Yeah, Kigali!

Kigali, Rwanda. In a short career, I now find myself staring at the beautiful hills of the up-and-coming investors' paradise. The hills are beautiful. The streets are suspiciously clean; how can anyone resist that powerful urge to simply drop that annoying banana peel so that the one behind you has a spill and a fall? How can they remain so calm in their infernally smooth traffic jams?

I have no profound things to say about Rwanda or the Rwandese. You all seem to have profound things to say about them. I have a much different measure of a place: can they make rice-and-beef-stew that doesn't taste like ass? Sadly, no. They are like those inexplicably bad Embu eateries that go out of their way to attract the attentions of the public health authorities for how diarrhhoea-inducing their meals are.

The people are polite, though a little aloof. I get the impression that they don't like being looked as some specimen of wonder. I get the impression that all people will associate with Rwanda for the next fifty years will not be the economic miracle they are, but that in a hundred days of violence twenty years ago, they descended into hell. The young ones I have seen have the de riguer jeans-and-tees, but they don't seem to be having fun; they seem to be forcing themselves to have fun. It is not fun to watch.

I have done the unthinkable and booked a hotel with an agent I do not know and checked in without the required serikali handholding that I have so come to loath. Hell, I tested the national ID as a travel document. It worked, after a fashion. I guess the immigration people knew I had used my shiny, barely used passport last time and were wondering why I wasn't employing it this time round. After all I had collected the entry/exit stamps then. If I admit that it is because I forgot it...

The Kenyan side of the immigration dance, as always, is pretty intimidating. If you are black, you are handled with a great degree of suspicion. If you are Kenyan, that suspicion is twice what is even considered polite. I wonder if they wonder at how a scruffy Kenyan like me would be able to afford the minor inconvenience of an empty bank account for the opportunity to experience the famed Kinyarwanda hospitality. Or whether I'll bring home drugs. Or Ivory; ivory seems to be the big thing these days. Either way, they are not very gentle with the Kenyan flying abroad.

The Rwandese aircrew and the Rwandese customs and immigration people are aloof, but not hostile. I like that. The hotel receptionist is aloof, but she won't say no with a sneer at my meagre dollars. The barman, on the other hand, is very generous with the cigarettes and the matches. It is going to be an OK trip.