This country has some of the most beautiful, wild places on the planet, and it has a horrible history, and it hosts the location of an extremely dangerous event that hasn’t happened yet. Rwanda, central Africa. Pronounced roo-wanda.

The country experienced some horrible genocide back in the mid 90′s, but that’s over now, and the tourist industry is justifiably growing by leaps and bounds. For the adventuresome.

Normal adventurers

This is the place to go to see gorillas, hippos (the largest hippo-oriented national park in the world), volcanoes (see a couple posts back about a trip to a volcano in nearby Congo), jungle, elephants, and more. Not to mention local culture and art.

Typical art, typical smile.

Almost ready to call your Serenity agent, right? Maybe not a bad idea, but there’s this one lake you might want to stay away from. Lake Kivu.

Looks innocent, doesn't it?

This lake is dangerous. Here’s a quote from a limnologist (lake scientist)

Lake Kivu is a meromictic lake with a relatively shallow euphotic layer (~18m) usually smaller than its oxic mixolimnion (20-60 m), and with a weak thermal gradient in the mixolimnion.

There’s more where that came from, but what’s going on is that this lake has a lot of dissolved carbon dioxide and methane in it, and tons and tons of these gasses are trapped down at the bottom of the lake. Something might make all that gas escape, all at once. The valley would fill with unbreathable gas, and everybody would suffocate. Maybe in their sleep. You might have heard of another lake that experienced a limnic eruption, killing a couple thousand people. This lake is 2,000 times larger and the area is more densely populated. ‘Nuff said.

On the optimistic side, scientists are working at extracting the methane peacefully and converting it into electricity. It could supply power to the region for a century. I’d rather have that happen.

Have you ever been to Rwanda? We’d like to hear about it.

Hey, some people watch TV, I read the funnies. (Takes less time to read the funnies, so I have more time to do useful things, like write this blog.)

So anyway, one strip I read is called Rip Haywire (google it). It’s a lighthearted parody of an adventure comic, like Steve Canyon and Buzz Sawyer back when I was a kid. The art is not nearly as good, but then, Rip is not serious, either. A new story arc started on Aug 16, set “somewhere off the coast of Kaua’i Island.”

Kaua’i happens to be a real place, so let’s take a look at it.

Kaua’i is a little more than 500 miles square; it’s pretty much a big, dormant volcano, the northernmost island in Hawaii.  Still tropical, but everybody speaks English and you don’t need a passport. And they do dumb American things, like pie-eating contests. Coconut cream pie, of course. They call it the garden island, and it’s certainly green. Maybe the island is most famous for being the location of another dumb thing, Gilligan’s island—the pilot, anyway.

The cast

More than 70 other movies were shot there, too. Okay, maybe it’s more famous for Pirates of the Caribbean and the Jurassic Park movies. It really is a gorgeous place. And since we raise chickens, I have to mention that the island has lots of wild chickens.

This is about how many adult chicken we have at our place. Ours are pets that give us eggs; these are wild.

It’s easy to get your Serenity agent to fix you up with a nice vacation there. Maybe you’ll see Rip’s flame-throwing squid.

PS. Wouldn’t you know it—a day or so after I wrote this, National Geographic revealed their photo of the month. It’s a wave on the shore of Kawai’i.

click to enlarge

Compared to some of the places I’ve described lately, Tahiti is a “traditional” place to vacation. It comes to mind because Tahiti was one of Ferdinand Magellan’s stops on his around-the-world voyage (two posts back), a description of a several-years-ago vacation by an orthopedic surgeon whose posts I read regularly, and a book I’m reading by a dentist who, back in the 1930′s, traveled the world to study the influence of diet on the condition of primitive peoples’ teeth. One place he visited was Tahiti, and I’m reading that section right now. All these have given me Tahiti on the brain.

Tahiti is out in the middle of the south pacific, part of a chain of islands called the Society Islands, in French Polynesia. Tahiti is the largest island of its group, and consists of two volcanic mountains. It’s shaped like an hourglass. I didn’t happen to find a good picture of the two volcanoes together, but this shot is interesting, don’t you think?

This boat is floating on water, not suspended in the air. Click to enlarge.

So a lot of people who wrote about this island luridly (or lovingly) described the superb physical beauty and friendliness of the “natives,” and the island has capitalized on its reputation, though I can’t say you’ll see a lot of naked girls running around. I can say that they’re friendly, and at least the people who still stick to the traditional diet are beautiful and have good teeth. Go read that book by the dentist.

We can’t all go to all these wonderful exotic locations I describe in this blog, but we can look at them. All day, too, if you slave over a hot keyboard at work. If that’s you, maybe you use the Chrome browser, developed by Google itself. (If you don’t, consider giving it a try. It’s clean and fast.)

So here’s the geek part: Chrome supports themes. Themes are visual “trimmings” that change the appearance around the edges of software like browsers and media players. Like putting a skin on your cell phone–doesn’t change how it works, it just looks different. Maybe I should say cooler. Under certain circumstances you can see a background picture in Chrome, and that’s where a travel-related theme is nice.

Here’s the theme for the island of Samosir, northwest of Indonesia.

https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/lhplnmlhhojlffceihlgmenbjgbchhhm

It’s free (beats even Serenity’s prices), and here’s what you get:

Samosir theme in Chrome

Pretty neat, huh? Poke around and you might find some more exotic locations. If you find one you like, put a link to it in the comments.

P.S. On another slightly geeky note, be sure to check the post two days from now, Aug 11. It’s about a special (non-commercial) event on the 12th.

Yup, a volcano. In the middle of nowhere—well, in the middle of the Republic of Congo. This is a twin peak, so to speak. It’s in the Great Rift Valley, and its name is Nyiragongo. The caldera is full of lava, which makes for quite a view if you can get to it. It’s the only volcano of this type in the world with a lake of such liquid lava. Here’s what the tourism website says (edited to correct the English. It was written by someone whose first language is French).

The Nyiragongo and Nyamuragira volcanoes offer spectacular, though difficult, hiking. Red lava flows can be seen on both volcanoes inside their craters, and the crater at Nyiragongo is still smoking up to now. Nyiragongo volcano is located at about  15 km from Goma town, and 18 kms from Gisenyi Rwanda. The  good way to see red lava is to visit this mountain at night. You will need to sleep at the top of the mountain with rangers in tents. The national park fee for nyiragongo volcano is $100.

So what do you get for all this hiking? This.

To be fair, this scene was during a recent eruption. Lava covered part of the runway. Most of the time You “just” have a lake of lava.

Lake of lava

At least “Nyiragongo” has a nice ring to it when you say it out loud. See you on the rim!