Like this:

The thought of traveling to Burundi excited me, for the same reason the Karamoja trip excited me – the travel advice for both places was this: don’t go there, but ever since I found the obscure little country in my Lonely Planet book I was intrigued. The country had recently come out of a civil war and the tourism industry (in fact industry in general) is just getting back on it’s feet, I decided to give it a helping hand.

When I was in Kampala I asked each and every tourist if they had been to Burundi. In three months I found two people. One was a German man, about 60 years old. He was pretty cool for an old guy. He wasn’t a hippie or anything, he was just a regular old guy you’d see in a pub, grey hair, fake teeth, he even had an old-man “oh jaysus me hip is gone” walk, and he was staying in the backpackers hostel in Kampala. He was a taxi driver from Frankfurt, and instead of taking holidays to the regular old-folk destinations, he goes to further flung places like Asia, Russia or Africa. He told me he had been to Burundi for a week and said it wasn’t too bad, there wasn’t much to see, but he collects crafts from different countries so he wanted to see what Burundi had to offer. Well if an OAP like that guy could do Burundi then a whipper snapper like me should have no problem.

I got talking to another guy in Kampala called Stephen who was on his way from London to South Africa – OVERLAND – through Europe, the Middle East and all the way down through Africa. He was also a really good photographer. After traveling for nearly two years, he said he was going to skip Burundi because he heard that it was too dangerous. He even spent two weeks traveling around the Congo, but wouldn’t go to Burundi.

The second person I met who had actually been to Burundi was a Belgian girl named Anna. She was working in the capital as a midwife with an NGO called Doctors Without Borders. She told me there’s nothing really worth seeing – tourism breathed it’s last dying breath just before the civil war, and the tourist sites are now un-manned. She said if I decided to head there, she would give me a tour around the city and maybe even offer me a free couch to sleep on!

“So is it dangerous?” I asked her, “You must have seen some dodgy situations in your time there…”.

“Yeah, just last week there was a bunch of people protesting on my street holding grenades aloft.” she said, so calmly it was as if she was telling me about some drizzly weather last Sunday. “The rival political parties hand out grenades to their youth wings, it’s normal. Also, if you want to see Burundi, go now before it gets worse, presidential elections are just around the corner and things are getting tense”

She also told me about the emergency backup plan her company had in case anything serious happened – evacuation to the Congo! If the Congo was seen as a safe-haven from Burundi I really didn’t know what to expect…

I checked out Burundi on some tourism sites. One of my favorite sites is Wikitravel.org, and on their Burundi page I found the following warning:

On the Australian Governments travel advisory website I found the following information:

• We strongly advise you not to travel to Burundi at this time, with the exception of the capital Bujumbura, because of high levels of serious crime, possible civil unrest and risk of terrorist attack. While the security situation has stabilised across the country, the risk of armed violence, banditry, kidnapping and cross-border attacks by rebels remains high.

• If you are in Burundi you should consider leaving unless you have compelling reasons to stay.

• If you do decide to travel outside of the capital, we advise you to contact the United Nations office in Burundi for the latest security advice prior to travel.

• We advise you to reconsider your need to travel to the capital Bujumbura at this time due to the unpredictable security situation. If you do decide to travel to Bujumbura, you should exercise extreme caution.

Lovely, but these warnings all seemed a bit too sensational and paranoid, a total contradiction of what I just saw in Kampala – the German OAP with the wobbly hip who “survived” a week in Burundi.

Here are some facts about the country:

It’s a tiny landlocked country, sandwiched between the Congo, Tanzania and Rwanda

The capital city has a cool exotic name: Bujumbura

It’s the 2nd poorest country in the world

It has just come out of a civil war in which about 300,000 people died

It has the same Hutu/Tutsi problem as Rwanda

The president is an ex rebel leader

The last rebel group laid down arms only two years ago

As part of the peace process, the rebels were integrated into the police and military

Grenades can be bought for as little as $1.

The police leave the streets after dark, giving way to thieves locally known as “les petits bandits”

The official languages are Kirundi and French – English is not widely spoken

It has no ATMs.

….Sounds nice eh?

Anyways where was I…. oh yeah, still in Rwanda. So I bought my bus ticket to Burundi, departing at 8am – only a seven hour journey – and packed my bags.

