Life in Congo, Part whatever....Vacation

I just found this incomplete version of a Life in Congo post, so I
thought I'd send it along. Its not grossly incomplete, but I thought
some folks might want to revisit life in the third World. Enjoy...

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(November 2003)
I've just returned from a 4-day vacation in the Republic of Congo,
which is not to be confused with the more southerly Democratic Republic
of Congo, where I live. It was adventurous and wonderful, even by
first-world standards, but recent news of the ferry disaster NE of
Kinshasa on Mai-Ndombe lake, drowning over 160, the freight train wreck
on the Kinshasa-Matadi line which killed everyone on board, and the
crash of the Antonov-26 in Boende, killing 22 (all within three days)
more gives a sobering insight to what can happen when you travel in the
heart of third-world Africa. I'm happy to say in my own journey there
were no dangerous incidents or near-misses, although the potential
always exists when you take off on a trek with a backpack and your
wits, in a region known for its ruthlessness, its lack of organization,
incomplete information and disregard for safety.

The trip had an auspicious beginning. Lauren and I woke up Thursday
morning an hour before we were to leave and realized that we had not
made the most basic arrangement for our trip: how to get from our
compound to the ferry terminal in Kinshasa. The travel agencies here
make a lucrative income shuttling their clients to the airport and
walking them through the check-in process for about $50 a person. Not
because it's necessary, but because they can. And because there is no
public transport infrastructure, the airport procedures are
poorly-defined and rife with corruption, and the people are willing to
be pampered and taken care of for a price. On this trip, however, we
had decided to travel without assistance and rely as little as possible
on the catering and pampering services given to the mun'dalis, but
instead to find our own way and experience travel 'African style' as
much as possible. We had only a day-pack and our visas. Travel light,
travel flexibly, figure it out as we go. And first of all, we needed to
figure out how to get to the ferry crossing.

We called and arranged to have our boss drive us to the terminal. He
had made the journey to Brazzaville two years ago, and enjoyed telling
us on the drive in how impossible it was to do, how inconvenient and
unmanageable the bureaucracy was, and how the costs were astronomical
to take the high-speed boat across. We were trying to block out his
warnings when we arrived at 'the Beach', which is the Congolese ferry
port in downtown Kinshasa. The Beach is located in the heart of the
defunct and rotted out commercial port, with thousands of half-sunken
hulks of large cargo vessels choking the
shoreline, and rusted cranes hanging overhead like bare, dead trees,
ready to drop broken branches on the heads of the inattentive. The
guard acknowledged our pseudo-diplomatic 'IT' license plates and waved
us through the first barrier, and the next guard followed suit and
waved us through the next razor-wire topped fence. We knew we had
already compromised our
native-travel ideology, but we also knew enough to take advantage of
small favors when they present themselves. Some amount of preferential
treatment is unavoidable. And desirable.

Our boss pulled up into the parking lot, we got out with our bags, and
with a wave and a malicious grin he drove off. For a moment, we stood
absorbing the surroundings. The terminal building was a large,
unpainted cinderblock structure with a cratered parking lot, surrounded
by two 10-foot steel fences topped with razor wire. There were guards
along the critical points in the fence, and the parking lot was crammed
with hundreds of Congolese milling about like ants. Money-changers were
making their deals, young men with huge loads on their heads were
sweating in the 100-degree heat, shouting and jostling for position in
the lines for boarding the ferry, colorful women were strolling around
like fashion models, followed by men carrying their bags or cases.
Goats and chicken heads were peeking out of burlap bags, kids peered
out from behind colorful skirts, and rolls of car tires were stacked
behind a huge truck, being ferried to the terminal building by sweating
porters. As we were looking at the melee, we were suddenly swamped by
'facilitateurs' who wanted to make our travel arrangements for us, for
a price. We had been warned that, as whites, it was almost impossible
to make your own ferry arrangements (it would be perceived like a
person going into the kitchen of a restaurant and asking to make their
own food), so we found a facilitateur whose name had been given to us,
handed him our passports and $20 each, and with a quick instruction
that we wanted seats on the safer "VIP Express ferry", he ushered us
into a small room to wait and see what would happen, and rushed off. It
was nervy, watching someone you don't even know walking off with your
passport, but eventually he returned with 4 small tickets for the
'Canot Rapide' ferry. We asked why he had not given us tickets on the
VIP, and he explained that the Canot Rapide made more crossings and was
leaving sooner, for the same price. We had some notes from a friend who
had made the crossing before, and in the bottom of his notes, he
mentioned "If you take the Canot Rapide, the facilitateur will try to
get you to 'buy the boat'. Don't do it", so it was no surprise when the
facilitateur explained to us that the ferry would only go when it had
ten passengers, and as there were currently only nine, would we be
willing to pitch in and pay for the empty seat so that we could go
sooner? We declined, and our facilitateur shrugged and went on his way,
leaving us sitting without our passports to sweat for another half
hour. Another facilitateur instantly materialized, shouting that we
should have taken the VIP ferry, how it was a better boat, and how it
would be there
soon instead of the open-ended Canot Rapide, and how it was not too
late to change our tickets. We sensed cut-throat Congolese
commercialism in action, and sat tight, despite his fanatic and frantic
efforts to get us to change our tickets.

