What To Know About Visiting Burundi

The green hills of Africa

This is going to be a slightly different format of blog post than usual. Instead of simply narrating our trip through Burundi, I want to structure it in terms of giving some useful travel tips for Burundi, a country which sees very few Western tourists, especially overlanders driving their own cars. (We met precisely zero Western tourists in our five days in the country.) When we were getting ready to enter Burundi, we found little useful travel information available online, so I want to try to plug that gap slightly. Here goes!

Why go?

Burundi is a small, densely settled country, but its landscape is spectacular, with endless lines of steep mountainsides terraced right to the top. When we were there it was the rainy season, and the vegetation was almost painfully green. The distant views from high points are stunning, and at closer range the fields are a striking mosaic of colours. The people are friendly and welcoming, and since it’s a fairly obscure, little-known place, you will always discover something unknown (to you), interesting and surprising. Burundi borders Tanzania and Rwanda, so it’s easy to tack it on to a trip primarily focused on one of these two countries. Besides this, if (like me) you want to visit every country in the world, you need to come to Burundi.

Us with a few big trees, Bururi Forest

 

Is it safe? Should I go?

In the Lonely Planet East Africa guide which I have, published in 2018, Burundi is described thus: “The entire country is now considered unsafe to visit.” There was continued political unrest starting in 2015 and continuing for several years, connected with a power grab by the then-president Pierre Nkurunziza, who wanted to run for president for a constitutionally forbidden third term. Luckily Nkurunziza stepped down as president before the 2020 election and (less luckily for him, although probably luckily for Burundi as a whole) then died, probably of covid-19. With him out of the way, the country has returned to some semblance of normality, and certainly while we were in the country, we saw no indication of violent unrest or political protest, and the Burundians we talked to stressed that the country now felt peaceful.

Women walking back from market through Bururi Forest

Having said that, the Canadian, British and US governments all advise against travelling to Burundi. They probably know more than I do, but it did not strike me as a country that was teetering on the brink of a return to violent chaos, or even a country where you’re likely to be mugged on the street. It’s up to you; I felt very comfortable travelling to Burundi in a way that I wouldn’t if I were travelling to (say) South Sudan or Mali or Somalia.

 

Visas

In the years of political unrest from 2015 to 2020, tourist visas to visit Burundi were very hard to come by, and I used to read accounts on the Lonely Planet Thorn Tree of people waiting for months in hope of getting a visa, only to be turned down in the end. This is no longer the case at all. We got a 1-month tourist visa at the Burundi consulate in Kigoma, Tanzania, and it could not have been easier. (The hardest thing was finding the consulate, which was in the wrong place on Google Maps!) We walked into the consulate, talked for five minutes with one of the consulate officials, paid our US$90 each (ouch!) in cash, and waited for about 20 minutes. We didn’t even have to fill out a visa form; the official did it all for us. It was all surprisingly quick and efficient, perhaps helped by the fact that we were the only Westerners there (there was one family who might have been Tanzanians, or perhaps Burundians living in Tanzania, who were there when we arrived and who were still waiting when we left).

One of the thousands of loads we saw on people's heads

We met another couple who were overlanding to Burundi, and they went for the cheaper option of buying a 3-day transit visa for US$40. This can be extended in Bujumbura for a month for (I believe) another $30, but then you have to hustle from the border to Bujumbura within those first three days. We didn’t intend to visit Bujumbura, so we went for the easier but more expensive 30-day option.

 

At the border

We crossed from Tanzania into Burundi at the small mountain-top crossing at Manyovu. There were very few travellers crossing there, and the entire process was very quick. We had to undergo a rapid-antigen test for covid-19, which costs $15, and wait for the results before going through immigration. There the immigration officer seemed genuinely confused by the fact that we had gotten our visas ahead of time, and there were a few minutes of bafflement while he kept asking us what date we had first entered the country, and why we were coming back a second time. We eventually showed him the receipt for our visa at the Kigoma consulate, and the light dawned in his eyes. A quick entry stamp, and we were free to go deal with the car.

A rare motorcycle taxi, fully loaded

Our car is on a carnet de passage en douanes (CPD), which in theory should allow it to enter a country without paying any sort of customs fees. This wasn’t the case in Tanzania, where we had paid US$30 for a Temporary Import Permit (TIP) despite having our carnet, and it proved to be the case once again in Burundi, where we had to pay 30,000 Burundian francs (BFr), worth about US$15 at the official exchange rate and about US$9 at the black market rate. Once we had paid for the TIP, we were free to go, trying to remember to drive on the right side of the road after months of driving on the left.

