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Comment by grecy | Hacker News Reader

I was in Rwanda this time last year. After visiting ~30 African countries by that point I can say that it's an extremely refreshing change.

There is a bustling tech sector in Kigali - they're making iPhone apps, designing and building hardware, etc. etc. There is a huge community of entrepreneurial younger people. People are extremely well educated, friendly and kind. I never saw a single piece of trash in the entire country.

I felt as safe riding moto taxis around in the dark in Kigali as I do in any Canadian city.

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FYI for those unaware, grecy is the guy who recently completed a >50000 mile Africa expedition[1]. This guy knows Africa. It's nice to hear that Rwanda is doing well.

[1] http://theroadchoseme.com

Wow. The coastline of Africa is 18,950 miles (30,500 km), so That’s like looping around the content nearly 3 times.

Here’s what I found on that site:

> I’m doing an “Ask Me Anything” on Reddit right now. Come on over to Reddit.com and ask me any question you have about my three year, 54,000 mile and 35 country expedition around Africa.

It’s all on the table – safety, money, health, budget, visas, route, people, animals, the Jeep.

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/brhbst/i_drove_my_jee...

Feel free to ask me any question you don't see answered there.

And Yes, I did some zig-zagging! - https://www.instagram.com/p/Bw4h0X_Fq_G/

Or he just looped around the coastline once at a tighter resolution than your source of 30,500 km

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coastline_paradox

(Also thanks for the AMA link)

The coastline paradox is cute, but any route using coastal roads will be shorter than any reasonable coastline estimate, for obvious reasons.

Plus the "resolution" of the coast is limited by the size of humans.

The coastline paradox is much more of a measurement problem then a physical one.

> This guy knows Africa.

I know it's likely hyperbole, but...JFC. Would you say an East-coaster who hikes part of the Appalachian trail knows Appalachia? At best, their knowledge is surface-level.

If he travelled that much, then yeah. It’s just a phrase.

That seems like way too high of a bar for the word knows. Someone who plays the guitar for 3 years certainly knows the guitar, even if they're not great at it. Who would you say knows Africa? Someone who lives all their life in Kongo? They might know Kongo, but probably know less about the varied experiences of Africa as a continent than someone who spends 3 years traveling around the whole of Africa.

Oh cool, I bought a Wrangler a few years ago and found his instagram when I was browsing around, love his stuff!

I found his blog on another HN thread a few months blog and binged through it for weeks.

I highly, highly recommend going through all the posts. I had no idea some of these countries and landscapes even existed.

Rwanda is known to be up-and-coming and is doing better at solving their problems than South Africa. At least, their derivative at this point in time looks much better.

Cape Town already has a good tech scene and is a great place to move to for programmers, but I would like to see sustained tech progress in SA's other big cities and then places like Rwanda or the eastern African countries.

>Rwanda is known to be up-and-coming and is doing better at solving their problems than South Africa

I mean, South Africa certainly has its problems, that's for sure. But I mean, Rwanda? With its disappeared opposition, assassinated dissidents, and child soldiers securing Tantalum deposits in Congo?

I don't know man? South Africa certainly has its problems, but even under Apartheid, you didn't see them sending child soldiers into neighboring countries. (Not that sending adult soldiers to secure diamond mines is that much better than sending child soldiers to secure tantalum deposits I suppose? But it just seems not as bad to me.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Rwanda

Also how most people are so scared shitless of anything like the genocide happening again (beyond understandable obviously) and thankful to Kagame it hasn't, they don't really seem to mind too much about the terrible shit he pulls, because it so clearly pales compared to "the alternative", however false a dichotomy that might be.

It's done them well, but at some point the mindset will have to change.

>It's done them well

Just hasn't done much for the thousands slaughtered in Congo.

Guy's a murderous turd and the worst kind of genocidal thieving resource warlord. Represents everything Ghana, Senegal, South Africa etc are trying to relegate to history books in Africa. Sooner he's gone, the better for Africa. People won't look at Africa as being quite so barbaric when a certain set of leaders finally die off. Kagame is definitely chief among them.

So, hopefully a country is more than their president?

Those thousands slaughtered in the Congo murdered close just under a million before they fled across the border, so perhaps it isn't so cut and dry.

Yes, so I agree with you on the human right topic but I think for the Rwanda argument to make sense you should restrict to the last five years or so. I feel pretty wary of Kigama, but maybe they will have a smooth transition to the next guy? Of course, in five years from now it is possible that SA again looks better in their rate of immediate progress than Rwanda.

Question, from a network engineering perspective, what does the ISP scene in Rwanda look like? Who are the ten largest ASes, what exists for an IX point, and where are the bottlenecks for international transit connectivity?

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