The journey to Burundi was enjoyable on the Rwandan side, lush green hills, tea plantations, the obligatory small village children waving at the bus. The countryside got more and more sparse the closer we got to the border. The bus eventually stopped at a few drab concrete buildings in the middle of absolute nowhere. The border between Uganda and Rwanda was like a small town, with lots of heavy traffic, shops, hustle, bustle, to and fro, police, and even a bank. This border crossing was like a deserted outpost. We all queued up at the Rwandan side to stamp ourselves out and then proceeded to the Burundian side. The Burundian immigration office was manned by two guys: one guy checked and stamped passports while another guy just stood behind him and stared at you as if he wanted to eat your children. I swear he looked as if he had just come back from slaughtering a village… there was something about his eyes. I really wanted to take a portrait photo of him but I was afraid he’d stab me in the face.

We hopped back onto the bus and off we sped into Burundi. The road to Bujumbura was in great condition, perfectly tarmacked and naer a pothole – I’m guessing due to the almost non-existent traffic. Between the border and the capital I remember seeing only one town with electricity, the rest was just mudhut & corrugated steel territory. After a while the landscape got a bit greener and eventually started looking exactly like Rwanda – very green with a ridiculous amounts of hills. After all, I was told in Rwanda that Burundi means “another Rwanda” in one of the native languages.

The bus made a long winding descent out of the hills and into a huge green valley where in the center I could see Bujumbura. For the first night or so I was going to stay in the best hotel in the city just to get my bearings and be extra safe – Hotel Amaharo. Amaharo is Kirundi for “peace”, and it’s where all the UN staff and diplomats stay when in town. It was still only 40euro per night! I would move to a cheaper place once I got more comfortable with the city. There are no budget/backpacker style tourist hotels in Burundi, because there are no tourists, so I’d just have to look for some cheap but safe African shtyle hotel.

It was my first time being in a dodgy African city. Kampala was a breeze, as was Kigali. When the bus pulled into it’s “station” in Bujumbura city – just an alleyway between a couple of shoddy buildings – I stood around wondering what to do, how to find a hotel, how to get a taxi. I couldn’t remember any French from school and I didn’t even know how to say “Hello” in Kirundi. I sat down on my bag, ate some biscuits and just watched the people unload their bags from the bus and walk off down the road. I wasn’t even sure if it was safe for me to be walking around during the day. All of a sudden this guy walked up to me, shook his keys and said “Taxi?” He looked like a normal nice guy so I followed him out to the front where he pointed to his car. It had official looking taxi symbols and we seemed to be close to the city center, so I hopped in. His taxi looked good from the outside, but once we got driving I realized that it was in dire need of a service. Actually it needed to be scrapped. The clattering and spluttering coming out of it was unreal, I’d say it had about three hours left in it.

After discovering that the only hotel recommended to me had been shut down, the taxi driver dropped me at Hotel Amaharo, which looked pretty posh and was located right next to the Central Bank of Burundi. I was a strange sight in the air-conditioned lobby with my sweaty armpits, scraggly hair and dirty backpack. I checked in and got myself a nice en-suite room with a double bed, fan, phone, TV, and free wireless internet. This was one of the best hotels Burundi had to offer, so I felt fierce VIP altogether.

Bujumbura is at a lower altitude than Kigali or Kampala, so it was hot, 30degrees the day I got there, and since it is located on the shores of Lake Tanganyika it was humid as f**k. I took a lovely cold shower (well I had no choice as the electric water heater in my room didn’t work) and went to sleep for a few hours….

I woke up at about 7pm and it was dark, so I decided to leave the walk through the city for another day because according to the guidebook, “les petits bandits” take to the streets once the sun goes down. I called Ann, the Belgian girl, to tell her I was in town. We decided to meet in the bar downstairs and I got myself a nice cold beer and watched some crappy Nigerian movie they were showing on the tellyvision. Ann eventually arrived at the hotel and told me to hop into her jeep. Due to safety concerns her employer doesn’t allow her to take public transport, including taxis, after 6pm, so she had the company driver bring us around the town. I hopped into the jeep, and before we drove off she radioed HQ to tell them her current location, where she was going and how long she expected to stay there. She took me to the Congolese part of town to a pretty nice restaurant/bar where we got a good feeding of chips and beer.

