The Rwandan rugby team arrived in Hong Kong and had never seen anything like it before - from the towering skyscrapers to the moving escalators. Then they met the Aliens.
Hong Kong is a whole new world for the wide-eyed men from the Central African country who will play in tomorrow's Kowloon RugbyFest at King's Park, and witness their first Hong Kong Sevens.
And the first team they got to practise with were the New Zealand Aliens, the defending champions at the GFI HKFC Tens, which also gets under way tomorrow.
'We have never seen so many buildings like this before, and very tall ones, too,' said an amazed Adams Mugabo, the team's inside centre. 'The tallest building in our country is only 14 floors. Here everything dwarfs that.'
It is an alien world that Mugabo and 12 teammates have come to, thanks to the generosity of the Hong Kong rugby community and a few corporates who have got behind an initiative of Dave Hughes to bring Rwanda on the groundbreaking trip.
The journey of discovery began in Kigali last Saturday when the squad left on a 27-hour passage to Hong Kong. All but two of the team had never been on a plane before. Most had never seen the sea.
