Lazy Weekend

 

Little bit of sad news to start off with. Hobnob didn't make it. She did well for another week but then went into a sudden decline. She died safe and warm at our local veterinary surgery last week. All really sad about it, but her final days were spent comfortably. We were privileged to have known her.

In wildlife-related news. Found a huge fruit chafer beetle. Relocated it outdoors, where it took a shine to my pants drying on the hedge.

Went for drinks with my friend Chris and witnessed the most incredible blood moon. I thought it was a firework when I first saw it. The picture doesn't really show, but it was huge. Really deep red that rose to become white.

And went for a lovely home-cooked meal of potatoes, salad and isombe (cassava leaves), made by my friend Pieter. A nice afternoon spent relaxing and catching up.

Woke early on Friday to a pretty sunrise over my back yard.

 

My friend from up north came down to visit for the weekend and spoilt me rotten. We've been on a food and cocktail binge. Discovered giant prawns at Zen, and daiquiris that tasted like lemon drops. They were delicious, and right up there with the Hut's passion fruit mojitos.  

We had the laziest Saturday on record. Lounged until around 1 p.m., then took a leisurely drive out to 1000 Hills Distillery, which is a place I'd wanted to visit for a while. It was a nice hangout, with a beautiful view of the valley, and friendly staff. They have about five pages of cocktails and one page of food, so we set about sampling the wares.

 

It was interesting. They've certainly got the alcohol part down, but infusion still has a way to go. They make coffee liqueur, macadamia nut liqueur, rum and whiskey, but they all taste pretty similar, except for the coffee, which is almost strong enough to dampen down the pure alcohol taste. The slight difficulty is that they make all of their cocktails with their own spirits. They look fabulous, but taste-wise, nowhere near a Zen daiquiri. Still, it was a very pleasant afternoon, and we finished up with food and a trip back into our youth with a couple of shandies. 

Being a cat momma can be hard. Sometimes you just have to put your pride aside and smuggle a small box of chicken bones home. 

In the evening, we went out for a drink with friends Chris and Solvejg, then spent another lazy morning with breakfast at Terra Café, which is a lovely little place next to my house. Didn't have far to walk. Then home for a nap on the couch before he headed back up to Gisenyi. Laziest weekend in a long time.

Things up there are interesting at the moment. Ebola recently spread from DRC to Uganda, killing a child and his grandmother. That was swiftly contained. Then worst fears were realised when a case was reported in Goma, a major transport hub near the border with Rwanda. There's only about five miles between Goma and Gisenyi. The rumour is the guy was a pastor, who thought it was a good idea to go lay hands on people in an infected Ebola region, then evaded checkpoint tests by taking paracetamol to suppress his fever. Others say he used different names at checkpoints to avoid tracking. Not sure how much of that is true, but it's a minor miracle no one else he came into contact with caught it, as he was travelling by public transport. Unfortunately, he has since died.

I'm likely to go up to Gisenyi again in the next few weeks, but think I'll hire a car and get some driving practise in, or catch a lift with friends. We've decided, although the risk is extremely low, it's probably best to avoid public transport for the time being. Many of the buses going south carry people who have crossed from Goma, and until the situation is completely under control, it's probably prudent to find alternative means. 

Anyway, I'm going to go and do some more sleeping, and possibly Netflix, with the last of my Sunday. Yay for lazy weekends.

Hobnob and Trumpet Trees

In a non-tea-related post, meet Hobnob.

My friend Jo came home one evening to find her sitting outside the front gate. You can't see from that picture, but  she is seriously emaciated. You could feel every single bone in her body, and almost touch your fingers together through the back of her spine.

 

  

 

 

Jo took her straight down to our lovely local vet, Dr. Arum. The examination showed she was starving, but she needed to wait to see whether it was just lack of food or whether there was an underlying condition causing this. Jo has other cats but no spare room, so she brought Hobnob, named by her daughter, over to my house. I had a spare room to keep her separate from my other cats, who are all vaccinated.

My friend Nick was staying with me. He lives up near Nyaringarama but was in town for a wedding. After I put my cats out for the night, I went and collected Hobnob and brought her in to snuggle on the couch with us as we started the new series of Stranger Things. When I opened the door to the spare room, I honestly thought she was dead for a moment as she was just lying there. Then she breathed and so did I. When I went to bed, I moved her into my room. She is such an incredibly affectionate little thing, I thought she'd feel safer with someone there.

Please ignore the dry food, I was feeding her small pieces of fresh meat and some mince. I quickly educated myself in starving cat nutrition. You've also got to be careful and keep an eye out for refeeding syndrome. When someone has been starved you can't just give them a big meal. The vitamins and minerals needed to digest food are depleted or exhausted, and without them the body can shut down when it encounters food. So, you need to start by offering around half the daily number of calories that a healthy creature would eat and include the vitamins and minerals needed for digestion, which, thankfully, meat has most of for a cat. Dry food is a bad idea as it's much harder to digest and dehydrating, which is bad in an already dehydrated animal.

She drank lots of water but was so weak she could hardly walk, so she wasn't able to use the litter box to begin with. The next morning she'd done two huge poos and had a wee, which was a really good sign. It meant her system was functioning.

We spent a couple of days cuddling and watching movies, and she was soon able to use the litter box. Because she's so affectionate, we wondered whether she might have belonged to someone. Many people get animals when they move to Rwanda, but a lot of expats leave them behind when they go. Or she might just have got lost. If she was a house cat or home bunny she might not have had much hunting experience and been unable to feed herself properly.

Arum had shaved off her matted fur and given her a bath, but there was still a strong, sickly smell about her. She was too weak to wash herself, so it was a really wonderful sign on the second day when she did this.