Ann was one crazy young lady, she hadn’t been home in about three years and she only works in countries that are known for their wars, genocides, rebels, child-soldiers etc. She’s like an adrenaline junkie, except instead of bungee jumping or parachuting, she delivers babies in war-zones and rebel controlled territories like the Congo and Central African Republic. Once her contract expires in Burundi she wants to go to Afghanistan. I don’t know what she’s going to do after that to top the list. I’m guessing Mogadishu. She said Central African Republic was the most dangerous place she had been. One night she was woken up by rebels shooting around the camp, and the staff rushed into her room to tell her to “hurry hurry get the hell out!” She was like “yeah yeah I’m coming keep your panty hoes on” and groggily put on her slippers to head to the safe room. The situation was pretty much routine for her.

We had to finish up in the bar early enough as Ann had some work to do in the morning, but she said I arrived just in time – one of her colleagues was leaving for good in a few days and they were throwing a going away party in town on Saturday night. Good stuff, I judge a country not only on it’s climate and security, but also on it’s ability to host a good session. She said she’d pick me up in the evening. I got a free lift home in the company car and fell asleep with the fan on full blast to keep away the heat and the mosquitos.

The next day I just walked around town and soaked in the sights, which were few and far between. One travel book I read before coming here had a “low-down” on almost every country in the world. In the Burundi section, under “Economy” it said “all but decimated due to the civil war”…

I didn’t get mugged or stabbed, but there were a lot of filthy dodgy feckers around, so high on god knows what that they didn’t even notice me. The city was full of idlers, people just sitting around in the shade doing nothing. Life is simple here, all they need is a bit of cash to get two good meals a day, which doesn’t take much, sell a few brik a brack here and there, or maybe carry a couch from the furniture shop to somebodys house, and you have enough for rice and beans for another day.

I sat outside a cafe and ordered a coffee. I couldn’t do my usual routine of drinking coffee and reading the newspaper as I couldn’t find any English language newspapers, so I just people-watched. There was no real buzz in the town, no hustle or bustle. I was told about a big outdoor market somewhere in the city but I didn’t think that it would be safe enough. I saw some guys walking around the street selling clothes which were just draped around their shoulders, and then noticed how the locals “tried on” the pants and jeans. They would just wrap the waist of the pants around their neck, and if the two ends met at the back of the neck, that meant that the pants would fit. I tried that trick later on in the hotel and it does actually work, the two sides of my pants met with literally zero overlap. Coincidence? I’m not sure, why don’t you try it?

Anyways, after a while a huge skin head guy with a dodgy moustache and no neck came and sat beside me outside the cafe. He started chatting and asking me where I was from and what am I doing here and how do I like it etc etc. He told me he was security. For this nice little cafe. I didn’t really believe him. He told me he was from the Congo, which made him a bit more dodgy. “I’m hungry” he suddenly said, “buy me something”. I wasn’t going to argue with this guy, I didn’t know if he had one of them $1 grenades I heard about, so I told the waiter to get him a samosa. “Two samosas” he told the waiter, “with milk”. Ha! This lad was well cheeky, but he was built like Mr.T and he was Congolese… plus he had a dodgy moustache, so I wasn’t going to argue. I paid the waiter for his grub, which only amounted to about a euro, and wandered off.

I went to find an internet cafe where I could search for cheaper accommodation in Bujumbura. I found some info about a cheap guest lodge about 20 minutes walk from the city center, and it had good reviews from a backpacker who posted about it on a travel forum, so I decided to head back to the hotel, grab my stuff and move to the new place. On my way back to the hotel, a passing pickup truck packed full of guys with AK47s, (police I’m guessing, I couldn’t really tell as they don’t seem to have a standard uniform in Burundi) did a quick U-turn and screeched off in the opposite direction. Some of the guys had three clips in their AK47s, one loaded and two extras duct-taped onto the side. As I said, the police force is full of ex-rebels, so they are definitely not a trustworthy bunch – and they actually still looked like a band of dodgy rebels. In case of emergency, DO NOT dial 999…

I moved into my new place, which was actually a nice spot, with a security guard, big gate, and free brekkie in the morning. The area itself seemed to be nice enough too, Concern had an office just a few minutes walk down the road.

I also found a nice bar & restaurant nearby that sold really good western mzungu style food. I had dinner there, had beers at the bar, chatted to the English speaking barman as we watched a game of footy on de telly, but before I knew it it was almost 9 o clock. The biggest pain in the arse in Africa is that the sun goes down really quickly, one minute it’ nice and bright and the next it’s pitch black, which is not so bad in places like Kampala but in dodgy cities where you need to be careful after dark it can be a problem. My hotel was only about 3 minutes walk but I still asked the barman about walking back. He told me it’s fine… yeah if you’re black I’m sure. I finished my beer and walked back anyways and got to the hotel safe and sound. I knocked on the gate, the guard slid open his little slidey peek hole to check me out, then let me in.

