A veranda in Rwanda

I was so incredibly excited to wake up on Saturday morning... More so even than Christmas morning! It was early - about 6am England time but I couldn't stay in bed any longer, I wanted to see Rwanda!! Of course it was dark when I got off the plane, so I saw very little out of the car window, and although we sat on the veranda for half an hour when we got home, it was pitch black but for the lights from our phones as Pam and I caught up on the last ten years of change in Ruhengeri.

The question I suppose you're asking is why did we sit on the veranda in the pitch black being nibbled by mosquitoes at 11.30pm when I was up at 3am. And it's a good question. We arrived home to find that Pam's house girl had locked the door with a random padlock and hidden the key as requested under a wooden plank. Much searching under said concrete block heralded no key, the house girl wasn't answering her phone so Justus (Pam's Rwandan 'son') and Gregory, the guard, went off in the car to find where she lived...she had moved recently so this was also not simple! Anyway, they woke her up to discover that she had buried the key in some soil, under said wooden plank. You would never know that the house had a double locked gates, 4 high walls round it and a guard... I think under the doormat might have worked just as well...

So... From the veranda in Rwanda at night, to the veranda in Rwanda by day... I have been looking forward to having breakfast in the sun on his veranda since Pam told me about it 3 years ago...and it didn't disappoint! (though with it being the rainy season there wasn't much sun.) I'm very excited by the array of birds including kites which just mosey about with the frequency of English pigeons.  If you're interested, these are the kind of things http://wildlifewoods.net/blog/2017/3/17/birds-of-kigali   (the variable sunbird on this list is a thing of absolute beauty... I thought it was a hummingbird as it was drinking nectar but apparently you only get hummingbirds in the Americas.  My plan is to camp out in the garden every morning until they get used to me and come close!

And in the front garden, I found these...