Au RE-voir, Burundi...

AND NOW, with a grand total of 2.5 days within its geographical borders, I will now attempt the impossible - to conceptualize the entire nation of Burundi with an articulate and exhaustive summary of my experiences!!!!!

Well, at least I can't possibly do quite as poorly as certain others have.

Music: A Saitama bamboo drummer named Yahi became one of my closest friends on Sado, and he introduced me to a type of music I came to love and associate vaguely with parts of Africa I'd never seen: ZOUK. Jacky Rapon and Viviane N'dour were his favorites and, after I compiled a cd of their work as a present to him, they became mine too. I had been thinking I wouldn't find this Francophone music until we got to West Africa, but within a few minutes of entering the country, our bus driver flipped on the radio, and who did I hear but Jacky Rapon??! I think the sight (or sound) of a white girl excitedly singing along with the music was the last thing our fellow passengers expected to hear.
I couldn't quite determine Jacky's homeland - the general impression is that he's from Cote d'Ivoire - but his music and zouk in general is cerainly popular in Burundi.

Food: It is fantastic to be back in a francophone country..fresh bread, anyone? I don't trust myself to elaborate much on the national cuisine, though, other than to assure you (as Nick Ray can) that delicious eats of several European cultures can readily be found (for a price) in the capital.
Best thing eaten: Magnificent goat-cheese-and-other-goodies pizza in a small restaurant on a back street of 'Buj'.
Worst thing eaten: This wasn't really so much terrible to taste as a terrible disappointment: expecting only the best from a French patisserie, David and I tucked in to two fluffy pastries on our second afternoon. They were a bit, uh, dry. And spongy. Not quite up to our sky-high hopes, I'm afraid.

Best Picture Taken: For reasons of my own which will be clear to certain among the readership, I was terribly excited about the life and potentially coffee-related activities of le President de Burundi. Who, incidentally, lived in a drab grey building right next to our hotel. Impossible but true, confirmed by the single bored guard sitting in a folding chair by the gate... the "Présidence Nationale" is more or less a Motel 7.
I invite you to disagree.. but only after you see the evidence yourself. WHICH, due to a joint photographic spy-mission reminiscent of the camera-unfriendly Sudan, undertaken as David and I casually sauntered along the side road, I CAN PROVIDE.AM I WRONG???

New Words Learned: It's bizarre how just being in a linguistic culture will make that language return to you in sporadic bits and pieces. In Djibouti, I had spent two days cranky about not being able to remember the French word for lots of random things - like elbow. What the heck is it? I tormented myself. Eight years of work and then in a few short years, down the drain... for what use is a language when you can't even say the word 'elbow'??
While crossing a street on our way to the market here, without any prompting or decent explanation, it came to me like a shot: coude. Elbow, in French, is coude.

On another linguistic note, Burundians have taken the same liberties with French as Djiboutians, and regularly "tutoyer" complete strangers instead of using the accepted formal "vous". The overall impression is one of casual friendliness, and I admit I like it. (Though I had to stop myself from stiffly vous-ing everyone.) It reminds me a little of the Texan "hey y'all" to complete strangers, as opposed to the traditional Northern greeting: stony silence.

Quote: This is not meant to be representative of Burundi as a nation or Burundians as a people, but I enjoyed the conversation nonetheless - checking my passport at the border, the official was surprised to realize how young I was. Remarking on my age, he asked whether I was married. The resulting conversation went something like:
"Are you married?"
"No, I'm not."
"Why not?"
"Because I'm too young!"
"What???"
"Yes."
"Don't you want to have a family?"
"I do have a family. They live in Pennsylvania."
[laughter]
"Then what are you doing in Burundi?"
"I want to see the world!"
[more laughter]
"So you have come to Burundi."
"Yes."
"To see the world."
"Yes. I am very excited to see Burundi."
[handing me my passport, more laughter] "Well, bon voyage..."

New Hygienic Lows: It was here that, after three months of dedicated bottled-water tooth-brushing, I finally got lazy and gave it up. That's right, I washed out both my toothbrush and the inside of my mouth with the potentially parasitic water of the tap. Since I surely must have been exposed to something by now, my rationalizing hope is that I've built up a wee bit of a tolerance to Africa. Let come what parasites may.

Could I live here? It would be interesting and enjoyable to live here, and I would be within coffee-dating distance of the President himself, but the NGO culture would probably get to me pretty soon. Plus, how would I ever afford it??

Worst experience: Far from unique to Burundi, but sort of disheartening every time it happens: we met with a bait-and-switch scam attempt from our taxidriver. Oh well. He's the anomaly, right?