On Saturday I decided to check out the famous Lake Tanganyika, which allegedly has the most beautiful inland beaches in Africa, and a nice aul concentration of crocs for you to swim with.

I headed into town and got a taxi to bring me to a beach bar I heard about called Saga Plage, about 15 minutes drive out of town, and it didn’t disappoint, it was a really nice place, with a well-stocked bar on a makeshift rickety boat a few meters out into the lake. I hung out there for a while and wrote some poetry as I listened to the soothing sound of the waves. Only messing I grabbed a few beers and read a book called The Zanzibar Chest, a really good autobiography of a crazy journalist who worked in Mogadishu and other dodgy hell holes.

The lake is so big it actually has surfable waves, and I watched some locals surfing away, obviously not giving a feck about the threat of crocodiles. I was talking to an American guy recently who also ventured out to the lake, and he went for a swim. Within a few minutes the locals called him back to shore to tell him that he was going to be eaten by crocodiles. He promptly towelled himself off and walked/ran back to the bar.

In the restaurant they had a chimp and a baboon in cages, so I hung out with them for a while, sharing my beer with the chimp, called Joe, who was sophisticated enough to have his own bottle, which he held out for me to top up every now and then. The baboon wan’t a fan of the beer but he did devout a chocolate bar I gave him. One of the workers came over for a chat, and asked me for a scholarship to Ireland… young guys in Africa are always asking me for scholarships, what do they think I am, the Minister of Education? Look at the cut of me, my toes are poking out of holes in me shoes! The guy gave Joe the chimp a cigarette, who did fairly well in smoking it, but about a quarter of the way down he just bit the butt off and threw the rest away… we’ll learn him yet! I asked if I could touch him and the guy said no bother, so I tickled Joe in the armpits, which he loved, and whenever I stopped he’d point at his armpits to tell me that he wanted more. He also liked to be tickled around the neck, he was just like a kid, he even laughed when I played with him. The poor baboon wasn’t getting any attention so I decided to play with him for a while. He wasn’t too receptive to tickles, but he was interested in my shoes. He untied my shoelaces, pulled down my socks and exposed my legs… I was like what the hell is this lad at, is he trying to mug me? But then he just started grooming my legs, picking mosquito bites off and checking each hair for nits and whatnot. Then he started to groom my hand. Basically I got a free manicure and pedicure from a baboon.

That night was the big going away party that Ann invited me to, and I was picked up by the company jeep from my hotel and brought to the pub, where I met all her colleagues from all over the world, each one as crazy as the last. It was a nice bar and I finally got to interact with the locals in a safe and friendly environment. After the party, myself and Ann weren’t satisfied with out levels of drunkenness so we decided to hit some more spots in town. So off we drove, and she brought me to a nice bar called Havana just in the city center, a place for ex-pats and rich locals. After a few drinks there, she asked if I’d like to check out the Congolese club, called 5/5… I said sure why not? Her driver was away running some errands so we had to get one of the taxis from outside… I said to Ann “Wait a sec, you can’t use taxis after 6pm! You could be fired!” She didn’t care, she uses taxis every now and then on the sly, she even walked home alone one night at after the club at about 2am… as I said, she likes living life on the edge. Actually to be more precise, she likes to be over the edge and hanging on to a twig half way down the cliff.

So we stumbled out of the bar into the streets. We crossed the road and I didn’t see the stupid thin almost invisible wires they use to separate the sides of the street and tripped over one and clatthered onto the road like a feckin gombeen. I just made us look like fresh “sitting duck” tourists who hadn’t a clue about Burundi and were wandering around the streets lost and drunk at night… which was partly true. And still fresh in my mind was one sentence from the “Drinks and Entetainment” section of Lonely Planet Burundi – “be careful outside the clubs as you never know who is lurking in the dark…”

We found a taxi shortly after the silly mzungu incident though and made our way to the Congolese club where we drank and danced the rest of the night away with the locals. We were the only mzungus there, they must have thought we were a bit nuts, dancing to all the crazy Congolese music, which is all plinky and plonky with twangy guitars and dodgy keyboard riffs, but it was great fun and I didn’t even get one machete to the face, just friendly smiles.

