Gisenyi

...is Paradise. Literally. I stayed at a hotel that would have easily cost $300 per night for my room: a bungalow alongside Lake Kivu, about twenty feet from the beach. It cost about $54 a night.
We got into Gisenyi, which is literally a five minute drive from the border with the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) at Goma, Friday night just before dinner. It was dark and raining outside so we had literally no idea what the beach and the hotel looked like! After checking in and sitting down to dinner, we were lucky enough to see a cultural dance-and-drum performance that was leased for the thirty-odd Canadian Christian Missionaries who also happened to be at dinner.
The next morning we got to actually see Lake Kivu, and it was worth the wait. It looks more like a sea than a lake. It is immense and deep (the 15th deepest lake in the world!) and sparkling blue, and has a beautiful rock beach. My words will not do the lake an inch of justice, so you will just have to wait to see my photos when I upload them. And you will. I took approximately 100 landscape shots of the lake. Seriously. Anyway, the most beautiful part about Kivu is that it's a lake among the milles collines (thousand hills) of Rwanda, so it is flanked by hills both nearby and in the distance. The hotel has a small island property less than a mile off-shore, and it dots the landscape in a very charming way.
Saturday, I spent the morning sunning and swimming in the lake, which is admittedly not always safe to swim in. Kivu is an "exploding lake," which means that it contains methane and CO2 (because of the very active volcano right across the border in Goma). It is one three known lakes that have these limnic eruptions in the world. The concentration of CO2 could also cause tsunamis. Anyway, now that I've terrified you, I hasten to note that Kivu is normally incredibly safe, and a great swim. The methane in Kivu is also, believe it or not, an environmental and economic boon to Rwanda. A brewery alongside the lake that produces local Primus beer and several Coca Cola products is extracting the methane to produce energy to run the plant's boilers.
I met a number of really interesting people in Gisenyi. I met two students--one from Yale and one from Virginia Commonwealth--who are studying abroad on an SIT program in Gulu, Uganda and Kigali. It was so nice to have college students to talk to for once...I felt more like myself than I have in quite a while. I also met this awesome expat from London who is contracted in Kigali for the year working with the government on capacity building, and her friend Jean-Paul, a local from Kigali. They drove me home last night from Gisenyi, which is about a three hour drive. It was so incredibly generous. I also met the son of the hotel owner, a Rwandese man who was born in Burundi and has lived all over the world and speaks five languages easily. He now does marketing for the hotel. He took me and several other guests, including the ex-pat and Jean-Paul, on a boat trip to the hotel's island property, which was absolutely gorgeous.
This weekend was a blessing and a half. I really needed to meet people outside of my volunteer group, and to spend some time in a different environment. I'm sunburnt on my back from the boat trip, but I feel more content that I have in quite some time.