 

Money

Red-tailed monkey, Bururi Forest

At the border we changed about 70,000 leftover Tanzania Shillings into 60,000 Burundian Francs. We had looked up the exchange rate online, and this seemed to be a fair exchange rate to us. It wasn’t until later that day, when I tried to change some US cash at a bank that I discovered that Burundi has a vigorous black market for foreign currency, particularly US dollars. The bank manager with whom I spoke told me that he couldn’t in good conscience exchange money for me at the official rate of 2040 BFr to the USD, when the black market rate was between 3300 and 3500. We tried to find a black marketeer in the first couple of towns we passed through after the border (Mabanda and Makamba) but failed miserably. We did manage to exchange some dollars eventually in Bururi, albeit at a very poor rate (2500), with a guy running a mobile phone money office who knew that we were desperate. A few days later in Gitega we got 3300 BFr to the USD, which let us tank up with diesel (some of the cheapest we’ve found in Africa if you use the black market rate, at just over 1 USD per litre). There are no ATMs that work for foreign cards (at least not that we could find), and since they would use the official rate, it wouldn’t be in any tourist’s interest to do that. We saw no evidence of credit cards being accepted anywhere: everything is in cash, or mobile money.

 

Communications

We bought a Burundi SIM card in Mabanda, the first decent-sized town north of the border; we tried at the border itself, but couldn’t find anyone selling them. The cards were inexpensive, and gave us 9 GB of data for about 10,000 BFr, which was a great deal. The cellular data network is extensive and has excellent coverage (since there are people living everywhere!), and when it works it’s really fast, but it was constantly going on and off during our time in the country.

 

Roads

RN 17, a supposed "highway"

There are a lot of newly paved tarmac roads in Burundi, and they are a joy to drive on, very smooth and with essentially no traffic at all. Most of the main roads (the Routes Nationales) are in this category. However we hit two sections of RN that were not just unpaved, they were barely driveable tracks, heavily gullied and really only passable on motorcycles. These stretches (from Makamba to Bururi on RN 17 on our first day in the country, and from Kampezi to near Gitega on RN 16) were truly dreadful, requiring carefully picking our way at 20 km/h in 4WD low-range, trying not to bottom out or damage our vehicle. There was no warning of these terrible stretches, and we couldn’t find any information online about which roads were in this sort of deplorable state. Luckily we were on pavement for most of the rest of our time in the country, but it would have been nice to know ahead of time when we were going to be on these pistes.

 

People and the Economy

Most of Burundi's population gets around on Shank's Pony

Burundi is one of the five poorest countries on earth, according to the World Bank and the UNDP, and it shows. It is visibly much less affluent than any of the other countries we have passed through on this trip. One easy measure of this is the number of motorized vehicles on the roads; there are almost no private cars to be seen in Burundi, and only a small number of motorcycles, most operating as moto-taxis. Most Burundians walk to get from point to point, with a few lucky enough to have a bicycle. We watched prodigious loads of bananas, sugar cane and wood (not to mention human passengers) being pushed uphill by wiry, sweating velo-taxi drivers, while even more people walked, often with big loads balanced on their heads. Some areas of the country, particularly just south of the new capital of Gitega, are even poorer than others, with most children in rags and houses in a dilapidated state.

A young entrepreneur lugging his wares back to his village

This poverty brings about a lot of begging; we saw more begging, and more persistent beggars, here than in any other country that we’ve driven Stanley through. Whenever we stopped by a roadside, children and adults would hustle over to hold out their hands and say some form of “Muzungu, give me money!” It got tiresome, particularly if we stopped in a village and dozens of young men would cluster around the vehicle, staring through the windows so thickly that we couldn’t see out past them. It became psychologically challenging to deal with this, although we had a lot less of this in towns such as Bururi and Gitega, the new national capital.

When we got to talk to Burundians in less trying circumstances, we found them friendly, curious about the outside world and willing to talk about politics and the dreadful political violence that has wracked the country since independence in 1962. Our guides in Bururi Forest and Ruvubu National Park were both intriguing, clever, inquisitive young men who felt trapped in a system that would likely never have any real opportunities for them. We spent an evening dining and drinking beer with some older retired gentlemen in Bururi and really had quite an entertaining and enlightening time. Most people speak French, although a handful also spoke some English. Speaking French definitely made interacting with Burundians a lot easier for us!

 

Accommodation

We stayed indoors most nights in Burundi, partly because it was hard to find places to camp, partly because it was pretty rainy, and partly because indoor accommodation was very reasonably priced. We slept one night in a cheap and not very nice hotel in Bururi (the Hollywood) for 12,000 BFr (about 4USD at the black market rate), and another at a more upmarket hotel in Bururi (the Moonlight) for 30.000 BFr (about 9 USD at the black market rate); this one had the downside of being the local watering hole and possessing a loud stereo which made sleeping a bit of a challenge. In Gitega we stayed at the Tamotel for two nights at 25,000 BFr (about USD 7.50), and it was by far and away the nicest place we stayed: roomy, comfortable and quiet, in lovely grounds full of birds and flowers. Finally we camped in Ruvubu National Park, which cost us about 20,000 BFr (USD 6); facilities were fairly basic and decrepit, but we were told that it was about to undergo a much-needed renovation. The place was perfectly quiet, peaceful and full of the sounds of the African bush, so we were quite happy to stay there.

