Rwanda is incredibly green. It's known as the Land of a Thousand Hills and the terraced fields all around are translucently verdant.

More than 10 years on from the genocide that ended nearly a million Tutsi lives, it's a dislocating experience visiting here - a bit like the last moments of a dream before waking, when you know it's a dream but aren't fully conscious.

Everywhere are signs of busy life: commerce in the capital, Kigali, is booming (partly thanks to massive international aid - white NGO trucks seem to be everywhere), and as the rainy season winds down, crops are maturing. Life seems good and the people happy.

But visit one of the genocide memorials scattered all over the country and it's like drifting into a nightmare. In Gikongoro, we flew down a hill on the back of taxi bicycles with no brakes, absolutely terrified of an horrific accident until we skidded to a halt in a cloud of red dust in front of the community college buildings. Immediately a crowd of small children raced up to us dancing and pointing - wildly excited to see strange white visitors. As they bopped around near us, a caretaker led us into a succession of classrooms where local students had prepared for a future they would never see. The Hutu Interahamwe death squads entered the college which was sheltering Tutsis and indiscriminately massacred men, women and children. We were faced by room after room packed with lime-preserved corpses of the murdered - up to 50,000 victims hacked to death by machetes and clubs. After each gruesome revelation we emerged blinking into the sun to the cheering, dancing and waving of children before entering the next horrific monument to man's capacity for wicked cruelty.

The surreal atmosphere and sheer recent proximity of these terrible events - seemingly medieval in their barbarity - cast a pall over the remainder of our visit to this beautiful, damaged country.

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