Eventually, our facilitateur returned, beaming, and said he had found
another passenger so we could go now. We asked about our passports, but
he ignored us and dove into the crowd. We followed him to the dock,
shouldering aside pushy moneychangers and other passengers, and made
our way to the gangplank where a soldier and a policeman had a
checklist of names and a fistful of passports, our own on top. We
sensed a bribe coming. He looked in our faces, looked at the manifest,
looked in our faces again, and asked who we worked for. I showed him my
fake embassy ID and said 'L'Embassie d'Amerique", and he handed back
our passports and waved us through. We walked down to the end of the
dock, wondering where the ferry was. Then we saw it: it was a watrous
version of a Congolese taxi (which is inevitably a 1972 Volkswagen bus
with a bailing-wire engine, and a seating capacity of about 35 people).
This was an old six passenger waterskiing speedboat, held together with
duct-tape and fiberglass, with a young wild-eyed Congolese man at the
wheel
and an old, dilapidated 50 HP Mercury outboard on the stern, tied on
with odd lengths of rope, belching blue and black smoke. There were
already 8 people in it, sitting two to a seat, and the four of us were
handed life jackets and crammed in also. Every inch of interior space
had someone sitting in it, and the boat looked like it could barely
float, let alone navigate the currents and debris of the 2-mile
crossing to Brazzaville. Off to the right, the 'VIP express' ferry was
pulling into port: a 40-foot long, two-level yacht with covered deck
seating and comfortable chairs. As we looked wistfully at the other
boat, we were pushed off, the Merc roared to life, and the hopelessly
overloaded Canot Rapid rocketed away from shore. My secret hope, as I
clutched the cheap lifejacket I was given, was when it sank, it would
be close enough to the DRC shore so I could make it back safely before
getting swept into the rapids below.

To my surprise, the engine turned out to be more of a homemade hotrod
than a duct-tape clunker, and the boat skimmed easily over the surface.
The driver deftly dodged the massive reed mats that drifted down from
the jungle upstream, and used the tricky river currents to guide us
towards the Brazzaville shore. After a short 7-minute ride (they don't
call it the Canot Rapide for nothing), we pulled up against the dock
and the boat was tied up fore and aft. I was just starting to stand up,
sighing and commenting to my partners about what a sturdy little craft
this was when the handrail came off in my hand. With a sharp glance at
the sheepish captain, I disembarked.

We were immediately met by a policeman with a passenger manifest who
took everyone's passports, and another facilitateur met us and herded
us off to the immigration desk, a few hundred meters up the road. A
second facilitateur retrieved our passports from the policeman, and
sped past us in a car, waving our passports out the window. My initial
instinct would have been to race after the car, but our facilitateur
assured us that they would be waiting for us at the immigration desk,
which they were. It was only a matter of a few minutes to fill in some
forms, get our visas stamped, pay
some 'appreciation money' to the facilitateurs, the guard and the
immigrations people, and then we were in a taxi headed into
Brazzaville, a city described in an article last year in a leading US
magazine as "the worst city on the Planet to live in or visit for any
length of time."

Our initial impression was that it was a damned sight nicer a place
than Kinshasa! There were sidewalk cafes, restaurants, good roads and
walkways, interesting architecture, grocery stores, and very few
homeless street people. Several building bore the scars of the recent
wars; some with artillery holes several floors up, and others with
clusters of machine-gun scars at street level, but most buildings were
newly painted and in repair. Our taxi driver took us on a quick tour of
town, and then drove us to 'le Rapide', an outdoor café on the west
end of town right on the shore of the Congo River. We ordered some
local beers, and as we sat drinking them in the cool shade, we could
look right across the river at our own backyards on the DRC side. The
hill where the school was rose up directly across form us, and we could
see the radio tower that sits outside our front gate. However, on the
DRC side, access to the river is strictly forbidden, and we found it
immensely pleasurable to sit with the sound of the whitewater at our
feet, gazing at the Kinshasa skyline. Suddenly, a small head bobbed up
in the water ahead of us, and a local boy smiled and waved moments
before he washed into the giant wave in front of us. A second later, he
floated up in the tailrace, swam toward shore, and dragged himself out
on a rock. Then he ran back upstream and jumped back in. Considering
that there are crocodiles and Goliath tigerfish in these waters, and
that the rapid he was swimming was easily a class 8 on the Grand Canyon
scale, I was most impressed with his bravery and joie de vivre. We gave
him some appreciation money, which was, of course, his intention all
along, then headed off to the airport.

