Further into the heart of darkness

By midnight on 30 August I was supposed to be back home asleep in Dakar, but in fact I was sat on a blue plastic chair wedged into a wooden pirogue, motoring up the River Congo from Lisala to Bumba. We’d woken up on the Sunday to hear that our flight back to Kinshasa had been cancelled. I wasn’t too pleased as this meant missing my subsequent flights, Kinshasa-Nairobi and Nairobi-Dakar, but of course there was nothing at all I could do. There was no flight due the next day, either, but it seemed that there would be one on the Tuesday. We heard from the airline that there would be enough people for it to run, the director of Lisala airport confirmed it was on his flight plan, and the travel agency sold us tickets. So we contacted Kinshasa and confirmed amended dates for the international flights.

So on the Tuesday morning I packed up my stuff ready and went in to breakfast – only to be told that the airline had decided that morning to use the plane to fly somewhere else instead, somewhere with more waiting passengers so they could make more money.

But there was a solution. The next day there was a cargo flight due to go to Kinshasa from the town of Bumba, only 120km upriver from Lisala. So the guide negotiated the hire of another engine, we packed our stuff into the pirogue, and set off for Bumba (with the guide’s poor wife by now suffering from a bout of malaria). It was a long ride, and unnerving to travel in a pirogue in a dark, moonless night, but eventually at 1:30 the next morning we arrived in Bumba – cold, hungry and tired. Miraculously there were no officials in sight but it took over an hour to find a hotel in the dark, and we finally got to bed after 3am, hoping that this time the flight would materialise.

It did, and what an experience! An old Russian Antonov plane with Russian pilots, packed with assorted cargo: a 4WD car, a set of plastic chairs, sacks of maize and cassava, bunches of plantains, a frightened pig, a goat, and crates and baskets containing at least 100 very noisy grey parrots! Plus six passengers wedged between it all.

So we finally got back to Kinshasa, then spent a frustrating day in and out of airline company offices and internet cafés trying to rearrange our international flights. The day was livened up a little though by a peaceful march of people demanding more transparency in the registrations for November’s presidential election, followed by riot police firing tear gas (it is the opposition apparently wanting more transparency), stones thrown at the police and more tear gas. Several passers-by ran into the internet café to escape, with their eyes red and streaming from the tear gas, but inside we felt only a slight prickle for a moment or two, thankfully.

& finally, $320 down, I had rearranged flights to get me home from Kinshasa, with just enough time to go out for a beer and fried termites to celebrate.

Travelling through the Congo

It all started when Hewa Bora airlines crashed on landing in Kisangani in July, so were grounded by the authorities. Or was it when Filair crashed in Bandundu last year, the plane unbalanced when all the passengers rushed to the front supposedly to avoid a crocodile that had escaped from someone’s bag? Either way, the result was a shortage of domestic flights within the DRC, meaning that neither passenger nor cargo flights were now guaranteed to operate even when scheduled and confirmed.

So the spare engine for our boat the “Go Congo” was stuck in Kinshasa for lack of a cargo flight to get it to where it was needed, and we started our trip along the river with just the one 55hp engine.

It should have been enough. But on our third day we encountered a boat in trouble – a tug towing four barges packed with people and cargo was floating out of control in the middle of the river with its engine broken down. There was only limited help we could give as the boat was probably eight times our size, but left in the river like that it would have been at the mercy of the current until it eventually hit a sandbank, where it could have been stuck for months until the river levels rise during the rainy season. By this time many passengers would have run out of food and money and might even have died – that is the way things are in the Congo.

So we came up alongside and pushed them, slowly, to the riverbank. At least that way they could moor and people could get off to hunt meat or seek alternative means of getting somewhere.

But it was a good deed we came to regret as our own engine was damaged by the strain, and packed up completely the next afternoon. & we had no spare. Thankfully with our smaller boat it was not too difficult for some passing fishermen in their pirogues to tow us to the bank (for a fee, of course). But then what were we to do?

Well the first thing was to deal with the officials. So far we had encountered various officials (soldiers, marines, police, civil guards, immigration, customs, intelligence…) at every village we had pulled in to. They were drawn to us – a boat with three white people on it – like moths to a flame. Often drunk, their sole intent was to extort money out of us. Thankfully the guide, a Belgian who has lived in the Congo for 18 years, knew how to deal with them – when to crack jokes, when to shout and argue and when to get them a round of beers – and he always managed to get the payment down to a reasonable level.

