Well, that was interesting.
The journey to the Congo was actually quite pleasant, despite the interminable length and the near loss of my hat in a Parisian hotel. The flight from Paris went by much quicker than I could have hoped for, and I was only on about my twenty-seventh imagined 'crisis in the skies' scenario by the time we landed.
We left
As I was saying, the airport was small. About 200 passengers were herded into Passport control, where we were greeted by a variety of very stern gentlemen asking for our passports. I don’t speak French, the national language, but one of our hosts, who had flown over from
The baggage area was probably no bigger than ten metres wide by about 20 metres long and was dominated by the carousel in the middle of the room. While we were waiting for our bags to present themselves, we were constantly being buffeted by people who had got their baggage and had loaded it onto the ancient trolleys that were littered around the room. Unable to communicate with anyone except our hosts, it made me very nervous. What if we were separated? What if something happens to one of us? The idea of a big bad something loomed large in my mind, but luckily, or perhaps predictably, nothing did.
We were led by our fixer, Felix, to a minivan parked outside. My companion Remco explained to me that even CEO's of forest companies don't wear suits and ties in the Congo, it's too damn hot, but Felix was wearing one anyway. I guess you have to look the business in this part of town to get things done.
Through the streets of
My room was large, but sparsely furnished, with two single beds and a tiny desk filling barely half of the room. A tiny white fridge sat in the opposite corner, and would have seemed out of place in any other hotel I’ve ever stayed in but here it wasn’t surprising. Even with the sparking air conditioning unit in the room blaring constantly, it was still sweltering in the room.
Luckily, the bar and restaurant were more agreeable. Four of us were eating that night and in the spirit of adventure we all decided to eat steaks. There was traditional
After a fairly sleepless night, we left early in the morning to fly to Ouesso. Even though it was an internal flight we still had to pass through some security checks. These consisted of the guards checking our passports a few times and asking us to open, but not search, our bags. And with that we flew to Ouesso on a South African owned DC-9 that leaked when it flew too high and steamed after landing. This was the flight I was most worried about, but it passed off without incident until we landed. There we had to surrender our passports to the local police, which was very worrying for me at this stage, but we were assured that we would get them back by a large, gregarious Frenchman we met from CIB, the company we were visiting, called Sebastian. He told us that a lot of the ex-pats, as they called themselves, thought of Brazzaville as the Roman empire and that Pokola, the village were CIB is based, was Gaul, mirroring the Asterisk and Obelix stories, quite what that made Ouesso I have no idea, but it kept me occupied trying to think of a suitable candidate.
Ouesso is a one-goat town. Brazzaville, being the capital, has had a large amount of money spent on it. Ouesso has a half-built airport and an office of the national bank that wouldn't look out of place on Canary Wharf but that's about it. We spent our time waiting for our lift to the river in the Soweto bar, a wooden shack that has probably the only working fridge in town. The heat was intense, but we were able to get a couple of cokes to pass the time. When we got them Sebastian told us to ignore the rust on the glass bottles, he said they all come like that.
To be continued...
