TWENTY km into Zaire, scavengers picked through the remains of massive refugee camps, taking away pieces of wood, beaten up pots and pans and plastic sheeting.
For the more discerning looter, however, there is the opportunity to pick through the debris of one of the most reviled political regimes of recent history - the perpetrators of the 1994 genocide of up to a million Tutsis and moderate Hutus.
As the refugees began flooding into Rwanda from Mugunga camp in Zaire last Friday, the armed Hutus went the other way to live to fight another day. They left behind documents, uniforms and bits and pieces of military equipment in three broken down buses and all over the road around them.
Armed rebel soldiers arrived yesterday to deter journalistic looters. The media has already had a field day with a document implying that a British company, Mil Tec Corporation has supplied arms to the former Rwandan regime after the genocide began, and after the UN arms embargo was imposed. For the rebels and the present Rwandan government, which is assumed to sponsor them, the intelligence information strewn over the roads may be too valuable to leave to scavenging reporters.
There was a Russian grenade, a piece of electrical military equipment with Israeli writing on it, bullets and military boots. And there is the name Mil Tec of Great Britain inscribed on another item.
An instruction manual for the use of a Panhard armoured car lies near a letter from Rwanda's pre 1994 minister for defence to the commander of the former peacekeeping force UNAMIR. The Minister argued over how many UN troops should be deployed at Kigale Airport, the telecommunications building and the radio station.
A bunch of photographs strewn on the roadside include a photo of two bodies, hacked to death, among routine family snaps. A memento from 1994 perhaps?
More mundane items include a list of names and addresses of army recruits, correspondence about a bill incurred by an officers mess and police petty crime reports.
Outside the bus one of the soldiers took a particularly interesting looking document from me, together with my notebook, and threw them into the bus. Polite requests for the return of the notebook were ignored. The document appeared to be an account of militia infiltrations into Rwanda over the past two years.
To get to this unlikely mine of information, you drive past banana plantations stripped bare by the flood of refugees, through rebel checkpoints made up of a few upturned beer crates in the middle of the road until you get to Mugunga camp.
It is empty of people now, a ghostly landscape of mud covered with plastic and the wooden skeletons of huts as far as the eye can see. Once home to 400,000 people, it is now a panorama of environmental devastation stretching as far as the eye can see.
We drove further west to Sake, which last week was the front line between the rebels and the retreating forces but is now under rebel control. On the way back, we passed two bodies by the side of the road of men whose throats had recently been cut.
Justin (26) and Emmanuel (27), two rebel soldiers, flagged down our car less than a kilometre further on and asked for a lift. Our driver said afterwards he believed they were from Rwanda. He explained to them about my notebook and they told us to stop beside the bus and allowed me to retrieve it.
Justin said he didn't know who had killed the two men. He said that his force would not stop until it had overthrown the Zairean government and asked that I convey his salutations to the rebels of Ireland.