We hadn’t been moored for long when some naval officers found us. These guys were not drunk, but it turned out they had been using gunpowder (removing it from their bullets and snorting it) to get high. So the Aussie and I quietly ignored them whilst the guide began the ‘negotiations’. They are not dangerous (so we were told) if you are white and reasonably confident, as they know we are more likely than the locals to make official complaints about any abuse, but it can still be a bit hair-raising to those of us not used to the situation.

By the evening there were seven armed officers roaming the boat, and at times the negotiations turned into a shouting match between them and the guide, but eventually he got them down from their initial $300 demand to a more reasonable $12 plus dinner, and all in return for their agreeing to guard our boat from bandits during the night.

Meanwhile negotiations with another visitor to the boat had got us the loan of a 15hp engine, enough for us to take our pirogue (attached to the back of our boat) to the nearby town of Mankanza where there was a good chance of being able to hire two 25hp engines to power the boat. Mankanza was some 3-4 hours away, they told us. So we set off around nine the next morning. Around 2pm it began raining so we took shelter in a village. How far was it to Mankanza, we asked? They all agreed that it was 40km away, but as estimates of when we might arrive ranged from 1pm (?) to 10pm, we pressed them further. Then it transpired that Mankanza was not 40km away from where we were, but 40km away from somewhere else. Of course. 40km from the village of Bolombo, which we might expect to arrive at by around 5pm.

Amazingly we did indeed arrive at 5pm, having negotiated en route in a village the loan of one 25hp engine. We set up our tents in the village and had some dinner (fish, cassava and greens) whilst the owner of the 15hp engine and one of our crew set off back to the boat with the 25hp engine – they were to catch us up in Mankanza the next day.

We had a nice stay in the village (despite all the rats in the toilet), and with a lift from a village pirogue, arrived in Mankanza the next day, around midday. Our boat didn’t arrive that day, however, nor the next day. One aspect of life in the Congo is the lack of any means of communication, with no mobile phone coverage and of course no internet (and indeed no electricity to power phones or computers in any case), so we could only sit and wait.

But on the third day they came. We were told that they had been held up because naval officers had stopped them on the way back to our boat, demanding money to buy twenty crates of beer (they knew they had come from our boat so assumed they must have money on them). When they did not get what they wanted they held a gun to our crew member’s head, forced him to crouch down and whipped him across his back. He was quite a timid character and our guide explained that this can happen to Congolese who do not stand up to the officials. Quite shocking that people should have to take such treatment!

We had managed to hire a second 25hp engine in Mankanza, so once another round of ‘negotiations’ was concluded with all concerned, we were on our way. It was now Wednesday afternoon and we still had 220km to do to get to our destination, Lisala, by Saturday evening as we were flying out of there back to Kinshasa on the Sunday.

It was nice to be back on the big boat again, with space to walk around, a toilet and bucket shower on the back, and a more reliable source of cold beer for my fellow traveller. It was also a good vantage point from which to observe the life of the local people, as they raced their pirogues up to our boat to try to sell us fresh fish/dried fish/bananas/beetle larvae/tree squirrels/dried monkeys/small crocodiles - or in one case a sitatunga (large antelope) they had just killed while out hunting with their dogs. We bought and ate their fish, bananas and even beetle larvae but refused the bushmeat as it is now illegal to eat it following pressure on the Congo to put an end to hunting of its wildlife (and I must say I saw no wildlife on this trip other than birds and squirrels).

Our progress, without the big engine, was slow, even though we slept on the boat to save the time of setting up camp in a village each night. Concerned about getting to Lisala in time for our flight we even kept going right through the night on the Friday, but we were still 120km away on Saturday morning so we transferred our luggage to the faster little pirogue and set off at speed – finally arriving around 8pm for a night in the Catholic Mission before our flight the next morning.

From Mombasa to Kinshasa

I spent a few days in Kenya visiting my Mum, taking her and her husband Chapati to dinner to celebrate her 70th birthday. Yes, 70th!! She doesn’t look it, doesn’t act it and says she doesn’t feel it. Maybe perpetual youth is one of the benefits that comes from being with a younger man…

They still seem as happy as ever together, and although the money is tight and Mum has had malaria now eight times, she would not be anywhere else.