The Brazzaville airport is another deep African airport, made of
cinderblocks, and inefficient and hot. We waited in line, passed our
tickets to the disinterested agent, were given our boarding passes
(open boarding- no seat reservations) and headed off to the barren
waiting room. We were intercepted by a woman selling 'tax stamps' for
1000 francs, and were forced to contribute to god-knows-what in
exchange for a tiny stamp on our ticket envelope. Since 1000 franks is
only $1.20, we didn't put up any argument and we were quite used to
these mysterious contributions anyway.

The flight was on time, and our plane was an old 737. From the outside,
it looked pretty well maintained, and fortunately the interior was not
so bad either. However, I know my minimal standards for airplanes has
changed during my time overseas, and most US passengers would have been
horrified by the occasional broken overhead compartment, the
non-working chairs, the steamy air-conditioning, or the nauseating
sticky smell of the cleaning agent. But we were relieved that it was
not a prop plane or an Antonov, and gleefully took our seats for the 45
minute flight to the coast.

The flight over Congo was interesting, as the clouds were broken and we
could see clearly. Almost immediately out of Brazzaville, the dense
rainforest I expected to see in DRC closed in and obscured the ground.
There were occasional mud roads, which looked impassible even from our
height, and the rolling hills were covered with groves of trees of all
types. A few villages had cleared areas for themselves, but for the
most part it was easy to see how this area still remained a rebel
stronghold in the Congolese war that still flares up in the region,
inaccessible to the government army. Suddenly, the plane banked very
steeply to the left, and the town of Pointe Noire appeared, clustered
against the shore of the Atlantic coast. We dropped out of the sky like
a bomb, and made a fast but perfect landing on the pavement of the
Pointe Noire airport, safely at our beach destination only 5 hours
after leaving the claustrophobic craziness of Kinshasa.

Pointe Noire is a sprawling beach town, its marginal economy fueled by
a collection of offshore oil derricks and their associated support
mechanisms on land. During more peaceful times, it was a thriving
resort town, with luxurious beachfront hotels, excellent restaurants,
crystal white sands and lots of tourists from West Africa. With the
onset of the unpredictable and prolonged Congolese wars, the hotels
have fallen into disrepair, the tourists are few, and the occasional
surge of violence when the rebel forces try to wrest it from the
government makes it (according to the same magazine poll last year)
'the second worst town on earth to live in or visit for any length of
time'. Which makes it a wonderful haven for people like ourselves.we
had the beaches to ourselves, the hotel was inexpensive, and the
restaurants had all the seafood you could eat for very manageable
prices, and even more manageable risk.

We met up with some friends who had arrived earlier in the day, made
some phone calls to reserve a 4WD truck for the next morning, and then
had a beachfront dinner that couldn't be beat. The next day,
accompanied by several other vehicles filled with some Embassy friends,
we made our way into the jungle near Pointe Noire to visit a chimpanzee
reserve run by an elderly woman and her young assistant from Chicago.
This reserve rehabilitates chimps who have fallen afoul of humanity,
either by living in a deteriorating jungle or by having been raised as
someone's pet, and provides the training they need in order to be
released back into the wild. They have chimps from newborns to one
frail old grandfatherly greyhair who
is the equivalent of about 110 in human years. We could not stop
laughing at the foolishness of the baby chimps, as they tumbled and
played on their jungle gym. One adolescent, who had been a housepet of
one of our traveling companions almost 5 years earlier, quickly
recognized its previous owner and ran up to her. It was a touching
moment.

After a stupendous day seeing the chimps and hiking around the region,
the assistant led us on some 4WD roads across the reserve to the coast,
and we emerged at a pristine inlet where we had the 5-mile long
crescent of white sand beach all to ourselves. The waves were perfect
for body surfing, so we stripped down to minimal garments, and had a
great time frolicking in the surf and getting sand in our noses. At one
point, I realized that we were probably quite indistinguishable from
the chimps we had just left.

Eventually, sunburned and sandblasted, we had to return south to Point
Noir, so we loaded up the jeeps and drove into the setting sun. After
returning to Pointe Noire, and having another beachfront dinner that
couldn't be beat, we declared it an excellent day, and gushing about
making plans to come back and do this again, we went to bed.

--riverman

On 23 Mar 2006 23:58:07 -0800, "riverman" wrote:

I just found this incomplete version of a Life in Congo post, so I
thought I'd send it along. Its not grossly incomplete, but I thought
some folks might want to revisit life in the third World. Enjoy...

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Thanks Myron.
--
Charlie...
http://www.chocphoto.com