Category: Travel

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R is for Rwanda

Fast Facts

  • Named for: Rwanda, ku-aanda or anda in the native language, expanding, referring to the consolidation and expansion of the Kingdom of Rwanda.
  • Capital: Kigali
  • Long/Lat:  1.5 S/30.3 E, 9500 miles or 19 hours east from Castro Valley
  • Population: 14.1 million or 200 CVs.
  • Size: 10,200 sq mi, 560 CVs
  • Avg temp in April: 80 F/26 C but varies because mountainous
  • Median household income: $7,200 annually
  • Ethnicity: 84% Hutu, 14% Tutsi, 1% Twa. And therein lies a tale.
  • Main industries: Precious stones, coffee, ores, i.e. natural resources scooped out by places like UAE, China, and the US.

Rwanda is a place of beauty and tragedy. Its nickname is “Land of a Thousand Hills” because of its lush mountains, formed as part of the Great Rift. This is near the place where humans were born, where “Lucy” and her hominid friends put their babies in a sling, stood up and started hunting and gathering.

That is, Rwanda is not only its genocide. The genocide was mostly what I had known, that it was a place of massacre, where modern tools of warfare facilitated murder on a large scale when an uneasy truce was broken. But Rwanda also known for its mountain gorillas, which are prized by both poachers and tourists, as well as for its beautiful landscapes. To explain Rwanda is just a few paragraphs is not easy, but let’s try.

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The Panama Canal: 500 Lives per Mile

The original Panama Canal still operates a century later. Kajmeister photo.

A grand vision. Incredible hubris. Stupidity and poor planning. Thousands of lives lost. A miracle of modern science and engineering. A doorway between oceans. The Panama Canal was–and is–all of these things.

Yesterday, I wrote my A to Z post about the country of Panama. But I mentioned the serendipity of being in Panama while it was time to write about Panama. And the first thing anyone usually thinks about Panama is The Canal.

Knowing I was planning this trip through the canal, Nan, one of my chickleball friends, recommended an excellent history of the canal: David McCullough’s The Pathway through the Seas. It earned a Pulitzer Prize 50 years ago, and for good reason. I had to speed-read the last of the 600 pages, just finishing it it in time–phew! otherwise, we would have been stuck in the locks. Spoiler: they did it. It was cray-cray. Herein, I will give you the speed version, 2000 words instead of 600 pages, the How, Why, and What the Canal was all about.

Before the Canal, there was a 50-mi (roughly) stretch of mountains and jungles. There was a railroad, but railroads can’t carry ships, and the Chagres River limited what ships could traverse it. Photo from mapsland.
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N is for North Macedonia

North Macedonia is a landlocked country in the Balkans, i.e., the old Kingdom of Macedonia. Graphic from Countryreports.org.

Fast Facts

  • Named for: Macedonia means “tall people” according to ancient Greeks
  • Capital: Skopje
  • Long/Lat: 42.0 N/21.2 E, 6500 mi & 13 hrs East of CV
  • Population: 1.8 million or 27 CVs, big for a “small” country
  • Size: 9800 sq mi, 540 CVs
  • Avg temp in April: 64 F/16 F, similar
  • Median household income: $7,000
  • Ethnicity: 55% Macedonian, 24% Albanian, 4% Turks
  • Main industries: Chemicals, Manufacturing. Embargoes and trade conflicts are common.

Sadly, there is no South Macedonia. Neither is there an East or West Macedonia, and when Macedonia gained independence in 1991 and tried to be the whole Macedonia, the Greeks blpcked them. It’s pretty ironic, since the Macedonians once conquered Greece, and the Greeks have never conquered Macedonia.

Those Greeks do act as if they run the show. They think they invented everything, and slap labels on things like the Pythagorean theorem (Pythagoras was great, but the Babylonians knew about the right-triangle relationships way before that) or the Metonic cycle (Babylonians again) and so on. Alexander the Great, the Macedonian emperor who spread “Greek” culture into the east, was tutored by a Greek, but he wasn’t Greek. Such a long time ago, who pays attention?

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