towards solo travel.
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