RwandAir In-Flight Magazine

Little White Shell

An overnight trek up Mount Karisimbi, the region’s tallest volcano

Story and Photos by Mark Darrough

The last night bus leaving Kigali pushed through the chaos of Nyabugogo bus station and set out on the winding highway to Rwanda’s northern vol- cano belt. There, I would endeavour to climb Mount Karisimbi, the tallest peak in the Virunga Massif, rising from a rich plateau of sorghum, maize and pyrethrum farmlands.

Driving further north, the pitch dark of the African rural night hid one of the world’s great scenic drives. We arched over high mountain ridges and down into narrow river valleys, snaking through papyrus swamps where enormous white egrets fly high above farmers wading through rice paddies.

In Musanze, the gateway to the famous Volcanoes National Park (estab- lished in 1925 as Africa’s first established park, then called Albert Park) I met Dan, an old friend who gave me a bed for the night. A beacon to the country’s swift development, and more precisely to the nearby park’s growing status as one of the continent’s most sought-after destinations, Musanze had transformed in recent years into a bustling town of tall, gleaming banks, coffee shops, hotels and restaurants. Yet the volcanoes still formed a massive wall to the north, and Musanze and its surrounding highlands, to me, best represented the wild beauty of Rwanda.

My friend Dan had climbed 33 four thousand foot peaks on America’s eastern seaboard, summited Mount Denali in Alaska (North America’s highest point), watched men die on the climb, and ice-picked his way to the top of some of the world’s highest mountains. When he reviewed the contents of my pack for the hike, he laughed. “You’re climbing a 4500 me- ter volcano in the rainy season,” he started. “And all you brought is cotton shirts and beans?”

Legend has it that Karisimbi, towering over its neighbouring volcanoes that jut from the Great Rift Valley floor, served as a compass for pre-co- lonial era conquest expeditions trying to reach Rwanda. Just as slaves in the old American South used the North Star to guide their way to freedom, former Ugandan kings, albeit with an opposing objective, used the shiny peak of Karisimbi to guide war parties southward in the aim of expanding their kingdoms.

“The top of Karisimbi shines because of the snow; it showed them the way to Rwanda,” explained Anaclet Budahera, Tourism Warden of Vol- canoes National Park. And so the people called the mountain Karisimbi – ‘little white shell’ in Kinyarwanda.

Early the next morning I set off for the park office with the world’s finest outdoor equipment on my back ready to enter a humid jungle of mountain gorillas and golden monkeys swinging from bamboo limbs, and a world of icy tundra awaiting me at 4,500 metres elevation--the eleventh highest point in all of Africa.

Dan had thrown out my cottons in disgust and replaced them with a stock of high-tech, waterproof “climbing essentials”. Thus saved from two days of wet, cold discomfort, I craned my neck eagerly toward the coned mountain in the distance, its peak hidden in a mist of swirling rain clouds.

Our hiking party consisted of one heavily outfitted ‘mzungu’ (white man), my guide Felician, and two porters from a village that is nestled against the park boundary. We soon met a patrol of 30 camouflaged soldiers sitting in a grove of eucalyptus trees; when we walked past, they fell into line in front and behind us. After ten minutes it was apparent we’d be walking together for a spell, and when Felician spoke to the captain, a lean man with a hawkish face, carrying a radio with an antenna a metre long, I asked what had been discussed.

“They are hiking with us to the summit!” he laughed. “His men need the exercise, and there is nothing better than climbing Karisimbi.”

We passed sprawling fields of white pyrethrum flowers and purple-flow- ered Irish potatoes before climbing a four-foot stone wall into a thick, equatorial Neoboutonia forest. The wall reaches 74 kilometres from the border of Uganda in the northwest to the Congo in the east, protecting the people’s crops from buffalo leaving the park in search of food.

Thirty minutes later we encountered a wooden sign stenciled “Dian Fossey and Bisoke Crater Lake.” Just two hours walk to our north, on the ridge between Karisimbi and Mount Bisoke, was the tomb of the great American zoologist Dian Fossey. The eccentric scientist established Kari- soke Research Center in 1967 to study the endangered mountain gorilla. Through a hermit-like existence, and in constant, bitter war against gorilla poachers, she greatly expanded contemporary knowledge of the gorillas and brought their plight to the worldwide stage. In December of 1985
her body was found slain near her campsite—a tragic conclusion, most believe, to her decades-long war with the poachers.

We cut through bamboo forests, ever alert for a lucky glimpse of Fossey’s beloved gorillas, until we found ourselves in a surreal world of overhang-

ing moss and lush, marshy meadows. A small bushbuck darted past us just before the rains fell; the soldiers laughed as I stumbled into the bush for a better look of the shy, almost goat-like, forest antelope.

We threw on our rain gear as Felician explained the dynamics of the mountain forest and the people. Long held tensions between conserva- tion efforts and the needs of the densely populated surrounding commu- nities seemed to be drawing to an end in recent years. Many former Twa poachers now served as park rangers protecting the animals they used
to profit from, and illegal honey harvesters threatening to burn the forest were now involved in successful beekeeping cooperatives just outside the park.

A line of soldiers stretched out into the high mountain meadow now before us, the captain barely visible through sheets of rain and tall, golden alpine grass. Karisimbi’s sheer rock face loomed directly beyond to our right. The captain’s fist raised and a pack of wild forest buffalo dashed from the fog at the meadow’s edge.

Our campsite lay at the base of the peak; Karismbi Valley stretched toward Mount Bisoke to our northeast, the jagged silhouette of Saby- inyo—‘old man’s teeth’—and coned form of Muhabura fading into the evening twilight. Before dark, the soldiers dispersed into the short alpine trees to collect firewood, everything soaked by the afternoon’s downpour. Reminiscent of Rwanda’s civil war in the nineties when the RPF rebels lived and fought on the slopes of the Virungas for over four years, the sol- diers quickly had five small fires blazing, displaying their uncanny ability to make do in the cold wet.

At night the stars opened up, orbiting counterclockwise around the dark shapes of the volcanoes. We sat by the fire with the valley’s lights scat- tered far beneath us, a reminder that civilization lay somewhere below the mysterious noises coming from the black forest. I’d forgotten what it was like to be that cold; that we were near the equator seemed difficult to grasp as the biting winds swooped in from the peak above us.

We awoke at dawn and made the steep climb to the summit, up narrow alpine ridges as the trees began to shrink and shrink until there were no trees at all; near the top was a lunar landscape of grey rock and white fog. At summit we saw a 40-metre metal mast shooting up into the mist—a token of man’s triumph over the extreme places of the world. We were

at the highest point in the region, and the tower had been built here as a transmission and weather monitoring point for East and Central Africa.

Somewhere below the clouds to our west was the boiling red crater of Mt. Nyiragongo, which in 2002 erupted and turned the DRC’s eastern town
of Goma into lava rock. Beyond was Lake Kivu, one of the world’s three “exploding lakes”.

No mountain I had climbed before afforded the vantage of such mysterious, breathtaking beauty. When we came back down to base camp I saw the captain giving orders to his men beside a still smoldering fire. He looked up and gave a slight nod of acknowledgement, as if now, after reaching Rwanda’s great peak, I had earned his right of recognition.