bikes

to go the the countryside, you take a road which goes from bujumbura, 600 meters above the sea, to a pass which is 1600 meters above the see, in 40 kilometers. it means it's really steep.
the most bizarre thing you see along the raod is the big amount ob bikes going up and down. taxi-bikes (it's plenty of them now, before the crisis of 1993 they didn't exist) or trade-bikes carrying bananas, pieces of trees or bags of agricoltural products (many of them, you wonder how they can fix all without making it fall down) to bujumbura markets. to go up, they usually push the bikes for all the 40 km, even if someone catches the back of a truck to be carried (trucks which can goes up to 60 km per hour in some points). to go down, they simply let the bike go, and so you see those bikes full of bags reaching 70 km per hour doing all the curves like formula 1 cars and overcoming trucks. in fact, accidents are quite commons.