She also rolled over for a tummy rub. All she wanted to do was stroke, but I felt a bit nervous, it was like touching a furry skeleton and I was terrified I would hurt her, but she's a resilient little thing.

 

I had already arranged to go back to Gisenyi to see Sameer, but I delayed another day to spend more time with her. On the final evening, Jo and her daughter came to collect Hobnob. I helped put her in the car. She was recovering well and showing no signs of disease. Jo is keeping her. I would have done otherwise. She's going to have a really happy life, but even knowing that, I had a little cry after she left. I'm fine in an emergency - feed, water, clean, cuddle, repeat - but once it was over there was time to reflect on how awful it was. Poor little thing was suffering, but still so loving despite it all. I'm really looking forward to seeing her again next time I visit Jo. It was just so lucky she ended up outside her door.

Talking of Jo, we had a really lovely day on Wednesday. She has a tourism business in Gisenyi, specialising in cycling the Congo Nile Trail. In my bid to avoid the bus, she agreed to drive me back to Kigali after a training session with her staff. I had a lazy morning, and breakfast with Sameer after he'd done the morning rounds, then Jo picked me up and we went over to her office.

 

  

Nice guest room.

 

Cycle details - pedals as towel hooks.

 

I really love this wash basin.

 

 

(panoramic, click to enlarge)

 

Like Sameer, Jo has a lovely garden with lots of flowers.

 

That last one is called ikijojo in Kinyarwanda (little Jojo). Its other name is brugmansia, trumpet tree, angel trumpet or pseudodatura. It's both a poison and a hallucinogen. I often wonder whether there's some connection between this and the traditional imigongo paintings that look really trippy. Locals say it'll either kill you or send you mad. Sameer told me that this plant is the antidote, but we're not sure what it is.

The day after I got back to Kigali, Sameer had a meeting here, so he stayed over. We had a lovely meal at Lalibela, washed down with Belgian beers at the rolex shop in Kimi. It's been a really nice week, if a little exhausting with all the travelling and gin, but I'm blessed to know such interesting people and to live in such a beautiful country.

More Tea and More Gin

After a couple of days in Kigali, I decided to go back to Gisenyi for a few more days. This time I splashed out on a taxi, as the bus was pretty hardcore. My friend Senga used to be my go-to taxi guy, but he's moved to Mozambique, so his brother, Jado, drove me instead. It was really nice to catch up, and I arrived far more refreshed than last time.

Sunset behind the northern mountains.

Spent a lazy couple of days as a lady of leisure, enjoying my friend's house. His staff were really kind, cooking and making coffee. We went back for more apple pie at Serena and had a really nice meal at Lake Side along the beach. Also discovered that giant mushrooms grow up in the hills.

 

This time, he also showed me around the tea factory. I've seen several tea fields, including the utterly stunning Gisovu garden, but I'd never been inside a processing factory before as it was always a Monday, when they're closed for maintenance, or a holiday. My friend's house is right next to the factory. Every morning you hear the siren go off around 6:30, calling the workers to work, then again for the start and end of lunch - it honestly sounds like an air raid. Throughout the night, the factory fans hum away in the background, drying the leaves ready for processing.

Last time I visited, I saw the painting in his office of the old government-owned factory. This is it in reality, tucked behind the huge modern factory.

Old factory left, modern factory right.

The tea arrives by truck from the field and people attach the pickers' bags to a moving overhead conveyor system, which takes them to the troughs on the top two floors. There are a total of 92 troughs. The green leaves are separated out and left to dry there for several hours. The fans help remove the moisture. You can test to see whether the leaves are ready by rolling them into a tight ball and throwing them in the air. If they separate, they're still fresh. If they stay in a ball, they're dry enough for the next part of the process.

Tea arriving from the field.

In the next part of the process, the leaves are cut, torn and curled (CTC) using these machines. The result being that the whole leaves are turned into smaller shreds.

Next, they go through a big metal box which slowly oxidises the leaves, turning them brown. They go in one end green, and fall out the other looking more recognisably like tea. This is the step that green tea misses out, and why it keeps its colour.

Going in.

Coming out.

Then it's down a long conveyor belt and into the driers, which remove the last of the moisture from the leaves. The fumes from the driers leave via giant exhaust chimneys. When tea is being dried, the whole estate smells of it.

Exhaust chimney.

Once out of the dryers, it continues its journey along another conveyor belt to the sorting machine. 

Tea here comes in four grades, from large grains (BP1) to fine powder, or 'dust'. The sorting machine sifts the grains of tea through a set of mesh drays to separate the grain sizes into buckets.

 

The machine also has a set of electromagnetic rollers, which use a static charge to lift the chaff from the leaves. That's any errant pieces of bark or twigs that were collected during the picking process. It's disposed of in a separate bucket.

Then, the tea is stored in large silos and packaged according to grade.

 

Ready to be put on a truck and driven to Mombasa, where it's shipped around the world. A lot of Rwandan tea ends up in Yorkshire Tea. 

Then it was off for a tea tasting session. The team at Pfunda taste the tea every hour to check the quality. The grains go from large (BP1) on the left, to dust on the right. The smaller the grains, the stronger the tea. Large-grain tea is more popular in India, whilst the British prefer small-grain, strong brews. The size of the grain is checked, the colour of the steeped leaves, and then the colour and taste of the brew itself. Like wine tasting, you swill the tea around your mouth, then spit it out.

I'll write about the rest of my stay in Gisenyi in the next post, as this one's long enough, but the day after I returned to Kigali, my friend stayed over as he had a workshop nearby. There is a singular sort of self-consciousness involved in making a morning cuppa for someone who tastes tea for a living. He immediately knew it wasn't Pfunda tea, but from an earlier stock he'd given me from Gisovu. Next time, I'm making coffee.