The next day kind of spoiled my new optimistic view on Burundi. After waking up with a lethal hangover, I exited the gate to make my walk into town. I had just stepped one foot out of the gate when I heard shouting and chanting from somewhere up the street… I poked my head around and saw a big group of lads in camo pants and raggedy t-shirts marching in my direction. I guessed that this was one of the grenade-wielding youth wings that Ann was telling me about, and I was just starting to feel the political tension I had read about. The elections were just around the corner… I slowly walked backwards into the gate and closed it, then opened the little slidey peephole door a bit to have a look at the guys. They didn’t have grenades, but they still looked a bit dodgy. I waited until they all marched past and the shouting and chanting receded into the distance… then I stepped out when the coast was clear. I decided to get a boda boda into town as I didn’t want to encounter these guys on foot.

After a bit of time in a nice cafe reading a book I went for lunch, then went to a bar to watch some tv, then went to the internet cafe… just a regular aul day. After finishing with the internet I decided to go for another walk around town and maybe finally venture to the market. I walked about two minutes and turned the corner to find a big crowd standing around something on the street, it looked like a few bags of rubbish. Lonely Planet says that one should always avoid large gatherings in Africa as things can turn violent in a split second… well I carefully inched a bit closer to see what the fuss was about, it didn’t seem as if there was a fight or anything particularly dangerous going on and it was still an hour or so from sunset. Then I finally saw what was going on as a police pickup arrived at the scene. They all moved out of the way for the truck, giving me a view of what was on the ground – two dead people just by the sidewalk, with streams of blood running down the street. The police didn’t even get off the back of the pickup, they just had a gawk at the dead bodies and then drove away. I’ve seen a dead body before, on display in a coffin, well dressed complete with make up, that was sick enough, but I’ve never seen a freshly killed human being, and here I was looking at not one but two of them, battered and bloody. I finally decided to heed Lonely Planets advice and make myself scarce, so I flagged a passing taxi and asked him to bring me to my hotel. I was hoping that he would drive in the opposite direction but the fecker drove past the bodies nice and slow so he could have his own little gawk. I turned the other way as we got closer, I didn’t want to see any brains or guts, or have the locals see me staring at the bodies. I asked the driver if they were shot, and made a gun shape with my fingers and went POW POW! He said yes, they were shot, they were husband and wife.

He dropped me to the restaurant by my hotel as I was starving. I noticed that there was a football match being played across the road, I think it was Uganda against Burundi, and they road was packed with people climbing on top of signposts and random scaffolding to get a good view over the high wall. Lots of dodgy drunk feckers were also stumbling around, obviously too wasted to climb the scaffolding. While eating dinner I got a call from my Mexican friend Temoris, who was in Nairobi and wondering when I would be arriving. Just as I was telling him that I saw two dead people on the street that day, I heard a few gunshots in the distance. He told me that I was the unluckiest person he’s ever met, in Kampala I happened upon a mob justice beat-down on a backstreet, when I arrived in Kigali they were throwing grenades around, and now in Bujumbura there are dead bodies and dodgy youth militias on the streets and gunshots echoing through the night. It just gets worse and worse. What next? A full-blown street shoot out? (yes I did end up seeing a street shoot out, but that’s another story…) He told me that if I survived Burundi I was to meet him in Nairobi ASAP for some serious partying before his flight back home, I said not a bother boss. I then called Ann to tell her about the shooting and ask her what the situation was, she said she’d get back to me. The next day she said that she heard they were killed in a motorbike accident… Seemed a bit bloody for a motorbike accident I didn’t know who to believe but anyways I decided to leave Burundi sooner than later.

After dinner in the restaurant it had become dark already, and the walk back to the hotel was pretty dodgy as all the football crowd were still around the street, I couldn’t see them as there were no streetlights but I could hear them having drunken arguments and laughing and shouting somewhere in the dark. I breathed a sigh of relief when I got to the hotel. I knocked on the gate, the guard slid open his little slidey peek hole to check me out, then let me in. What a feckin day. I decided to head on to Tanzania as I was pretty much finished with Burundi, it was dodgy, there were no other travelers to hang out with, and talking to the locals was difficult because of the language barrier, and if I got into an accident or any sort of trouble I was fucked – how do you explain to a thick headed ex-rebel cop who doesn’t know English and never went to school that you want to speak to your embassy? I suppose I did have a really valuable contact – Ann – who could sort me out in medical emergencies, but in the end I decided that Burundi still had a bit of developing to do before I could stay there for a longer period of time and enjoy it properly.

