Category: ML Personally
The quarterly newsletter (contact us to subscribe) and other personal thoughts by ML Rwebandira, formerly known as Miha Logar. An adventure/cultural tourism expert and a multimedia producer, ML co-founded Gorilla Highlands Experts and now resides in the unofficial capital of the region, Rwanda’s Musanze. Formal education: MA in Development Studies (Uganda Martryrs University) and BA in Journalism (University of Ljubljana).
Our Stories:
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Teddy Bear
“Too good to be true,” recently said Barrett Nash when we discussed a fascinating woman. He meant it literally; he had been shaken up by the realities of life one too many times. Paradoxically, Nash* is the very definition of too good to be true in its more common, less fatalist version. It is hard to…
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Vegetarian Bonanza
I know people who love keeping secrets. It gives them a feeling of security or, in some other cases, perhaps some perverted sense of power. “I know what you don’t know. He he he,” their smirks seem to communicate. As another writer on the Gorilla Highlands blog once humorously revealed, local African cultures value tight-lipped…
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Kigali Crying
Yesterday’s Silverchef announcement reminded me of where I was with my life six months ago and where I do not want to be again. This morning I registered a company called MYL with my partner Isabelle, in Kigali, a picturesque city of blue, black and red roofs sprayed over green rolling hills. There are currently…
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Bullshit Meter
I often get stuck in my crammed little room. It has a bed as big as a football pitch (a headmaster once said), shelves with files and my multi-colour Getting Things Done folders, a wardrobe and a huge table; if your father is an architect you learn to demand one. The walls are brown, waiting…
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Funny Philosopher
My day with Dutch entrepreneurs inevitably took me down memory lane… To the beginning of 2007. I had just spent all my money and sold all my stocks to make The Home of Edirisa in Kabale Town as impressive as possible. Our volunteer Samo Ačko had been doing crazy things, including calling his father to…
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Total Surprise
Something extraordinary happened to me last week, quite possibly due to this personal blog I began to write, exposing myself in the process. I went to Rwanda to collect a bunch of Dutch business people, 7 entrepreneurs successful enough to be members of EO, a global peer-to-peer network that connects owners and founders of companies grossing…
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Two Africas
Forgive me a litte detour… It would be worth mentioning the reason I missed the meeting in Rushaga: Uganda had sent me to Slovenia, my country of birth, to promote tourism in the Pearl of Africa. How it got to that was fascinating… In another life I ran a multimedia studio on the equator, near…
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Our Problem
In the beginning of October a group of tourism people met in Rushaga Gorilla Camp on the edge of Bwindi, the rugged rainforest that hides mountain gorillas. They discussed how to promote tourism in Kigezi, the Ugandan side of the Gorilla Highlands region. I couldn’t attend but the hotel manager was present and shared the meeting…
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Their Noise
I don’t walk much. That might be odd for somebody whose daily bread are hiking expeditions, however, there is always a passenger motorcycle somewhere around. There are tens of thousands, some claim hundreds of thousands, of them in Rwanda and Uganda. They are a dangerous yet strikingly efficient way to travel, and a handy way…