I’ve done more than my fair share of travelling—and travel flinging, but this jaunt around three small East African nations almost put an end to my singledom. It starts in Kigali, Rwanda’s clean, organized, and overall pleasant capital. My couch-surfing host, solemn and ambitious Naser, doesn’t live in a mud hut like some of my other African friends, but in a spacious, modern apartment with actual bed linen. It’s practically another planet when compared to most of Africa.

The reason Rwandans are different from their carefree neighbors is apparent: the recent horrors of the Genocide have taught them that life is not about fun. The bus stations all over Africa are populated by hawkers, but here they’re rife with people crippled in the conflict.

The thought of their countrymen having hacked their limbs off—while the rest of the world sat and watched—is wildly disturbing. Rwandans have suffered so much that now, united, they work twenty-four seven on building a better future. They are far more interested in reducing poverty and resolving environmental and health issues than partaking in continent-wide competitions for most stunning hairstyles, longest fingernails, and tightest pants. Here, the dress is simple and unpretentious, and the dominant hairstyle is short for men and women alike.

Mugisha, a waiter I met in Kigali, considers himself lucky to be working fourteen-hour days for fifteen dollars a month. The young man used his last pennies to study and spent months looking for work. He lost his twenty-year-old girlfriend in the Genocide, but he doesn’t seem resentful or embittered. In fact, his patriotic optimism is a life-affirming phenomenon.

I find a very different Africa in Bujumbura, the capital of neighboring Burundi. My host, Nestor, rents a room in a spacious compound with a communal pit in the middle, serving as both toilet and shower. Every porch in the courtyard is taken up by a grasshopper-frying mamma. It looks like a blissful occupation. Nestor is the odd one out here, like a dragonfly in a beehive.

We cross the hectic city to the compound where Nestor’s cousin lives. A younger and busier place; here adolescent mothers crouch next to their gas burners plucking chickens and stirring pots, babies tied to their backs and toddlers hanging off their necks. Groups of men are solving the world’s problems over multiple beers. So much mystery and intrigue swirl around me that I feel as if I’ve just wandered into some other world. Nestor’s cousin is making dinner, and I’m watching life as it happens. It was worth it coming to Burundi just for this.

It takes two days, innumerable modes of transport, and all the slow patience I can muster to track the short distance back north across Rwanda. At some point, I count eleven of us in a small rust bucket of a car, someone’s baby nestled on my lap, the mum holding two other kids. My destination is Lake Bunyonyi, just across the Ugandan border.

“Where are you heading, girl?” A car pulls up as I’m brushing the road dust off my backpack on a street corner in Kabale, a high-altitude town close to the lake.

“Lake Bunyonyi?” I check out the three friendly, smiling faces.

“Come we give ya a lift! We’re just heading that way ourselves.” The three engineers are charged with inspecting something or someone at Bunyonyi.

For the next two hours, we zip around this nondescript town, buying item upon item, making photocopies, picking things up and dropping them off. The triumvirate chatting in Swahili with the vivacity of Jane Austen’s Bennet sisters. I could have made it to the lake ten times over, but I’m letting the currents take me. One of my goals for this trip is to be flexible. Leaving Kabale at last, we don’t go to the lake yet, but to a nearby hill—to show me the view. Just as well, this is the first and the last I see of the beauty of this body of water with its terraced shores and many islands. It’s almost dark when we board a boat and set sail past the tiny Punishment Island where, until the early last century, pregnant unmarried women were left to die unless they got picked up by men who didn’t have enough cows for “proper” wives. Our destination is Bwama Island, the site of a former leper colony converted into a medical facility. My new friends say we’ll be here for about ten minutes, but I already know the drill.

I spent the next couple of hours with four volunteer doctors from Slovenia. The work they’ve done in the last few months is phenomenal: previously, the hospital had neither furniture nor medication, but now people from around the lake come here for help. One of the doctors’ comments on a fundamental physical quality that differentiates us from the locals: “Compared to Africans, we’re made out of a handkerchief.” In my case, a paper one. “What do you guys do for entertainment?” is my last question for the doctors sitting on the hospital porch as I pull off into the watery darkness with the engineering trio.

