The hiiiiills are alive with the sound of me wheezing

The first thing you notice are the hills. Landing at midnight at Kigali International Airport you fly in over the pinpricks of lights spread across the rolling hillsides, deep valleys and hilltop towns, reflecting the pockets of immense suburban sprawl growing out from the bright, illuminated centre of Kigali.

I landed at 1am Rwandan time (midnight UK time) after a 13 hour flight from Manchester, via Istanbul (no, not Constantinople). I had a lovely chat with the passport/VISA control chap at the airport who, after reading my affiliation letter from the University of Rwanda, seemed genuinely pleased to welcome me to his ‘beautiful country’. Then, still in the airport, I queued up to show my UK Ready to Fly COVID certificate, and, additionally, to pay $60 for an in-country regulation LFT, the results of which were recorded on my Rwandan Biomedical Centre’s visitor health certificate. The Rwandan government are rightly taking absolutely no chances with us contaminated foreigners.

 The first morning, then, I was advised by my new landlord to head to the Union Trade Centre (UTC), a shopping complex in the centre of town, from which I can get done a lot of the bureaucracy necessary when you arrive to stay for a while in a new country: a Rwandan SIM, exchange pounds into Rwandan Francs, buy some electricity for my new apartment, and at the same time get some food in for dinner and tea. Now, Google Maps told me the UTC was a mere 3.3 km away, a distance which in the UK wouldn’t even cause a raising of the eyebrow to walk.  

So, naturally, excited and enthusiastic to soak in the sights, sounds and smells of my new East African home for the summer, off I set on foot. In the heat. On major roads congested with exhaust fumes. Up the long, steep hill into town. By the time I got there an hour later, my sight was blinded by sweat in the early morning sun, the only sound I’d heard was the honking of horns of vehicles playing dodgems on the roads, and the smell of gasoline had long annihilated anything else the immense Kigali inner-city wildlife has to offer. I had a long sit down. I understood then why taxis and motocycles (taxi motorbikes) are so prevalent here – it is just foolhardy to attempt any kind of commute by foot. 

People look at you funny.

Still, at some point the steep roads, congested streets and dirt tracks needed to be attacked if I’m going to keep up my fitness in preparation for the International Kigali Peace Marathon I rather optimistically  signed up to, held on 29^th May, just weeks after arriving (just the half marathon, though. I’m not a lunatic). 

Before I arrived here I joined the Kigali Hash Harriers running group on Facebook, which it turns out is a bunch of global immigrants and Rwandans who meet every Saturday to bowl out together on a cross-country (VERY country) trail run, through swamps, crop fields, bush, rivers, mud and even, it turns out, over infrastructure (see video). It was on my first meeting with the Kigali Hash Harriers that I met my lovely new running partner-in-crime Berni, from the UK High Commission, though unlike me who just wheezed around a 10k every so often in the UK, she is an actual fit marathon runner, so I just do my best to keep up.

Now, a Hash is where someone goes before you and marks out a trail with little piles of shredded newspaper at every junction, suggesting the correct way to run, after which us runners then follow the course as best we can. So it's a bit like a cross between an Easter Egg hunt, a sight-seeing trip, and a gruelling 10k slog. Then afterwards we all collapse into some cold, cold beers.

It’s almost impossible to run longer than 100 metres around here without encountering a hill of some sort, so I’ve staked out a 10k training course that rises and falls like the temperature of an average spring day in Britain. This is mine and Berni's attempt at acclimatising to running in the thin air at 1500m above sea level, up and down the steep Kigali slopes, for the marathon . The 21.01km of the Kigali half is going to be twice as long, and with as twice as many hills, but, right now, 10k is really as much as I can manage!

Rwanda is known as the Land of a Thousand Hills. It feels like I run up half of them every time I step out of my front door.