🇧🇮 3/2025 Burundi Travel

Day 162, 10.03.2025. — Did you know anything about Burundi? 🇧🇮

It’s cool and rainy. 🌧️ Perfect weather for a good nap, but we need to hurry to the border! 🏃 It’s 7 km away, so we get a motorbike rider who can skillfully fit both of us and our bags on board. 🏍️ We ride through the hills, mist settling in the valley. What a beautiful place! 👀

And then — the border. One of the world’s poorest countries. You already know what comes next. So do we. 🙄

First up is the temperature check, with a massive crowd already queuing before 8 AM. We walk past them, show our yellow fever certificates, get a thermometer pressed against our foreheads, and hear the inevitable: “Would you like to pay us 1.5 euros each?” 🤑 It’s the kind of sentence that’s hard to hear and even harder to answer calmly. A simple “I hate all your corruption” is enough, and we’re waved through. 😅

Past the line of trucks, vendors, and money changers. We’ve read that the US dollar is so valuable here that we can live like kings. Imagine — if the official rate is 1 USD to 3,000 Burundian francs, the black market offers up to 8,000! We negotiate from 3 to 7. 💰 Unreal! Here, withdrawing money from an ATM is pointless — you have to exchange cash! 💱 We don’t have much USD, but even with just a hundred, we’re expecting a pretty good deal.