Hotel Mille Collines in Kigali, the setting of the famous film "Hotel Rwanda"
Nobody who has watched “Hotel Rwanda” can leave Kigali without a visit to “Hotel des Mille Collines”, where the manager Paul Rusesabagina, a Hutu, sheltered and saved 1.250 Tutsis. In 2009, I had the privilege to meet and talk to Mr. Rusesabagina in Vienna. One sentence remains ingrained in my memory, because it summarized the horror: “In 1994 in Rwanda, people sat on a pile of corpses and smoked a cigarette”.
To my surprise, its clientele was mostly African families, mainly expats, who obviously are not troubled by paying 200 USD for a room. Watching their children munching hamburgers for 7 USD at the pool, while the big flat TV screen showed starving children in Somali was the ultimate déjà vu. In “Hotel Rwanda” a French journalist, also sitting by the hotel pool, warns Paul not to get his hopes up high. “I think, if people see this footage, they’ll was “Oh my God, that’s horrible” and then go on eating their dinners”. How true!
The hotel’s unbeatable asset is its location. With pretty much all of Kigali at its feet, the sweeping view over the hills makes you forget you are right in the center of the capital city.
The high - priced tourist industry in Rwanda stands in stark contrast to what most locals earn: a cleaning lady in a moderately priced tourist hotel takes home 25 USD a month, a person cleaning the market area makes 20 cents a day! People walking for miles carrying heavy loads don’t do so because of lack of transport, but because they simply cannot afford even a few cents for the minibus.
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