Three Days In The Congo: An Epic... Something.

(Alright, I know I said this blog would be Chicago-based, but I'm too lazy to put this anywhere else.)

This is the first post describing 72 very eventful hours Susan and I spent in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Apparently, what happens in the Congo does not stay there.

Part 1: Getting to the DRC

Scene: Africa, February, 2012

A trip to Africa. We had an exciting itinerary planned: Following a short stay in Nairobi, we were heading to the Democratic Republic of Congo to spend a day with endangered mountain gorillas and climb a an active volcano. Unbelievable, right?

We flew into Nairobi the night before we departed for Congo. Nairobi can be broken down into a simple set of positives and negatives.

The positives: It costs slightly less to fly into Nairobi than the nearby cities of Entebbe (Uganda), Kigali (Rwanda) or Dar Es Salaam (Tanzania).

The negatives: Nairobi is a shithole. This is a city roughly as large as New York that has maybe four traffic lights and no roads bigger than two lanes. The city is redolent with Eau de Open Sewer. Our hotel employed five security guards to prevent our, what, murder? Robbery?

We stayed only one terrible day in Nairobi before beginning our journey to the Congo. Our ride to the airport was arranged through the hotel’s official taxi driver, Solomon. The day before, Solomon had driven us around for four hours, confirming our initial impressions of Nairobi. Solomon was about sixty, and was VERY in touch with his own emotions: He repeatedly confessed to us that he loved us like his own children, children who paid him $55 for four hours’ work (OK, he left that last part out). However, Solomon hadn’t tried to kill or rob us. This meant that he was our most trusted ally in this godforsaken city. We accepted his offer.

“Solomon, how long does it take to get to the airport?” I asked.

“Oh, could take two, three hours,” Solomon replied.

We left at 5:45 AM for our 11 AM flight. We were at the airport by 6:15.

The sense that Solomon had failed us lasted only until we tried to enter the airport. We’d come through Nairobi International at 2 AM two days earlier; now, it was a madhouse. It took us almost two hours just to get in the front door of the airport. Organized chaos would at least have been organized. I swear to God, I think we saw someone trying to take a chicken on a flight.

We reached the front counter around 8:30, slid our passports across the desk to the ruddy-faced agent for Air Kenya… and listened in disbelief as he told us the airline had absolutely no record of us being on this flight.

Missing this flight endangered an already-fragile travel schedule. We had only budgeted three days in the Congo, each one meticulously allocated to activities. Gorilla permits weren’t cheap. Nor were permits to climb an active volcano, visas, lodging, and transportation. All told, Susan and I had several thousand dollars invested in making this flight.

A lady behind us was late for her flight to Rwanda. We stepped aside to discuss our situation, and God tossed us a bone.

“Oh, here you are,” the gate agent said. “You’re on the same flight as this lady. The 8:30 flight.”    

Susan and I checked our watches. It was 8:24 AM. The questions of why the airline would book us on a different, earlier flight, or why they wouldn’t notify us were lost. Even after a short time in Africa, we’d learned that if we didn’t move now, we might be shit out of luck.

I am not sure how, but we somehow cleared customs, and found ourselves running down the terminal. Precious seconds ticked by.

“Which gate?!?” Susan yelled, running ahead as I lumbered behind, carrying our packs.

“Ticket says Gate 8,” I yelled back.

There was no agent at Gate 8. There was also no jetway; patrons simply walked out onto the flight tarmac and boarded whatever plane happened to have an open hatch. There was a sign by Gate 8, though, which reported that the flight was bound for Mogadishu, capital of Somalia. Black Hawk Down Mogadishu.

“Susan, No!” I yelled, as my fiancé joined a queue of straggling passengers. “It’s going to Mogadishu! Moga-fucking-dishu!”

Fortunately, the gate signs were as incorrect as Air Kenya’s ticketing procedure, and our plane was going somewhere (hopefully) less dangerous. It was not possible to fly into the DRC (AKA The Democratic Republic of Congo), at least on an airline that hadn’t crashed in the past three months. Our planned itinerary took us to Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, from which we would travel overland to the DRC. As we boarded, however, we were informed the flight would first be making a stop in Bujumbura, capital of nearby Burundi. It was unclear as to whether this stop was planned, or merely a whim of the pilot.    

Our first approach to Bujumbura was aborted. Moments from landing, the plane immediately went to full power and banked away. Having a massive jet plane go from almost landing to clawing for altitude is terrifying. Over the screaming engines, our captain explained the landing had been aborted (“No shit,” remarked Susan) because of animals on the runway. Our second landing attempt was also aborted; People on the runway this time, reported the captain, in a tone a little too casual for my liking.

Eventually we landed. The airport terminal was little more than a shack set into the jungle. By the runway, perhaps twenty meters from the plane, fishermen were lined up, plying their trade in a ditch that lined the runway.

Moments later, we were off to Rwanda and, and hour later, Susan and I crammed ourselves in a minibus and, at the princely sum of $6 each, were sent speeding away across the country.

For a country that’s as legendarily conflict-plagued, Rwanda was a tremendous surprise. The capital was virtually pristine. Buildings were painted. Outside the capital, the road dodged between steep, impossibly tall green hills, each covered with a tidy patchwork of agriculture that separated equally picturesque village. Then, just when you’re about to forget that you’re in the very heart of chaos, you see a guy on a skateboard hitching a ride down the highway by grabbing the bumper of a truck that’s going 50 mph.

Rwanda’s niceness only served to prime us for how crappy Congo was. We reached Gisenyi, the border town on the Rwandan side of the Congolese border. Exiting Rwanda was an orderly, perfunctory affair that took place in a low white building with a well-manicured lawn. To get to the Congolese side, we walked over a neutral zone of about 50 yards to a dusty, sagging shack with ‘Immagracion’ scrawled on the side. A generator roared in the background, powering a single dingy light bulb. In dormant high school French, Susan indicated our interest in entering the country and handed over our visas and passports. The agent began entering our information into a ledger by hand.  

Thirty minutes later, we were still waiting. Tiny African men in ridiculous blue berets swarmed around, accomplishing little. Susan and I sat helplessly, longingly looking back at the (literally) greener grass and smiling customs agents on the Rwandan side of the border*. Finally, our passports were returned. “Where are our visas?” Susan asked in French. The customs agent spoke a few words and made a gesture not unlike brushing off a fly. “He says we don’t need them and that they stay here,” Susan reported glumly. And so we entered Congo, our legal status a shade of grey. 

Part 2: Susan deliberately crashes an armored military vehicle... just to be a bitch. 

*When we left the Congo, we finally figured out a big reason for why things were so slow: the entire border operation had only a single passport stamper and only a single inkpad, which had to be laboriously passed around between immigration officers.