Sometimes things affect you when it hasn’t occurred to you that they might, and Nyungwe National Park was, for me, one of those things. For the record, it’s the largest mountainous rainforest in Africa, and I suppose what surprised me was this: I think, in my mind, I’d decided that I would probably never in my life see a rainforest. I mean, I’m not the kind of person to seek out a terrain that I generally associate with leeches, giant spiders and hacking through undergrowth with a machete. So to sit on a bus watching this incredible, just-how-you-imagine-it landscape roll by, knowing all the while that you’re going to have days to explore, made my eyes go kinda watery.
Our first glimpse of Nyungwe National Park
Almost as impressive, when we reached the other side of Nyungwe, was Gisakura Tea Estate:
That, my friends, is a lot of tea
For someone who drinks so much tea, it suddenly seemed strange that I’d never seen the stuff grow. It’s very green.
A few days later I ended up watching England/Egypt in the staff common room of the tea factory. That was a strange experience, although I suspect it was at least as strange for the workers as it was for me. Not my fault there is no other satellite telly in the vicinity of the rainforest…
[...] drive to Gisakura, on the western edge of Nyungwe, is truly, truly beautiful, but at the back of our minds there was the worry that no-one had seemed to totally understand that [...]