The bus ride into town was fascinating, and I fear that Kinshasa's best experiences may be impossible for the foreigner. Thousands of people in night markets stretching deep into the sprawling suburbs, lit only by the fires of cooking stoves and candles. The mass of humanity is amazing, seething, breathing heaving crowds of people all out to buy food and drink beer. And did I mention beer is exactly 0.3 cents more expensive per millilitre than water here? You cannot help but spend your visit with a little bit of a buzz.
Today I was in the centre, a typical business district and full of shops and traffic, happily snapping photos. Into the embassy areas I went, still snapping, and to the Congo river, still snapping - and there was my folly. I was a mere 250 metres from the President's Palace, and I forgot to note it on my map. I was quickly set upon by half a dozen officials and soldiers, arrested, with my camera confiscated after a polite tug of war with me offering to give them only the film, all of them talking about prison time. (Oh no, not another African prison.)
They had me genuinely worried, and they knew it. Their superiors came by after a quick call on a cell phone, and four men dressed in black uniforms wandered down to the shore, shook all of our hands, muttered something to one of them, and left. The rest of them seemed far more relaxed after that, and the most important thing, how much I needed to pay, finally turned up as a point of conversation.
An hour later, me lacking my roll of film and 40 US dollars, I was walking away from the scene of the crime laughing with the officials, one of them promising to call me in Canada next week when I return home. It was my own fault for not being aware enough, and them having a reason to detain me, I'm glad I got out of that situation reasonably well - also since I had over a hundred dollars on my person at the time. (Nothing like bargaining a 'fine'!)
So, I certainly ate my smugness about getting here so cheaply with the UN - a free flight, a free bus ride into town. It was also a slight ordeal to break out of their web - they wanted me to stay at a posh place for 60 US dollars a night, but after the bus left I told the concierge that it was simply too expensive and I would take a taxi elsewhere. The look on his face was priceless - he must have been horribly confused. Was I not, of course, here on a six figure salary with some massive organization?
Indeed, there are plenty of foreigners in Kinshasa but absolutely no tourists. There is no infrastructure per se for tourism, no guesthouses, no middle of the road transport - I am staying in a sprawling hotel that reminds me of a run down apartment in New York, with stained tile floors and walls.
The UN's operation in Congo, MONUC, must easily be their largest operation on the planet. Their air network dwarves the rest of Congo's many airlines combined. They have their own bus system here in Kinshasa. And of course, dozens of aircraft at their disposal, from Antonov and Hercules cargo planes to small Cessna private jets. And hundreds, if not thousands, of well paid foreign expats dispersed into the most remote areas of this nation.
Flying over Congo, it felt like ocean. No roads, no development - only small huts and tiny farms, like the population has lived for centuries. On that roll of film I lost were some striking pictures of the Congo river from the air, which I suppose my site will now have to do without. The vastness of the nation and its interior is juxtaposed by this massive city, populated by everyone, and everything.
A strange last day in Kinshasa - chased around by the usual throng of limping kids egged on by their parents, I was also followed by vegetable sellers and of course the crew of shady looking guys each holding a single watch trying to peddle it to passersby. Eventually I ducked into an expat watering hole, tried Congolese Guinness(beats Haiti's Guinness brewery by only a little....) as well as a few other brews, then stumbled back on down Kinshasa's main boulevard.
"Bon Marche?" I asked crowded old vehicles as they slowed on the side of the curb. This is the phrase you use to find out if a vehicle is selling itself on the road, packing 7-8 people in a normal sedan sized car to go along the main thoroughfares. Cost is about 30 cents for the ride, no matter how long or short. Indeed my first full day in Kinshasa was a strange experience as I had no idea how to hail these shared taxis and none of them even stopped for me, as is often the case with cheap transport in the third world that they're always touting for business - here they automatically assume I'm just walking over to my Land Rover.
A whole plethora of soldiers and police were outside my hotel the afternoon before I left, giving me pause to think that perhaps they had caught up with me for that photo incident and were intent on hauling me off. But instead the hotel's restaurant was hosting some sort of luncheon with assumably an important person or two, and therefore the hotel was required to be flooded with automatic weapons. Which is good, since there did not seem to be any secret exits out of the cockroach infested hole that Hotel Phenix is.
Late afternoon of my final day, heading along the highway - massive trucks two storeys high with goods and people sitting on top of those goods dotted the roadsides, me in my private taxi stopped at the lights and accosted by streetsellers. Albino Africans - I had seen this before, but not to this extent - where the pigment in an African's skin turns white; often it is just speckled whiteness on their black skin, but in Kinshasa I saw several people who bore the physical features of Africans but their skin was entirely white.
Kinshasa airport is a lower circle of travelling hell that I would not wish upon anyone - a tiny crowded terminal, ancient and not Air Conditioned; four different hand searches of my luggage; six security guards poring over every document in your possession looking for evidence of its forgery; a hand written boarding pass, as the airport has no computers. Rolling blackouts, a cluttered bar on the terrace overlooking the tarmac - with empty shelves and prices triple what they are in town. I was harassed by a security guard because I still had 700 Congolese Francs on me, about two dollars, and exporting currency is a big no-no. It took me several minutes of calm, calculated french responses to explain that I was going to buy something in the airport bar - in other words, I wasn't going to give it to him.
And of course before him I had to explain myself to another guard who really wanted to know how I got from Bunia to Kinshasa. I was stamped in at every airport I flew into, except the UN flights. But of course just namedropping MONUC helps a lot; there is an air of respect for those foreigners here with some connection to the UN, as loose as it may be.
"60 Dollahs for a steak!?" An American was complaining about on the terrace. Surely, the expats here and their organizations get heavily shafted by the local hotels. Tourism is nonexistent, but no matter: the money behind the expats in Kinshasa is more than enough, and the companies more than willing to pay any price, that any price is attempted on these people.
Kinshasa's airport has an observation deck where locals can look out onto the tarmac, an open air balcony - which did not look too difficult to scale. I wondered to myself how often the ramp staff of Air France in Paris found frozen bodies in the wheel wells. I of course was not freezing, as we were delayed by 90 minutes as the captain tried to fix a climate control and electrical shortage problem. Sweating profusely, a spare minute without air conditioning in the Congo is enough for the tropical heat and humidity to bleed in a nd turn the inside into a hotter version of the outside.
And, that was the beginning of a 30-hour ordeal back to Vancouver. Will I be going back to Congo? Sometime again, possibly. However it stands as one of the most expensive countries on the planet for independent travel, as well as one of the most corrupt places in the world. Getting in and around is complex, expensive, time consuming, but also extremely interesting. As one of Africa's pre-eminent collapsed countries I could hardly say I know much about Africa without visiting. But the ordeal of being there ensures that repeat visits are rare.
-September 2003
* A full account of my visit to this country is available in my yet to be published book, Means To An Exit. If you are an agent or publisher and would like to receive an outline and manuscript, please Contact Me.
