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Adventures with Kingsley Holgate (12)

Adventures with Kingsley Holgate (12)

Date: 2016-06-17
Our hardy Land Rover adventurers are still on their yearlong journey to follow the entire Great African Rift Valley, a story best told from the scribbles in Kingsley's sweat-stained expedition journals

As we travel along the Rwandan shoreline of the beautiful Lake of Kivu, we are constantly reminded of the horrors of the genocide. Out of Rwanda into Burundi we follow the Rusizi River which runs down the floor of the Rift Valley from Lake Kivu to Lake Tanganyika. Burundi at 27,830 km2 is after Rwanda the second to smallest country of our Rift Valley journey.

The country is still very French and still has an on-the-edge close to Congo feel. Nowhere in Africa have we seen so many bicycles piled so high with trade goods and produce - one Landy behind the other, our expedition makes it to the Delta where the brown waters of the Rusizi merge with the clear blue of Tanganyika, Mama Afrika's largest fresh water lake where there's rumoured to be a killer crocodile called Gustav who's said to have killed more than 200 people. We hire a boat and rangers, but no Gustav.

It's a yardstick for the expedition to reach Bujumbura in Burundi at the top-end of Lake Tanganyika. The Great African Rift Valley is wonderfully challenging with all its volcanoes (some still active), lakes and rivers, sip fulls of which get added to the expedition calabash, abundant wildlife, ancient tribes, snowcapped mountain ranges, equatorial downpours, mind-numbing heat, deserts, forests, the hyenas of Harar, village markets, rebels, cattle wars and the genocide of the Tutsi, roads that turn to goat tracks, the hottest and lowest places on the African continent and now, the challenge of Lake Tanganyika, Africa's longest and deepest lake.