Our few days together were quickly over though, and I flew on to Kinshasa, and from there to the town of Mbandaka a further 700km up the River Congo, for the start of a holiday in the Democratic Republic of Congo. I was more excited than I’ve been about a holiday for a long time, as I have wanted to travel on this river for years. Originally I expected to take one of the public barges between Kinshasa and Kisangani, but given their irregularity and their propensity to break down or get stuck on sandbanks for weeks/months, it was something I was never able to arrange. Then I spotted this organised trip on a traditional-style Congolese longboat, ten days cruising between Mbandaka and Lisala (the middle third of the river between Kinshasa and Kisangani), camping in small villages and fishing camps on the banks each night, and decided this was the way to do it.

To my surprise there was only one other tourist on the trip, a laid-back Australian guy, and with us were the owner/guide, his wife the cook, his son and the crew. We settled in, ordered a beer and sat back to watch the life on the river.

Cruising in the Arctic Circle

Perhaps it was a reaction to over four years living and working in a hot climate that made me finally book that trip to the Svalbard Archipelago that had been on my “To do one day” list for so long. The Archipelago, part of Norway but hundreds of kilometres away from its mainland, is better known to some people by the name of its main island, Spitsbergen. Formerly dominated by coal-mining, and before that by whaling, it now makes most of its money from tourism, from people like me going to see the polar bears before they’re all gone. 2,400 of them living in the Archipelago at present!

The walruses were also an attraction, as were the reindeer and a small but interesting variety of birds. So I booked myself onto a cruise – triple share, to keep the costs down - and begged and borrowed a collection of warm winter clothes from friends and acquaintances in London.

The first shock though, before I’d even registered the cold, was the 24-hour daylight. Of course I knew to expect it – in theory – but I was still not prepared to arrive at my hotel to check in for the first night at 1:30am with the sun shining! It continued to surprise me and other guests on the ship for the whole cruise, as we sat round talking in the bar, or watching for seals and whales from the bridge, only to be reminded by someone that it was already well after midnight and that breakfast, as usual, was at 7:30. It’s rather nice but does take some discipline to ensure you get to bed at a reasonable hour!

In fact the light was the main thing I enjoyed about the tour. Many afternoons there was a kind of ‘sunset’ period, when there were orange, pink and purple tinges to the sky, and the sunlight often seemed more silver than its usual golden colour – more like a strong moonlight. Perhaps it was all the water and ice that made it look like that, and perhaps more noticeable to me than those from more northerly latitudes as it was such a contrast to the strong, bright African sun. But it was really beautiful.

One of the first wildlife sightings was of a big pod of beluga whales, all around our little zodiacs. These whales are totally white – very strange. Apparently when the whalers started visiting the area a few hundred years ago there were so many whales there that they had to force the ship through them the same way they would through ice! Almost impossible to believe that now, when there are so few whales left there. & what was diplomatically left unsaid by the guides was that Norway still allows whaling today – as evidenced by the whale on the menu in the Radisson Hotel on the island.

Later the same day, just as we were setting out on a walk to search for some tundra birds, came the call to get back to the zodiacs – QUICKLY – as a polar bear had been spotted. It was a couple of kilometres away, but by the time we had got our life jackets on and were all in the zodiacs the bear was half way towards us. They can run faster than humans but even when apparently just ambling along they actually cover distances surprisingly quickly.

The bear made its way towards the beach we had been on, as we cruised along in the zodiacs, cameras snapping away. Having missed the chance of lunch there, it stepped into the sea and swam – again quite quickly – at least a kilometre across a channel between two islands. We now understood why we always had to be accompanied by someone with a gun!

We had two more polar bear sightings during the week, another lone male and also a female with two cubs. Despite their dangerous reputation, they are of course very attractive animals. I’m still trying to decide which of my 48 polar bear photos I can delete…

I think most people’s next favourite animal, mine included, was the walrus. They are actually quite unpleasant when on land – fat and ungainly, constantly scratching themselves, and absolutely foul-smelling – but when they drag themselves into the water they are suddenly transformed into powerful, agile and even graceful creatures.

We also saw seals (ringed, bearded and hooded – and for those still up at 3am a large group of harp seals), and reindeer, though sadly no arctic fox. Our planned trip to the base of some cliffs of nesting birds where foxes often patrol was thwarted by a load of pack ice which our ship couldn’t break through. The birds were nice too, including puffins, the beautiful sabine’s gull and a red-throated diver on its nest. Back on the island the day the cruise ended three of us also managed to see ptarmigan.

