Gitega month by month — at a glance
Hover each month for the summary. Click to pin it.
01 Thirteen-tenths of a degree
Key moments at a glance
10.4 mm and 0.6 rain days in the month. Effectively guaranteed.
A mean high of 28.1 °C and only 2.4 rain days. And it is still August.
96.7 mm but only 7.4 days: it rains hard and briefly, then clears.
17.3 rain days on red-earth tracks. Getting around becomes hard.
The explanation fits in two figures. Gitega lies three and a half degrees south of the equator, where the sun's angle hardly varies, and 1,504 metres up, which takes some nine or ten degrees off tropical heat compared with sea level. The combination produces a climate of almost anomalous thermal stability.
Even the historic extremes are moderate: the heat record is 35.4 degrees and the cold record 11.3. Twenty-four degrees between the two furthest-apart values recorded in decades. In many cities that spread happens within a single week.
02 The only thing that changes is water
With the temperature still, the rain writes the whole year's calendar. Some 1,258.8 millimetres fall over 110.1 days, and the distribution is anything but even: November takes 192.1 millimetres over 17.3 rain days, and July 10.4 over six-tenths of a day.
Eighteen times more water in November than in July, at the same temperature and the same altitude. It is the same place behaving in two different ways.
And there is a nuance the tables hide. January and February each record nearly 100 millimetres, but over only 7.3 and 7.4 rain days; March and April record a little over 142, but spread across 12.5 and 15.5 days. The quantity is similar; the experience is not. What ruins a trip is not the millimetres: it is the days.
03 June, July, August
The dry season does not arrive gradually: it arrives all at once. May has 11.1 rain days and June has 1.8. In one month you go from rain every other day to rain every three weeks, and that regime holds through June, July and August.
Those are the three months to come, and the best of the three is July, with 10.4 millimetres and six-tenths of a rain day in the whole month. August has an added and slightly paradoxical advantage: it holds the year's highest mean high, 28.1 degrees, in a place where that is still a pleasant temperature.
04 What the rains give you
It is worth saying what you give up by choosing the dry season, because it is real. With 1,258.8 millimetres a year this country is green by definition, but November's green and July's green are not the same green. In the rains the hills close over with vegetation, the watercourses run full and the waterfalls in the south-east carry real water.
The problem is not the rain itself: it is the surface. A good share of the tracks leaving the national roads are red earth, and with seventeen rain days a month they become impassable. If you come in November or December, plan around the tarmac and do not count on improvising detours.
In one sentence: come in July if you want to move, and in February if you want it green without giving up movement entirely — 96.7 millimetres, but only 7.4 rain days. And rule out November, December and April, the three months in which the ground decides for you.
