A country on the road for the Tour du Rwanda, a week that alternates between excitement and an atmosphere absolutely worthy of a major European stage race. One might say that the World Championships had as an essential premise this event that reached its eighteenth edition in 2026, benefiting at the same time from the prestige of the rainbow jersey.

True, but in mixing memories and images together emerges an equatorial blur where you find, in no particular order, lush green tea plantations and reddish canyons through which the race asphalt flows, and then, since we're in Geo&Geo mode, even the monkeys of Nyunwe National Park, a UNESCO biodiversity heritage site.

At the Tour du Rwanda it happens that school autonomy generates vivid colors with the jerseys of this or that institution, but there are also spectators perched in the third row on the balconies of buildings in Musanze. The speaker presenting the teams doesn't hold back on emphasis, fair enough, even though you don't need to go to the Equator to find above all an attention to the race that goes beyond knowledge of the start list.

A popular happening that becomes youth entertainment on an evening of Afro music along Lake Kivu, at Amstel. And, to stay true to form, among the sponsors we find the insurance company and the telephone company, natural water from the Bank and even those mattress makers from Rwanda Foam, somewhat akin to Eminflex. Leaving the Kigali Convention Center, a crossroads of major cycling and venue of the final stage, the futuristic dome just steps away from the lounge bars is the most evident counterpoint to the natural and rural contexts traversed. Here in the Land of a Thousand Hills where the bicycle has been granted honorary citizenship. To be continued…