Some of the passengers on the ship were quite interesting too. The sixth best twitcher in the world (8,383 species of birds seen including his first ever little auk on this trip), a world traveller with only eight countries still left to visit, and one man rich enough to take a family of six on the trip and to drink champagne with dinners on several days – I googled his name when I got back to find he is in the Sunday Times Rich List and worth some $300m! & thankfully my room mate (only one, luckily, as the triple share would have been horribly cramped with three people) was nice enough.

For those interested, the cruise took us almost to 81°N, which I think is some 5-600km from the North Pole. One afternoon we all landed on the sea ice somewhere north of the 80° line and drank a celebratory hot chocolate with Baileys! As for the weather, well we had a couple of cold days, particularly when that icy wind was blowing, although with three layers of clothes on my legs and six layers on my upper body I didn’t find it too bad. The main problem was how to keep nose and cheeks warm. We also had some fairly warm days: 12°C on one day!

My overriding memory of it all though is that wonderful silvery light.


(borrowed a colleague's laptop - seems the problems with the photos is specific to my laptop)

A few weeks in England 2

I don't know exactly why blogger (google) would not let me attach a photo to my post on my few weeks in England, nor can I attach it (or any other photo) to this separate post. I get the following error message (following on from the Internet Explorer message that it cannot display the required web page):

"BlogID: required field must not be blank"

Which field? Any techie readers out there who can help me?

A few weeks in England

As ever, a trip back to the UK stirred very mixed feelings.

A conference, a training workshop and visits to family and friends over a period of several weeks has meant that I have got to many different parts of the country. I had some lovely walks along the white cliffs of Dover and the undercliff on the Isle of Wight, amongst the colleges of Oxford and deep into the Yorkshire dales. It reminded me how beautiful the country is, though also how cold and wet it can be even in the heart of summer.

I had less time than I would have liked to enjoy the culture – I managed a superb concert at the Barbican (Konono No. 1 and Kasai Allstars in a “Congotronics v Rockers” evening) but didn’t manage the Afghanistan treasures exhibition at the British Museum, Viva Riva at the cinema or Richard III at the Old Vic. Shopping was also curtailed, this time by a lack of space to carry any purchases home, although I did find room for a Kindle and the time to load on over 100 free books (from The Iliad and Zen Buddhism to A Tale of Two Cities and The Communist Manifesto).

I was struck this time by the effects of the recession. Several well-known names went under whilst I was here (including Habitat and Jane Norman), Oddbins had already gone, and others such as Thorntons and HMV seem to be struggling. There were less people out shopping, and those who were out must be spending less judging by the predominance of Primark bags. & in a way I can’t quite explain, the place seemed quite shabby. Shabby morals (the News International phone hacking scandal following on from last year’s revelations on MPs’ expenses), shabby manners (too many people pushing their way onto the tube while others were still trying to get off) and lots of things of low quality. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised that the megabus turned up 45 minutes late and had a toilet that didn’t flush given the £2.50 return fare from London to Leeds.

& worst of all, so many of the British population seem to be addicted to their mobile phones, frantically tapping away into them and oblivious to the real world around them.

I say all of this with the personal backdrop of wondering where I am going to go next, when my contract in Senegal ends, and where I am going to end up settling down. I love London in so many ways, and of course it is easier administratively to live in your own country than overseas, and so whenever I come “home” I have that question in the back of my mind as to whether or not I could live here again. I continue to miss London’s amazing cultural output, and I’m sure I will always feel a core of Britishness (a pride in our history and our inventiveness as a people) but apart from that there is less and less that draws me back. The problem may come down to whether I can find anywhere else to take its place.

A regular Sunday

I had a little telling off recently from one of my readers, reminding me that bloggers are not supposed to just go quiet, not posting for over a month, leaving their readers wondering what has happened to them. The trouble is, when you get to your fifth year of living and travelling in the same places there is far less to write about. Things that once seemed strange become routine, and none of you want to read about the routine parts of my life, do you?

But as there has been nothing interesting happening over the last month or so I will oblige my readers by telling you about last Sunday.

I woke up in a hotel room in Monrovia. I got up, showered and dressed, with the CNN news on in the background, and finished packing my stuff into my suitcase, then went down to breakfast. This hotel has a little open terrace attached to its restaurant, so unusually no need to take a cardigan to protect me from the air conditioning. I collected a bowl of papaya and mango, a yoghurt and some rolls with butter and jam and sat down out on the terrace. Ignoring the foreground buildings, there was a nice view – a few trees, a small lagoon and beyond that a sandy ridge and then the ocean. I thought sadly how I’d not had time to walk down there, the usual story when I’m away on these visits. I’d been working during all the daylight hours all week (plus a few late nights), with just a couple of hours off the previous afternoon but at that time there was a major storm, with thunder and lightning and heavy rain. The rainy season has already started in Liberia and we’d had many impressive storms during the week.