Camped at Ruvubu National Park

 

Costs

We ended up spending 70,000 Tanzanian shillings (about USD 25), plus USD 130 which we exchanged on the black market, plus USD 40 for chimp tracking. All up, we spent about USD 195 for 5 days and nights in the country, including chimp tracking in Bururi Forest, a night in Ruvubu National Park and four nights in various hotels, plus meals, lots of fruit, beers and a good dollop of diesel for Stanley. It was easily the least expensive country so far on Stanley’s Travels!

 

Attractions

Our lone male chimp, Bururi Forest

For us the highlight was definitely hiking for several hours through the atmospheric Bururi Forest Nature Reserve in search of habituated chimpanzees. Compared to the cost of exactly the same sort of activity in neighbouring Tanzania, Rwanda and Uganda, it costs a pittance: USD 20 per person, less than 10% of what it costs in Gombe Stream in Tanzania or in Kibale Forest in Uganda. We saw three chimps, two of whom ran off almost immediately, but one of whom (a big male) sat and watched us carefully from up a tree for 15 minutes or so. Unfortunately, about five minutes after arriving we were drenched by a tropical downpour that soaked us to the skin, making it a less enjoyable experience than it might have been. Still, the ranger who accompanied us was a fascinating and enlightening character, and the forest itself is fabulous, full of birds, enormous old trees and various species of monkeys (we spotted red-tailed monkeys beside the track). We would highly recommend this to anyone visiting Burundi, especially as it helps support a very minimally funded conservation effort. Bururi Forest is located on the outskirts of Bururi Town, and you certainly don’t have to worry about getting a reservation, as they only seem to have a couple of visitors a week, judging by their visitors’ book.

Terri points towards the Nile and I toward the Congo basin

The very furthest headwaters of the Nile

We also found the Source of the Nile to be well worth a visit. We drove there from Bururi and although it has cheesy elements to it (like a fake Egyptian pyramid built up on the ridge that forms the Nile watershed, and some white ceramic basins that catch the infant Nile waters as they emerge from the soil), it’s actually pretty interesting and moving to realize that here, south of the Equator, you are already feeding the mighty Nile River and that this landscape ultimately drains into the distant Mediterranean. For 10,000 BFr (about USD 3 at the black-market rate) it’s a must-see.

The same can’t be said anymore for the Muhweza hot springs just a few kilometres from the Source of the Nile, which were said once upon a time to be very pretty, but which had all its surrounding forest cut down to make charcoal, leaving the pools exposed, clogged with debris and surrounded by smouldering ruins. It was pretty grim.

We skipped the Karera Waterfalls as the admission price was pretty steep and the pictures looked underwhelming. Another attraction that we skipped was the Drum Museum outside Gitega which looked interesting in videos, but again was quite pricey.

Our final attraction was Ruvubu National Park. It was a pretty non-descript little park, with a few waterbuck and some baboons and monkeys and buffalo, but it was nice to see that the country is trying to rehabilitate a park that was completely devastated during the years of conflict. Plus it was nice to get away from the densely packed population that fills every square kilometre of the country outside the national park.

Baboons, Ruvubu National Park

We never visited the former capital and main city of the country, Bujumbura. Partly this was because of a lack of time, and partly it was because we were loth to lose all the hundreds of vertical metres we had laboriously gained on the way from Kigoma, and partly it was because we had seen plenty of Lake Tanganyika already and were more interested in the highland parts of the country.

For me the biggest attraction in the country was the landscape, the impossibly convoluted contours and mountain ridges of a country that mostly sits at more than 1600 metres above sea level. I found the pattern of farm fields on the steep slopes mesmerizing, and the endless vistas of serried ranks of distant ranges were strikingly beautiful.

Typical Burundian landscape

                          

Annoyances

Aside from the staring and begging, we didn't really encounter much in the way of serious annoyances. We weren't really ripped off very much, and the police (about whom we'd heard mixed reports) never once tried to shake us down for money. We found it an easy-going country that didn't raise our blood pressure very much at all.

Final Verdict

I am very glad that we made it to Burundi. Even if its attractions don’t measure up to those of Uganda or Tanzania, it’s still worth seeing. It can be a bit depressing, as not much seems to work well, and there is no real sense that the country is developing in any meaningful way. The lives of the people we drove past are really, really hard, and the lives of their children and grandchildren will likely continue to be equally difficult. Still, the smiles on people’s faces, the exotic birds and misty mountain slopes, and the feeling of being on the Roof of Africa make it all worthwhile.