Best experience: Oddly enough, despite my usual queasy reluctance about bus-rides, I would have to say that some of our best hours in Burundi were spent in the delightful bus-ride north from the Tanzanian border. The smooth tarmac ran right alongside the gorgeous narrow lake that separates Burundi and peace from the DRC and fun, and it was from this vantage point that David and I first glimpsed the mysterious Congolese mountains, over the water and through the mist, warmed by a setting sun. We had a good crew with us, too, relaxed passengers, a lovely fresh breeze, and a backdrop of great African music. I stuck my foot out the window only to yelp embarassingly when the driver and his friend plotted a sly tickle-attack on it from his window, but they bought us bananas a bit later to make up for it. It felt so much lower-pressure than Tanzania, the air was fresher, the music was better, and we floated fluidly in and out of casual conversation with locals given that we actually had a language in common with them. It was really, truly lovely.

Désolée, Burundi.. I'm going to have to come back here.

"Not Much to See HERE..."

When planning a trip to a country you've never seen, it's understandably difficult to decide how much time to set aside.
In such cases, most people rely on a trusted travel guide company - say, Lonely Planet - to figure out what a country has to see.
Outside the typical tourist circuit of Europe and Japan, however, such L.P.-dependent travelers are in for a nasty shock.

In introducing Burundi, self-proclaimed travel writer Nick Ray ("A Londoner of sorts" by his own characterization) assures you not to bother too much about the place. After accepting payment for writing the authoritative chapter on Burundi (a chapter which, incidentally, consists of six pages), he can think of only three things to see in the entire place. "Choose from the Southernmost source of the Nile, the ancient forest of Parc National de la Kiriba, or the spot where Stanley was reputed to have uttered those timeless words, 'Dr. Livingstone, I presume?'" (Incidentally, this last isn't even true - most sources agree that the two men met instead outside Kigoma in neighboring Tanzania.) Concluding the chapter, Mr. Ray declares "Yes, you've guessed it, there's not a lot to see..."

Never having been there ourselves, David and I naively trusted Nick Ray (the Londoner of sorts) and only planned two days to see the "not much" that there was to see. Of the six small pages, four were devoted to the capital of Bujumbura, an NGO hangout due to the war in neighboring DRC, so we planned just a quick stop there on our way to Rwanda.

Unfortunately, Mr. Nick's idea of interesting traveler must-do's in Burundi, as we soon realized, was to blow a lot of Lonely Planet dollars at the capital's high-end hotels and bars, and head down to the neighboring inland beaches at its lake to get drunk and talk a lot of trash about the adventures he'd had. It's abundantly obvious that he spent most of his time with the high-flying expat community, adopting their stunningly clever nickname for the capital, 'Buj'. You can almost hear the pretentious high-English drawl sauntering off the page as he place-drops a posh NGO-hangout as his "Author's pick", sneering "A must anytime you're passing through Buj." Only the most expensive hotels and restaurants are even listed, and he wrote more about the capital's bars and nightclubs than he did about the three things he could think of to do here - the Source du Nil, the Parc National or the false Stanley-Livingstone spot - combined. To learn about these three spots, tourists must turn to the one-page "Around Bujumbura" section to find a three-sentence paragraph on each with absolutely no practicalities (such as hotels, transportation, or facilities), just a string of vomitrociously cutesy quips about how they're the best Burundi has to offer. The lack of practical or first-hand information, combined with his final sentence about the Source du Nil - "There are some security question marks until peace is fully established in the country" renders it glaringly obvious that Mr. Ray never bothered to go anywhere outside the capital.

If the security situation really was terrible, and there really was nothing to see, then such a statement would be understandable. However, David and I learned more from two extremely well-informed, trilingually-fluent and articulate guides in a ten-minute visit to the Tourist Information Bureau (dissed in the book as a non-entity, corresponding to the non-existence of the national tourism industry) than Mr. Ray ever discovered. Near as I can tell, there are no security issues whatsoever, and the country is practically a UN preserve. But perhaps that wasn't quite safe enough for this Londoner of sorts to risk his yellow hide on the extremely well-paved roads to see Burundi's famed tambourinaire drummers, or the tourist-friendly pygmy tribes in the North, or the stunning waterfalls in the southeast... none of which David or I was able to see, either, because we'd only allotted two days for the entire country.

Perhaps we should have just checked the concluding sentence for the country as a sign of what to expect from Mr. Ray, who has the necessary lack of shame to actually list "Being in Burundi" as one of the four national "highlights":
"Sipping a cold beer on the shores of the lake, Ethiopian peacekeepers to your left, local surfers to your right," this intrepid explorer and eloquent writer decides to himself, "maybe Burundi is not so bad after all."

Thanks, Nick. Definitely gonna keep my eye out for your name on future tourist publications.