So the plan was to cross the Tanzanian border at the southern tip of Burundi, head to the town of Kigoma, where I could get a train (with comfy beds and a bar & restaurant) that would take me all the way across the country to the capital, Dar es Salaam, where I would stay for a few days before heading northwards to Nairobi in Kenya. So the next day I was googling some information just to make sure I knew exactly what I was doing, and found out some depressing news – the railway line that I was supposed to use to cross Tanzania was out of order due to recent flood damage, some important part of it, a bridge or something, was recently swept away. The only other way to cross Tanzania was by a back breaking busride, which would take a few days. Even 10 hours on a bus in Africa is a nightmare, 2 days in a bus would be the end of me, I’d arrive in Dar es Salaam an old, crippled, shell of a man. Then I found out that the visa for entry into Tanzania would cost me $100… a hundred dollars! Just to walk into Tanzania. Are they trying to scare tourists away or what? The Uganda visa is free, Rwanda is $50, Burundi $40, Kenya $25… and Tanzania $100. Well if their plan with the high visa fees is to scare tourists away, it works. I gave Tanzania the middle finger and decided to head back north, and make my way to Nairobi via Uganda. Cheeky Tanzanian feckers. I booked a bus to Rwanda for the next day and said my goodbyes to Ann.

The next day as I was getting stamped out of Burundi, the immigration officer asked me how my trip was. “Grand yeah”, I said, “Lake Tanganyika was nice…” I didn’t mention the dead bodies or streams of blood or gunshots or dodgy military guys or the political climate so tense you could bate it with a hurley. I got stamped into Rwanda and made my way to Kigali for a night and met up with the old crew for a few drinks.

Soon after I was on my merry way to Kampala Uganda, my home away from home at this stage. As I was getting stamped out of Rwanda, Mr. Immigration raised his eyebrow and noticed something about my passport. “You didn’t pay to get into Rwanda?” he asked. I said “No, the immigration guy just gave me the stamp at the border… is there a problem?” “Yes,” he said, “you should have paid to enter Rwanda, there is no evidence of payment received here. You must give me $60 to leave.” “But your guys at the border just let me in, didn’t ask me for any money. It’s the Rwandese government that made the mistake, it’s not my fault!” He was having none of it though. The thing was, I didn’t have $60 to give him, but thankfully there was a bank nearby where I saw VisaCard stickers on the window. I called in and asked them if they could sort me out. “Sorry, the VisaCard service is not working today.” Things rarely happen the way you want them to here in Africa, and it’s pointless to complain about it, everybody just says T.I.A. which stands for This Is Africa. So this was a perfect T.I.A. moment. I saw that there was also a Western Union sticker on the window, so I was thinking I could call somebody in Ireland to wire over $60 to me. I asked them about it. “Sorry, we don’t actually do Western Union yet, we’ll have it in a few weeks.” Wow, two T.I.A.s in under 5 seconds!!! I went back to the immigration officer at the border and told him the story. We spent a few minutes going through all my options and he conferred with his colleagues in hushed tones, then he finally said “Ok, how about this, I’ll let you leave, but you have to go to the next town in Uganda, get the $60, and bring it back here.” I said not a bother. We looked eachother in the eyes, and we both knew that there was no way I was coming back to give him those crisp dollar notes. I don’t know why he let me go like that, he could have told me to go back to Kigali to get the money, but maybe he got some good sex from his wife before coming to work that day and was feeling extra jolly. He stamped me out, I got stamped into Uganda, and hopped on the bus to Kampala.

So what ever happened to Burundi?

As Burundi moved closer to its presidential elections, things started to get a bit crazier. The good advice I got in Kampala about going before it’s too late was just that: good advice. The number of grenade attacks in the country rose rapidly, in two weeks there were something like 30 grenade attacks in the Bujumbura, and the rebels were not only targeting government buildings, they were randomly throwing them into bars and restaurants. Opposition candidates were being intimidated, with one candidate actually fleeing to the neighboring Congo (it’s speculated that he’s trying to round up a new rebel force to stage a coup d’etat). One presidential candidate after the other boycotted the election until only one remained – the already president Pierre Nkunduriza. He had practically won the election before voting day. The whole thing was a very dodgy affair. In the last week or so, mutilated bodys, 14 in total, and four of them positively identified as members of an old rebel group, have begun washing up on the banks of a river west of the capital, and there have been sightings of large groups, dressed in camoflage gear and heavily armed, moving around the countryside. I smell trouble, but we’ll wait and see what happens…