Breakfast over, I took my suitcase down to reception to check out, five minutes before the driver was due to collect me for the long drive to the airport. But someone had changed the password on the hotel computer, so the receptionists couldn’t get into the system to retrieve my bill. I waited whilst they made several phone calls in an attempt to track down the password, as several more guests came down to check out. Meanwhile no driver had appeared from my organisation, but I overheard a couple of other guests asking if the hotel-airport shuttle bus was on its way, so I slid my case over next to theirs – one problem solved!

Finally, half an hour later, the receptionists got our bills printed, we all paid and I got into the bus (apologising to the other occupants who’d had the foresight to pay their bills the night before).

Check in at the airport was uneventful, the flight was on time (which makes a nice change), and we arrived in Accra at around 12:30. Kotoka International Airport in Accra is not set up for transit passengers, but I already knew where to stand and wait for the man who deals with transit passengers. Normally the first step is for him to laboriously write all our details into a big register, before ushering us past passport control to collect our luggage, but today there was one man with only twenty minutes to make his connection, so we were all taken with him straight through a side door and along innumerable passageways to finally arrive in the departure hall, where the man at the Emirates check-in desk confirmed that his flight was already closed. At this point the rest of us pointed out that none of us yet had our luggage. “Do you know the way back to the luggage hall – the regular way?” we were asked.

Yes, we did – outside, across the road, down the slip road into the car park, under the tunnel and into the arrivals area. Surprisingly only one person stopped us to ask why we were going through customs, etc in the wrong direction, and so we collected our luggage and made the same journey back to the departure hall.

By this time it was after 1pm, but the Nigeria Airways check-in didn’t open until 6pm so there were still five hours to kill, with no lounge to wait in and no real point in spending money going into Accra as I had my luggage to deal with. Besides, I didn’t have a valid Ghanaian visa, so strictly shouldn’t be leaving the airport although there was nothing in practice, apart from my luggage, to stop me doing so.

So I found myself a seat and settled down to wait. I had a book with me, and had sat near a TV showing Super Sport 3 (one advantage this airport has above others in the region), so managed to entertain myself reading the book from cover to cover and watching a repeat of Gary Neville’s testimonial match from the previous week.

Eventually it got to 6pm, so I went through the check-in process. First to customs who took a quick look in my case before putting their chalk marks on it, then to the weighing machine where I collected my little hand-written slip of paper showing that I had one suitcase weighing 9kg, and finally to the check-in desk. Where I was told there was something wrong with my ticket so I would have to go to the Nigeria Airways office to get it sorted out. I did so, back to check in, then up the stairs to passport control.

Here when I got near the front of the queue my passport and boarding pass was examined to ensure I had all I needed to pass to one of the desks. I explained that I didn’t have an exit form because I was in transit. “What time did you get here?” the official asked me. I told him, and to my surprise he asked to see my visa. I explained that I didn’t have a visa, that I hadn’t left the airport but had been in transit there all day. He got quite cross with me and told me that a transit visa was needed by anyone with more than five hours between their flights – but that he would let me off this time.

(I checked later and he was right, I should have had a transit visa)

Of course as I went through the x-ray bit they called me over to search my bag – thoroughly too. Apparently an old lipstick at the bottom looked suspicious on the x-ray machine.

Through all of the formalities, I went to the small bar to get something to eat and drink, and as I sat there I looked down at my boarding pass for the first time. It said that my destination was Banjul, not Dakar, and my heart sank for a moment – but fortunately my luggage tag said Dakar. I knew my ticket was for Dakar (the next stop after Banjul) so I figured that the check-in clerk had probably just written Banjul by mistake, but in any case, once I was on the flight, no-one would realise I was supposed to get off in Banjul…

Nobody said anything at Banjul, and I finally got out of the airport in Dakar at 1.30am, brushed off the hustlers trying to sell me phone cards or change money, and argued over the price of a taxi. I got home at about 2am and went quickly to bed knowing that I had to be up again in six hours to go to the office.

So now you see how some parts of my life out here can be pretty uninteresting!