Rwenzoris

An absolutely marvellous day trip into the Rwenzori Mountains to experience both the landscape and examples of successful community enterprises. We walked in the lower reaches of the lush and dramatic Rwenzori Mountains National Park, home to some of Africa’s tallest peaks. The multi-day summit trek sounds tough, to put it mildly. Here is my colleague Paul enjoying the Park’s waterways.

Later we visited an awesome coffee cooperative where we heard how the group of producers works together to market their coffee and negotiate to sell to other cooperatives if they can’t find buyers. Obviously sampling the coffee was the highlight. Through some field demonstrations I also improved my knowledge of vanilla cultivation by about 1,000 from a baseline of zero knowledge.

We were having too much fun in the Rwenzoris so the workshop sessions back at the hotel were postponed. When we eventually returned I took a walk and had a solitary pizza in Fort Portal, followed by a motorbike taxi ride back for an early night. The cool wind was blasting away any notion of the haranguing emails and WhatsApps that are a daily work feature. On a Rwenzori day, those things matter not one jot, and they can be kept largely at bay.