“We sit here and brush our teeth...for a very, very long time,” echoes across the lake. The next morning, a bus designed to carry sixty-seven passengers packs in double that in warm bodies; the residual space is filled with bananas, pots, and sponges. When it hits the dusty road to Uganda’s capital, Kampala, the vehicle goes into resonance and keeps bouncing even when the road smooths out; watching out for my backpack in case it goes flying off the roof is a full-time job. When we cross the equator line, I have a brief hallucination that we have arrived, but no, the engine is kaput and now the passengers with their pots and chickens are on the roadside, mere kilometers from the city. I grab my bag and walk into Kampala.

Kampala! Smog, crush, and organized chaos. I park my bones at a sensational backpacker’s. Never the one to take cold beers or hot showers for granted, I scrub myself clean and hit the city’s famous nightlife with some new friends I’ve made at the hostel. On a Tuesday night, this city rocks with live music, beautiful crowds, and dancing until dawn. But the highlight of my evening is Adroa, a friend of the hostel receptionist, all cute dreads and grooves as smooth as his chiseled face.

Here I have to make a sidenote. I know at least half the reason why, in my younger days, I often found myself decidedly lacking a boyfriend. Becoming romantically involved with me was only for the brave. From anyone who dared to try, I expected the intellect of Isaac Newton, the nobility of D’Artagnan, and the kindness of Mahatma Gandhi. I was quick to pigeonhole prospective partners as either gadget-intensive, workaholic, or playboy types. If I felt my interest dwindling on a date, I’d been known to say things like: “I like my conversations a bit more sophisticated than that. Do you think you can manage?”

The subjects of my experiments ran without looking back. Still, I dated profusely—usually once per candidate—the thrill of hope coupled with natural curiosity and tinged by a little dread that my collection of disappointments would grow. And boy, did it ever.

I did not apply my usual tests and trials to men I happened to meet on my travels. From the outset, I assumed tormented lives were archived behind serene and tranquil faces—lives they’d hint at in limited conversations, leaving it to my imagination to make up backstories worthy of bravery awards and bestseller biographies. The same language barriers gave me only the vaguest measure of the depth of their intellect, but I always assumed they were smarter than they let on. If ever they did anything objectionable, I wrote it off to cultural differences. Contemporary dance served as our main communication medium...It was escapist and easy to fall for unlikely characters from faraway lands. The trouble was, I often made the mistake of taking these flings seriously.

What happened in Kampala is lost in the annals of history. All I know is that I didn’t visit half the places in Uganda I was planning to. I wish I had the presence of mind to see my dark prince for who he was, but my direct and peripheral vision were taken up by his many charms. One thing I did know was that he wasn’t using me to get out of the country. My boy was a big boss of his own company and traveled freely to Europe and back. It took all my strength to catch my flight back home, with a promise to return as soon as possible.

***

When I come back to Uganda some six months later, on the very first evening Adroa offers me a ring. Whatever semi-manic trance I’m in at the time elicits a yes, and I was brought up to believe that when I promise something, I have to deliver. The wedding is set for two weeks later.

The circumstances keep spinning. What stands between me and a decisive plunge into the crazy is New Year’s Eve in party-heavy Kampala. In a mega-club with seven dance floors and thousands of revelers, the delusion that Adroa and I are a perfect couple is instantly shattered. While I am being stomped on and branded with cigarette burns in the neck-to-neck crush of the club, my freshly baked fiancé drifts through the room as if he owns it, scattering his charms with expert ease. He clasps every dark beauty by the waist to toast the New Year, his glass forever raised, his smile shared with all and sundry. Adroa likes people and Scotch, but more than either, he likes the steady tribute paid to his smashing good looks and his refrigerated poise. Meanwhile, I am left to fend off stray elbows and ash, simmering in the realization that the accidental nature of him being my future husband is not some private doubt but a spectacle, laid bare for all to see.

My beau is sleeping off his hangover while I’m packing my bags the next morning. Before he gets a chance to flash me his signature smile and make it impossible to be mad at him, I leave the ring on the bedside table and slip back into freedom. Lions scratch and hippos stomp around my chest cavity, but once I’m sitting on the plane, it becomes just another escape, another adventure. Another rake I stepped on in the hope of avoiding a similar rake in the future. I’m not terribly upset, but somewhere between the Equator and my front door, I begin to suspect I will always stay single.