experience
Passing Time What you find at Kwitonda, more than anything, is unstructured time. There are no game drives here, and nothing needs to be arranged in advance. If you want to go for a walk between the lodge and the volcanoes or eat something hearty and nourishing, you can. Once a week, maybe twice, the lodge hosts a traditional night, which starts with the team dancing, drumming, and singing (on a quiet, misty day, you might hear the sound of them practicing reverberating across the property) and ends with meals like Nyama Choma, a local goat curry, brochettes (skewers) of meat, and Isombe, a flavourful stew of mashed cassava leaves, simmered with ground peanuts or palm oil. Sommeliers are always on hand to complement meals with well-chosen wines. You can visit the Akarabo Nursery, where much of the produce used in the lodge is grown. Akarabo means ‘little flower’. When Singita arrived, the area it spans now was farmland, overgrown with invasive eucalyptus. Hundreds of thousands of endemic trees have been planted since to rewild the landscape. With this, an abundance of wildlife has returned to the property. You can plant a tree at the Nursery or enjoy meals in the gardens, surrounded by birds and verdant vegetation. You can take a pottery
class, paint, commission works by a local tailor, weaver, or carver, and purchase trinkets by local artisans in the on-site shop. “Being surrounded by beauty like this makes you curious,” says Donatha Kabaganwa, the Nursery’s Supervisor. And you can certainly fill that curiosity at Kwitonda. You can soak up views of the Virungas from your heated plunge pool or the sprawling outdoor couch; enjoy wellness treatments in your room; or read or watch buffaloes and antelope roam, and birds flitting from a cosy corner nook framed by windows. If you’re lucky, you might see forest elephants coming down from the volcanoes. Martin Tuyisenge, Singita’s community liaison officer, can drive you to the Singita Community Culinary School in Musanze — filling the journey with stories of Singita’s conservation and community projects and partnerships in the region. Here, you can meet the students and sample some of their work, or take part in cooking classes, learning traditional recipes. You can visit local communities and ride bikes around the property and into town, all at your own pace. Without anything strictly to do, days feel longer, and you never feel rushed.
Left The beauty of unstructured time is that it starts with presence and ends up somewhere you didn’t expect.
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