The Purple Culture Guide to Rwanda

Chapter 1: First Impressions

You land at Kigali International Airport and the first thing you notice is the quiet. Not the oppressive quiet of a place that is empty, but the calm of a place that is functioning. The immigration queue moves quickly. The officials are polite, not stern. Someone asks if you need help with your bags, not aggressively, just help. It is, you think, the most organized arrival you have ever had in Africa, and that thought trips a wire in your head, because you realize you had expected less. Most visitors to Rwanda carry a set of assumptions they did not consciously choose, and the country is very good at dismantling them within the first hour.

The wrong assumptions usually start with the geography. People picture Rwanda as a dense jungle, a place you have to hack through, a wild Eden. The truth is that Rwanda is a country of hills. It is called the land of a thousand hills, which is actually an undercount; it is more like a thousand and a half. Everywhere you look, the land folds and rises, a green patchwork of smallholdings, maize plots, banana groves, and tea fields. This is not a jungle. It is a garden, intensely cultivated, hedged, and managed. The hills make travel beautiful and slow, and they dictate the rhythm of the country. You cannot build a highway straight across a land that is perpetually on a slope, so you wind, you climb, you descend. The distance