Roads in Rwanda

As you might expect,  roads in Rwanda vary quite a bit.   There is a really good highway system that joins the major cities together - two lane roads with nice smooth asphalt.    They're curvy everywhere and have some hills (Rwanda is called the country of 1000 hills),  but really nice!    Side roads are dirt, sometimes with big washout ditches in them,   and the farthest rural roads (like we rode to get to the start of the gorilla trekking) can be brutal by US standards,  yet cars, mini-busses and motorcycles can be seen on them.

Here you can see a typical road ditch:   you don't want to swerve off the road in Rwanda! 

We also saw the ditches being built in some other areas.    It looks like tough work -  and there were both men and women doing it.  

One fun thing about the roads is that they are also the main route for walkers.   With over 10 million people in this very small country,  there were always people walking on the roads.   It made for some crazy driving,  but thanks to Scott and some hired drivers,  we never had to drive.   

It's amazing to watch how hard working Rwandans are, and this is especially evident watching people on the sides of the roads.  People of all ages walking or biking or pushing a heavily overloaded bike -  sometimes in the middle of nowhere so you know they're going for a ways -  just to provide water, food, milk,  farmed goods for their families and to the markets.     Jill quoted a statistic that the average child walks 6 miles a day just for fresh water.    What we take for granted.     Rwanda seems to have a lot of public wells spaced pretty regularly along the roads - I think there are other countries much less fortunate.  

From there the water is either carried in hands,  on heads,  or loaded onto bikes.   These bikes looked especially heavy going uphill:

Here are some other photos from our time on the roads....

We think the woman in red has 40-60 lbs of potatoes on her head,  plus a baby on her back:

Taxis are not regularly used by local Rwandans - they are expensive.     "Moto-taxis" are everywhere in the main cities,  and can also be seen in some more rural areas in between cities.    Several years ago the government tried to outlaw moto-taxis,  but public outcry brought them back.    By law the passenger on the back has to wear a helmet.    We're not sure about the helmet law with babies....    The scariest thing is that if you see in this photo,  the moto-taxi is passing a slow moving truck going uphill,  and we're double-passing the truck and the moto-taxi.   This is all on a narrow two lane road.    Everyone was fine, but it looks a bit sketchy: