Alphabet Travel

When the last of the DRC officials had checked our passports and waved us on, we found ourselves in a big dusty square, where a group of guinea fowl pecked the remains of a soldier’s sandwich, and a few sleepy shopkeepers eyed the newcomers. The Angolan immigration team were friendly, if serious, and they taught us how to say ‘hello’ and ‘thank you’ in Portuguese. I had not really turned my mind to the practicalities of travel in Angola. For days my brain had been awash with will-we-won’t-we get the Angolan visa, will-we-won’t-we make it through the DRC without incident… now we had, and we were here, and it was a bit like waking up after a strange dream.

As taxi drivers made their furtive approaches, reality suddenly hit home. We had been granted five-day transit visas with which to cross Africa’s seventh largest country, in which decades of civil war had left a practically non-existent infrastructure. When we had told people that we planned to cross Angola by public transport, little smirks had raised the corners of their mouths. This was a poor start to our first day, too – the clock began to tick as soon as our passports were stamped, and yet our delays in the DRC had rendered this, day one, almost useless: we would make it only as far as the nearby settlement of Mbanza Congo, and would be lucky to do so before sunset. Perhaps we should have tried to bum a ride with the Belgians we met while applying for visas in Matadi? They had a van and were overlanding. I felt sure they would make it from border to border within the five-day time limit, but how much would they see of Angola and its people? And would they have wanted two freeloading backpackers on board in the first place? Our way was riskier – dumb, even – but I hoped it would have its rewards.

The share-taxi to Mbanza Congo rattled along bumpy roads, past the shells of old cars, pretty hills and small villages. In one, both the driver and our fellow passenger jumped out and ran to a shop. They came back with a bottle of beer each.

‘Local beer!’ grinned the driver, slugging his back as we hit the road again in the glowing afternoon light. Within minutes the bottles were empty and were flung out of the window.

Seth and I smiled at each other, thinking ‘these guys are characters’ but this turned out to be classic behaviour when on the road in Angola.

The passenger recommended a cheap hotel in town, and we were glad of it. Waving off our beer-mad buddies, we headed inside and found simply a bar full of plastic furniture, with a row of dark rooms situated behind. A young guy, surprised to see us, stuttered that um, yes, they might have a room, he would check. Meanwhile a reclining woman on a moth-eaten sofa seemed to be doing so in a way that deliberately accentuated her curves and her eyes had an odd-combination of try-hard ‘come-hither’ and glazed over exhaustion. Her friend, reeking of whisky, ran over and began pawing at Seth. We were out of there in a shot, the young man calling after us; did we not want the room? We began a fruitless tour around town with a moody driver, looking for a hotel that was not a brothel and finding everywhere full because of a government visit. We ended up in a dark hotel on the outskirts of town. There was no electricity, no water, no toilet roll in the communal bathroom and the window didn’t close properly. They charged us £50 for it. People had told us Angola was pricey, but this we had not expected.

‘At least it’s not a brothel,’ I said to Seth, as we sat in the bar eating a disastrous self-made dinner of bread with stock cubes and onions.

Our fellow guests were welcoming, cheery men, who had not moved from their tables in hours and were enjoying a prolonged liquid dinner of watery Skol beer. After we crawled into bed and some hours had passed, women’s voices echoed in the corridors. There was giggling, and the noises of rooms occupied, then deserted ten minutes later. More giggling, more door slamming. In the morning, we demanded a discount and left. The sun shone over the yellow houses and shacks of Mbanza Congo, their terracotta coloured roofs giving the town a jaunty look deceptive of our experience of the place. The friendly women outside their little farm houses, speaking to us in a language we couldn’t understand, as well as the smiling shop keepers who greeted us as we walked to the station helped soften our hearts a little as we searched for a minibus that would take us on the long journey to Luanda.

It was about 8am, and the conductor of the minibus had a sachet of whisky hanging from his mouth. We smiled at each other, thinking ‘at least this guy’s not driving’, and chatted to the various friendly characters who approached us while the bus was filling up, one of whom spoke very good, if formal, English. (When we said goodbye, he gave a little bow and said, ‘Thank you for your cooperation,’ which I thought was fantastic.) Another fine English speaker was a gentleman we shall Mr. Y for the sake of privacy, because he was with the Angolan secret services. How secret these services were, and what it really meant, was ambiguous, because the other passengers eyed him with caution and he had noticeable influence at the police checks we past along the way when we finally set off. He too enjoyed sachets of booze, his preference being for Amarula, a creamy liqueur. Again, we looked at our watches and couldn’t quite get our heads around it. These locals knew what we didn’t though: how bad the roads ahead really were, how long it takes to get anywhere in Angola, how very far Luanda was away. In my notebook, I have called this ‘the minibus of doom’ and have written in block capitals, THIS JOURNEY SUCKS! We left Mbanza Congo at around 10am. The driver, the conductor and Mr. Y sat up front. Another bus boy, mainly responsible for the loading and unloading of belongings and passengers, sat by the sliding door. He was lecherous towards me, very creepy and overly physical with all of the young women on board. I was glad to be tucked away on the back row, although he did enjoy coming to the window to beam in at me. When we had been on the bus for an hour, the boys pulled over to buy a bottle of whisky from a stall. Now it was passed along the whole front row, the driver enjoying a few slugs between navigating the dips in the red road and dodging monkeys. The family in front of us were sharing a carton of fruit juice. On closer inspection, it was a box of Sangria. The father was in the military and he showed us his papers with lofty intensity – ‘ZAIRE’ was printed next to his picture. He was a giant of a man, not someone to be on the wrong side of. We smiled and nodded nervously, not really sure what we were supposed to say. He was on his second box of sangria by the time the boys bought the whisky. It was midday and the whole bus stank of booze and sweat. Police checks came and went. At one, a man was softening up the officials with an amusing bribe of sangria, laying the cartons down beside the reclining officer. We couldn’t help but laugh at the bizarre spectacle. Hours and hours were passing, yet we seemed to be getting nowhere. The bus had to stop every twenty minutes so that people could pee, or buy more sachets of whisky. We contented ourselves with the fact that the driver was at least sparing in his slugging, whereas Mr. Y and the other bus boys were going for gold. The closer we got to Luanda, we told ourselves, the better the roads would get. We had not considered the possibility of the minibus not even reaching Luanda that day. Late afternoon, we stopped at another bar. Seth and I sat at a table with Mr Y as he sucked on a sachet of Amarula.

‘It’s good that you’re not driving,’ Seth pointed out, ‘You’ve had quite a few of those.’

‘Yes!’ said Mr Y, ‘It is good, South African liqueur! It’s my day off.’

We walked to a little shop and bought a few supplies:

‘A tub of laughing cow, a coke, and one of those boxes of sangria, please.’

We figured, better roll with it. Maybe our fellow passengers were on to something. A bit of booze to numb the senses and calm the nerves – a chance to care a little less about putting your life in the hands of a group of maniacs.

At sunset, the bus pulled over for a police check. It did not move again for several hours. A wheel needed changing. The boys had headed out to secure more whisky. Mr Military Zaire was on the beer. He was getting quite chatty with us as his sobriety reduced. A fight started a little way down the road. Pricking up his ears, he headed off to get involved. Seth and I could hear the shouting but I didn’t even want to look back to see what was happening.

‘This blows’, I kept saying, ‘This journey… this journey sucks so much.’

Mr Creepy was grabbing at one of the female passengers who, to my surprise, was responding flirtatiously.

‘Do you think they’re together?’ I whispered to Seth

‘No, she’s travelling alone with that toddler,’ he replied. I put my head in my hands. (This sucks sucks sucks.)

Outside, an old man was playing with fire, literally. He was leaping around it, sticking his hand into it, running it slowly through it. The owner of a nearby petrol pump was scolding him, but didn’t seem too worried about a potential explosion, nor injury. I do not know whether the old man was drunk, drugged, mad or traumatised by what he seen in his lifetime, or maybe all of those things. Our small experience of Angola so far seemed, to me, depressing. Twenty-seven years of insane civil war, this country had seen. We had talked about getting through Angola and getting visas, but I now felt hideously naive. It was becoming one of those rare times on the African Alphabet trip where I was questioning what we were doing and why. Finally, the wheel was changed. The passengers flew into a fury, however, when the bus boys decided not to hit the road but to visit a friend’s house for dinner. They left us all parked outside a house while they went in to enjoy food and hospitality. Mr Military flexed his muscles and strolled around the courtyard shouting. The boys returned at last, then drove us to another mechanic – there was one more wheel that had to be changed. At this point, Seth and I climbed out of the bus, leaned back against it, and opened our carton of sangria. The whole journey suddenly seemed so ludicrous as to be funny. The sangria tasted just like it does in Menorca. I thought fondly of holidays I went on with my friend Sarah when we were sixteen, seventeen, drinking sangria in beachside restaurants, talking about boys…
It was very late when the bus boys finally decided to get us back on the road. The unthinkable happened – Mr Y, who had been drunk all day and all evening – took the wheel ‘to give my friend some rest.’ He drove stupidly fast, narrowly skirting potholes and other vehicles, and the chances of ending up in a ditch were seriously high. Seth’s eyes were big and shiny as he stared at the road ahead in alarm.

We’re going to crash,’ he kept saying.

This went on for hours. I tried to sleep but the woman next to us complained that we were taking up too much room when I rested with my back against Seth. I was disappointed in her – she had been a grump all day, and I had helped her carry her bags of fruit onto the bus. I was not taking up much room at all and yet she was holding out on me. So I did not sleep that night and neither did Seth, and the horror of being driven by a drunk man continued into the early hours. When we reached Luanda at the break of day, the bus stopped not in the city centre but in a township. Mr Y’s house, in fact.

‘Stay here at my house,’ said Mr Y, ‘the boys will drop the other passengers at a nearby station, then the bus will come back for you and we will drive you to your hotel.’

I was reluctant. It seemed like nonsense. There was no choice. We sat in Mr Y’s living room, where his sister lay asleep on the floor and his wife and baby emerged from a curtained room. More family members strolled in and out, but they are blurred from my memory. The TV was on. A silent film about monks in a mountain monastery was playing. I remember thinking that watching it felt a bit like sliding down the long tunnel into death. Having not slept for 24 hours, enduring the worst journey ever, and finding myself in a stranger’s house in a township nowhere near central Luanda, I thought, ‘I’m going to cry.’ We talked about finding a taxi. The only one we could find wanted to charge us about eight times too much. We sat outside Mr Y’s house. Toddlers were playing in the dirt. I stared at a smashed CD trodden into the earth. A mouse ran under the fence and disappeared into a pipe. Four hours passed.

Mr Y was a good guy, even with his passion for Amarula and secret agent slyness. He eventually got the boys, who had gone on a joyride (booze mission?) to return the minibus, and drove us into Luanda, via many poor townships. Spotting Mr Y as we waited in a traffic jam, a man approached the window and called him a bastard. The traffic cleared, and with obvious relief, Mr Y sped away. I wondered, is there any end to this nightmare? When he dropped us near our hotel, Mr Y asked for no money. We smiled and shook hands, and within an hour were smoking cigarettes quietly, desperately on a hotel balcony. Having eaten only biscuits, peanuts and laughing cow for the past day and a half, we went for a pizza. I almost fell asleep in mine. Next, we tried to apply for a visa extension and were told to try in Benguela, the next city on our itinerary. I was so tired I thought I might collapse on the street. The sun felt overwhelming. Luanda is on the sea, and it was the first time we had seen it since Cameroon, but all that really mattered was sleep.

That night, after some rest, we accidentally ordered chicken giblets in a restaurant, and broke all the rules of conduct by walking around Luanda at night. It did not feel dangerous. Maybe we were cocky, but surviving the minibus of doom made us feel untouchable – or like Angola had done her worst, and we were now on friendly terms with her. We made the mistake of relaxing. Thinking we could extend our visas in Benguela, we enjoyed another day in Luanda, Seth taking street photographs of basketball players, both of us watching movies and finding we were able to see the funny side of some our recent experiences, with the luxury of reflection. When we went to catch our bus to Benguela, a young jogger stopped to show us the way. In Angola, this happened frequently – people taking you under their wing. It’s my most positive memory of the place. At the bus stop, chaos reigned, of course. Bus boys fought over us, one knocking hot tea all over another one as he grabbed Seth’s bag and ran ahead with it. Obviously, despite the early hour, they all had bottles of beer in their hands. I settled into my seat and groaned inwardly, expecting a repeat performance of the same old routine. Seth sat on the seat in front of me and attracted the attention of a man whose crazy eyes gave away his drug abuse. He spoke a million words per second, and in French, so Seth could understand. Nervously he played with the long sleeves of his jumper as he begged for money, and told Seth, ‘My name is Edward… we’ve had lots of war here. Lots of suffering. There’s no money. There are no jobs.’ He ran away, and when the bus was ready to depart, he ran back.

‘God is black,’ he said, ‘and he lives in Mbanza Congo.’

With that, we left. Both of us waved at Edward. He had lesions on his forehead. Not for the first time in the past few days, I felt very sad.

The bus followed the coast south. There were baobab trees, such a classically African sight, and the sea was the richest royal blue. Phil Collins sang ‘Another Day in Paradise’ for the fiftieth time since we touched down on this continent. Everyone had to pee every twenty minutes. The busboy slugged down his beer, but we reached Benguela at sunset. Our hotel had a hot shower and two resident fluffy white dogs called Molly and Mookie. In the morning, we went to extend our visas. And we were told, sorry but no.

No?

This was day five. The last day of our visa. In Luanda, we had been as good as assured that an extension would be possible. Now we had been refused, and were liable for a 150 US dollar fine, each, per day that we overstayed. This, and we were about 450kms from the Angola-Namibia border, in a country where public transport meanders at best. Worst of all, Angola was the country we had hoped to secure our ‘Q’ in. Indeed, Qs are very rare in Africa, Somalia and Botswana being the only other known options (the former not really an option, when you think about it.) Now we were rushing out of the country, how the hell would we get our Q? We had to get onwards ASAP, and I had excruciating menstrual cramps to add to the fun. We found a bus bound for the southern town of Lubango, and had to wait two hours for it to set off. Between us and Lubango, we knew there was a small town called Quilengues. Would a bus full of strangers mind if the two foreigners wanted to stop and get out, just for a moment or two, in Quilengues? Just because it began with a ‘Q’? It is real testimony to the folks of Angola that they not only didn’t mind the mad photographer and woman with the notebook jumping off the bus in two different parts of Quilengues, but that they were amused and even excited about it.

‘Take my portrait, too!’ said one of the passengers as we climbed back on board, having stopped to take pictures in a small market (at 10pm), and buying whisky sachets for our models, as well as one for our ‘Q’ trinket. We even stopped outside a pretty church, lit up in the darkness, so that we could appreciate it. Would you find such kindness and understanding among a group of travelling strangers in Europe? Bet your arse you wouldn’t! At Lubango, it was too late to hunt for hotels, so all the passengers slept either on the bus, parked up in the station, or the nearby waiting room. I was physically and mentally exhausted, still in pain, and longing for Namibia. Come morning, we had one more bus to catch – one that would take us to the border. We sadly watched the hills of Lubango disappear behind us.

‘We have to come back here one day and see this, ‘said Seth, emotionally, ‘I love this part of Africa. I wish we had more time.’

‘And money,’ I pointed out. Central Africa had cleaned our pockets out somewhat.

‘But Angola is amazing. I’ve got some of my best photos from the whole trip in the few days we’ve been here, ‘ Seth sighed. I knew what he meant. The intense travel had been enriching. But I was making a tally in my notebook of all of the huge, rusting tanks we past along the roadside, and the fact that when we stopped to pee, nobody could go into the bushes because of landmines, made this a country that could only really make me feel sombre. There were moments when it was truly beautiful though; mountains, cliffs, palm trees, towns that clung to hills and sunsets that fell behind silhouetted baobab trees. The people, too, aside from the young male drinking cult, had been warm and approachable. But in all honesty, I wanted to leave, and I didn’t really want to come back. That we might end up paying 300 US dollars to leave was an unhappy thought, and as the bus rattled slowly along the bad road to the border, it seemed like we might not reach it before it closed. Cows with bells around their necks minced across the road in a way that seemed knowing and deliberate.

‘Come on, cows! Bloody cows!’ said Seth with white knuckles, as the closing time crept closer. I smiled and videoed them as they loitered at the roadside. Fate would have to do its thing.

We arrived at immigration with just minutes to spare. Handing over our passports hopefully, we rode the wave of chance, hoping the expiration date might go unnoticed. Not so. We were called to a back room. Heads down, we slunk in, both of us knackered and thinking, ‘damn.’ Seth now underwent a remarkable transformation. His basic Spanish, learnt while we were living in the USA in 2002, suddenly made him able to kind of speak, and understand, Portuguese. He had managed a little so far in Angola, but this was impressive. I looked at him as though he was a Martian just dropped down from space, and thought, ‘Man, he really is some kind of genius.’
The officials looked at our details on their computers and told us we were a day overdue, and owed them 300 dollars. Seth said, very politely, in this new, miracle Portuguese, that the circumstances were totally beyond our control, that we’d been given misinformation about extensions, that we had rushed all the way to the border as soon as we had found out, and couldn’t some exception be made? A senior official took us to a back room. Here, things worked in our favour. You see, it was either we pay the state/government the classified 300 bucks, or we line the pocket of one individual and the problem would disappear. Ah Africa. So much talk of corruption. But honestly, it sucks you in, and you do become part of it. We had already had to pay bribes, and we knew it was no good thing, but in this situation it saved our skin. Forty US dollars and we were out of there. We felt bad to have played the greasing palm game and hoped we would never have to do it again. It happens to most travellers in Africa, and I admire the ones who stand up to it as much as possible. As we stepped out of Angola and into Namibia, I could not suppress a feeling of huge relief.

‘You need a ride to Ondangwa?’ asked an official outside the Namibian immigration post, ‘I finish my shift in a minute. I’ll give you a lift.’

Seth and I smiled at each other. We had come through Central Africa. I had dark circles around my eyes, like a big racoon, and there had been too many pilchards and stock cubes, too many bribes, too many nightmare journeys – but it had been the travel experience of a lifetime.

The plunge into Central Africa brought us to a string of exotic-sounding places I’d never heard of in my life; places like Oyem, Ndjole, Lambarene, N’dende, Mila-mila, M’banza Kongo,Benguela and Lubango. The few that I had heard of – Brazzaville, Kinshasa, Luanda – did not fill my heart with delight, though there was a little buzz, a small flush of excitement, connected with each, because they seemed like cities of the imagination, places that had seen hard times, were or had been hard to live in, and were visited only by intrepid explorers, coffee swilling journalists and wary expats. The sense of adventure was with us as we headed south, though for me it came with some sleepless nights.

Gabon was easy to travel through until we hit the equator, and the paved jungle road descended into red dust. As a country, it seemed less scruffy and more ‘together’ than Cameroon, with heavier price tags to match. Friendly locals in the border town had helped us get our orientation.

‘This is Gabon!’ exclaimed a young man selling biscuits.

‘This is a sandwich!’ grinned another man close by, waving it at us.

President Bongo had just passed away and Gabon was in an official mourning period that was just winding to a close, after which talk of succession could take place. Big posters on billboards showing Bongo’s image were everywhere. In the countryside and along the edge of the forests, one story wooden slat houses saw the usual rural activity played out around them. Goats grazed and sprung about, chickens pecked in ditches, clothes hung on lines and people headed out with baskets and machetes to harvest fruit while others worked around the home. New to us was the bush meat trade. Roadside trade extended beyond the usual piles of plantain here – over barrels, the occasional dead monkey was laid out for sale, and pangolins hung from wooden frames by their tails. In Oyem, our alphabet ‘O’, we found pangolin on a restaurant menu (‘You know!’ smiled the waiter, ‘the one that curls up into a ball!’) it was not tempting. Seth got a haircut in this town, in a tiny dark barbers full of mirrors and dusty football posters. It looked to me that the barber had accidentally given him a big round bald patch, and for twenty minutes I was genuinely worried. In daylight, however, the bald patch was gone, and what Seth was left with was a classic Kevin-Costner-in-The-Bodyguard cut. Preferable, I think, to a monk-from-The-Name-of-the-Rose cut.

The women in our minibus south to Ndjole spent much of the journey picking on a couple from Equatorial Guinea, because their incomplete paperwork kept slowing us down at police checks. The bad vibe seemed to rub off on the bus itself because the strap attaching all the luggage to the roof snapped and everything fell into the road. For an hour, the women directed their shouting at the bus boys as they attempted to reload, and we sat by the road enjoying the view of Gabon’s thick forests as large hornbills flew over it. A little boy joined us and we threw stones at targets. The cliché about travelling in Africa teaching you patience is absolutely true. I learned lots about patience last summer when walking such a long pilgrimage day by day, too. Hopefully, by September, I will be a patience wizard. The afternoon ticked on, the light began to change. I walked two hundred metres down the road, retrieved a fallen plantain, and brought it back, adding it to the pile for reloading. Finally we got back on
the road, and the scene became stunningly exotic, with the wide brown Ogooue River to our left and whole tunnels of lime green bamboo to pass under. In Ndjole, I bought popcorn from a man in the street with a very old fashioned popping machine, and we ate grilled chicken from a street stall, and drank cheap Regab beer. Everything and everyone in the town was bleached with red dust, and logging trucks roared through the dusty heart of the place. It was a strange town and our being there was strange, too, for the people living there: a double whammy of weirdness.
The same logging lorries that roared through Ndjole also nearly killed us numerous times on the road south to Lambarene. They swung round corners on the wrong side of the road and almost sent us flying into ditches several times. Our share-taxi driver mumbled his disapproval but generally lost himself to the reedy tones of Phil Collins, singing about paradise again, as he always has since we came to Africa. Lambarene, on the Oogue River, would have been a great place to stay, if both of us hadn’t gotten intense food poisoning. (You know it’s a bad place to eat lunch when you see a member of the kitchen staff sticking his finger up his nose to prod a spot, but by then our plates were clean…) Both of us lay hot then cold, green in the cheeks, exhausted from vomiting, in what was a nice hotel with a pleasant balcony we never really got to enjoy. We had chosen it because the guidebook said the owners demonstrated ‘some eccentric behaviour’, and we wanted to know exactly what that meant, but sadly we were too ill to find out and it will remain a mystery. Whenever I closed my eyes, all I could see was road and jungle coming at me, and somewhere echoing in my brain were remnants of the usual minibus songs, about Jehovah, and being covered in the blood of Jesus, and being in-ter-nash-eeo-nal.

The next day, weak and grumpy, we attempted to catch a bus south to the Congolese border. Unfortunately, the white Toyota pick-up truck heading that way already had a full cabin, and the back was half loaded with boxes and luggage. The remaining space – about one by two metres if I’m generous – was occupied by a crush of six people. There was room for two more, insisted the driver. It was not wise for two people who were sick and who had not eaten for 24 hours to ride for many hours on the edge of an overcrowded pickup truck but we climbed apprehensively on board. It was the filthiest journey to date. The woman across from me kept holding her head in her hands and muttering ‘never again’ in French. The bumps meant you had to hold on for dear life, and the rising dust from the red roads coated all of us until, at police checks, we were no longer recognisable against our passport pictures. How the cop kept a straight face while scrutinising so many bright orange faces is beyond me. If you closed your eyes, your eyelids grew so heavy with dust that it was actually hard to open them again. It was impossible not to swallow the stuff, too, when you spoke to someone or coughed. We arrived in N’dende looking like complete freaks, and checked into a motel at a petrol station. After washing away an ocean of orange dirt, it was beer time, and our empty stomachs, having shifted the bug, cried out for food. Crashed out in chairs in the motel bar, we laughed about the day, and a black dog strolled up to us to be petted. When I looked down, it was actually a chimpanzee. ‘Toto, no,’ called the waitress, and it scuttled off. Strange incidents like this are beginning to feel normal.

When it comes to police bribes and corruption, we had always expected central Africa to be the worst. In Nigeria, we didn’t pay a single bribe. Cameroon was bad for it, Gabon comparatively angelic, but northern Congo proved to be something else. Our first experience took the biscuit – or noodles, even. Barely had we stepped into little Ngongo, our very first Congolese town/village when the police had us opening up our bags, laying everything out, and talking them through each item in detail as their eyes shone covetously. It was like a television shopping channel, listening to Seth explaining his GPS while eyeballs goggled. One man was particularly taken by my small collection of Nigerian movies. In his head, they had his name blazoned across them in big letters.

‘These’, he wagged a finger at me, ‘are illegal. It’s illegal to bring them here!’ He was using the fake-stern manner, pulling the fake-stern face, that we have seen so many times on greedy officials out here. I used to do a lot of acting, and I see it as an art form, so when someone is ‘acting’ with me in real life, for the sake of manipulation, I see straight through it and it urks me. I get customers like this occasionally in the bookshop, who pretend to be angry about something to wangle a discount – the faux-huffing and puffing, like little dragons – you can spot it a mile off. It’s hammy. So this official was furrowing his brow at me, jabbing an accusing finger at my petite nollywood selection, and he was about as intimidating as a tuskless walrus in a sunhat, honking along to yellow submarine, but annoyingly these people do have the power to make things difficult for you. I brushed off his talk about the DVDs and continued to unpack when he ordered me to do so, being sure to wave my packs of sanitary towels and tampons in his face.

‘Keep calm,’ whispered Seth, recognising the classic Taurean temper beginning to reveal itself, ‘don’t get impatient with them!’

Meanwhile, the other policeman was very interested in our packs of noodles. ‘You just add hot water’, explained Seth. This will make me sound ridiculous, but the pack in question was my favourite flavour and I had spent some of the morning planning devouring them – cracking a raw egg on top, stirring it in, down the hatch – so when Seth made the (actually wise) decision to give them to the cop, I stood mortified for a moment,, long enough to make my official bark at me to start packing away the big mess they’d forced us to make in their office. It was necessary, too, to hand over a token note in a handshake before we were allowed to progress to the next office. (In Congo, you run the gauntlet of different divisions and at every layer you want to bury your wallet deep in your pocket.) In the second office, we ducked out of the bribe. In the third, we bought our visas, and the officer had no interest in lining his pocket. Ngongo was tiny, dusty and inhabited by more hens than people. We asked when the next vehicle would head south, expecting an answer like ‘3pm.’

‘It’ll be tomorrow morning, 5am’ was the response. This meant a whole afternoon and night in police-ville. The local hotel was a brick block of tiny rooms under one long corrugated iron roof. Cockerels strolled in and out of our room as we made a makeshift lunch, and when we ventured out into the town… village… we found it was only a hundred metres long. Beyond it lay deserted grasslands and dirt road. Walking a little way in the late afternoon light, it was hard to understand we had reached the Congo.

‘Don’t walk as far as the roundabout,’ warned the local kids, ‘there are ghosts.’ Congo’s civil war officially ended in 2003, but security in the country was still a bit patchy. Elections had just been held and the results were widely believed to have been rigged. Ahead of us down that dirt road lay a country with a difficult past, an edgy present and an unpredictable future. I was fairly sure that the only ghosts on the road were metaphorical, but perhaps that made them no less important to consider.

At half four in the morning a horn began to blast on the road outside our room. We both sat bolt upright as someone pounded on the door. For those who have seen the movie ‘Jeepers Creepers’ (scary, but ultimately let down by the hysterically unfrightening use of the namesake song as a recurring theme); remember the first scene, in which the two teenagers are chased by a crazy truck being driven wildly down the road by an insane demon, leaning on the horn, waaaaaap-waaaap? That truck was waiting for us on this particular morning. There was no time to wake up or even to think – we ran to the lorry, were ushered away from its crowded back and into the cabin, where we sat between mike, the angry yet likeable driver, and Joseph, the bespectacled maths teacher. The hours passed and night fused into day. Only after several police checks (and one bribe) did I realise I was wearing my adidas trousers around my neck. There hadn’t been time to pack them. At one stop, loading boys heaved crates of empty beer bottles onto the roof. As though the sight of so many empties offended him, mike cracked open a full bottle and slugged down the full 600ml. Somehow, it didn’t really matter. He and Joseph warmed to us, and enjoyed pointing out oddities along the way – Joseph in the precise detail suited to his profession, and Mike in his loud Jeepers Creepers style. He helped Seth get photos of some men selling a big hunk of gazelle, and then bought it. Later he pulled over and bought a dead monkey. I watched him inspecting the quality of its sad hands in the wing mirror. Close to the town of mila-mila the scene suddenly became one of grassy mounds, very spectacular. We waved goodbye to Mike and Joseph, and looked for onward transport to Pointe-noire – our planned ‘P’ – in this tiny junction town. It lay 181 kilometres away. The policeman who checked our passports told us it would be a ride of two hours, maybe three. It sounded easy, but the town was full of people huddled in bars looking slightly dusty – not a good sign. Their luggage – typically dotted with great branches of plantains – lay by the road with half-arsed plastic covers draped across it. It had obviously been there for some time.

‘How long have you been here?’ Seth asked a tired looking workman nursing a beer.

‘Since yesterday’ was the reply. It seemed like nobody in these bars was that set on actually reaching Pointe-Noire. They’d given up. There was no public transport – the only chance you had was hitching a lift in or on a lorry, and these guys had too much luggage to squeeze into a cabin. Someone knew someone who might be leaving for P-N that afternoon. The lorry depot was a kilometre away, they could give us a lift. We agreed. Mila-mila was too depressing to hang out in, and we told ourselves we weren’t queue jumping because nobody had seemed remotely animated to get up and go. It was a logging company, and our ride would be a huge lorry loaded down with huge tree trunks. A price was debated over and the driver readied the vehicle. We waited. And waited. A kitten fell asleep on Seth’s bag and we talked with a local nurse. Kids with mad hairdos ran around while women prepared pastry puff-puffs. Finally Seth said to me: ‘Why are you wearing your trousers around your neck?’

‘It’s been that kind of day,’ I said.

It was an hour and a half before we climbed up into the cabin and hit the jungle road. The excitement of leaving in the lorry wore thin when it became clear that it could travel no faster than a trotting warthog. It had severe problems with hills and even the smoothest parts of the rough jungle roads threw the driver into overly-cautious concentration. Bafflingly, other lorries with identical loads roared by and sped into the distance, leaving us in clouds of red dust. Moussa, the driver, was a good guy, but we worried – with all the scenic twists and turns in the road, we seemed to be covering no distance at all, and we were moving as fast as a drunken slug. Pushed to explain our situation, Moussa told us that while most other lorries had ten cylinders, we had eight. While they could race downhill in third gear, we had to do so in first. Hours past. Each time we hit a pothole, we flew out of our seats. Sunset approached. P-N was virtually no closer than it had been when we set out many hours before. Moussa pulled up beside a truckers stop next to the Mayoume Forest. It was a lovely area, where patches of dark green forest filled the clefts in the valley, but the idea of sleeping over in an all-male truck stop in the middle of the Congo worried me. Nobody had said anything about overnighting in the middle of nowhere. It felt like a curveball I wasn’t quite ready to catch. Moussa reassured me that there were women here, and as we walked into the fire lit compound, I was relieved to see one or two of them, their faces lit up orange. A simple wooden hut was available for us. It had a sand floor and we had goats for neighbours. You locked the door from the inside using two big sticks and the bed was a bamboo frame with a thin mattress. From the small supply shop we bought a drink for Moussa, and pilchards, beer and luncheon meat for ourselves, which we ate by the light of a kerosene lamp. (The pilchards were mine. Too many crunchy spines…)

At dawn, the three of us returned to the lorry. Surveying the huge load as the sun rose over it, it looked almost appealing. We drove ALL DAY. I thought several times about the policeman’s claim that it would take just two or three hours. There were times when the GPS thought we were actually getting further away from Pointe-Noire. For some reason it didn’t matter and we even laughed about it. Sometimes potholes almost sent the three of us through the roof. It was sunset when we reached the coastal city. The two hours had in fact been 26. There was a sense of awesome release on hopping into a taxi, but it was short lived. Seth and the driver conducted an animated conversation in French that did not sound at all promising. I kept hearing the words ‘train’, ‘ninjas’ and ‘probleme.’ The ninjas, I knew, were a militant group. We had already discovered the crazily bad roads in Southern Congo (deliberate neglect, we were told, a political statement from a government that looked north) and had been counting on riding the train east to the capital, Brazzaville, from where to cross into the DRC. If we couldn’t take the train, we were in trouble. I looked out of the window. Our guidebook called the city Congo’s answer to a beach resort, but we never saw the sea, and the streets were covered in grey sand. Alleyways were piled high with rubbish, and pubs had great paintings outside – gorillas, crocodiles, mirrors in the shape of the Eiffel tower. Trucks carrying soldiers with huge guns rumbled past. Our hotel was bustling with wealthy Africans, and the occasional Chinese visitor, here to see family working on the national highway or near the oil plants. The Simpsons was on TV in French. We took a room and Seth translated the conversation from the cab: the train is unsafe to travel on, as it passes through the dangerous Pool region before reaching Brazzavillle. In Pool, the police have to get off the train and the Ninjas get on to hassle the travellers a little. As foreigners with valuable gear, we’d almost certainly be robbed of everything we owned, should the militia feel that way inclined. As for our physical safety, it could not be guaranteed or guessed at.

‘Perhaps the driver was exaggerating’, said Seth, ‘a lady in the lobby said she might be able to arrange an armed guard for us…’

I was not feeling inspired by any of this. The next day we went to the train station and asked the situation. They confirmed that the ninjas did indeed take over the train at Pool, and that we would be likely targets. Sassou had only been re-elected a week ago and tensions were high in the country.

‘Maybe we could hire a 4 by 4,’ I suggested, though totally unconvinced, ‘there’s still the road.’

We asked our hotel manager about it. He said that to avoid the Pool region we would have to drive all the way up to north Congo then all the way down again; days…probably weeks… He held our shoulders.

‘You are young people, with long lives ahead. These people don’t value human life. They are bad, bad people – like animals.’ We knew we had to fly. Seth cursed our map, and then our chosen route through Gabon to Ngongo, but if fate puts a bunch of crazed rebels in your path, what can you do? The next day, when we flew to Brazzaville, President Sassou was flying to Pointe-Noire. Both airports were braced for him, the armed soldiers more serious looking than ever. Politics seemed to lace life in central Africa, even in the eyes of the fly-by traveller. The flight instilled in both of us a sense of numbness. We had travelled on public transport from Morocco to Congo, and now had to break our aeroplane virginity, against our wishes. It was only a domestic flight. This distance was just 350km. We didn’t have a choice but it felt like a failure at the time. In likeable Brazzaville, even after beer and Chinese food, I felt a bit broken. Part of me thought we may as well be done with it and fly to Johannesburg, and explore southern Africa from there. Why risk travel in the DRC and the uncertainty of trying for an Angolan visa, when we could just fly? In honesty, what I was experiencing was pure nerves. We planned to cross the Congo River to Kinshasa, DRC, the next morning. I’m not a brave person. It’s a common misconception that those who travel to unlikely places are. Like most people, I get a little high from risk taking when it works out, sure, but I don’t much trust that part of myself – it’s a bit tacky, like the cheap, brief thrill you get on a rollercoaster. I don’t travel to take risks or to boast of it; I travel because the world is amazing and I like to be as much in it as possible. In many ways I am still a total softy, and so that night, I didn’t sleep. I was awake all night – seriously – worrying about Kinshasa. We never wanted to have to fly at any point between Morocco and South Africa, but the unpredictable stability of certain African countries meant that we would probably have to at some point. We were lucky it was just a domestic flight, and it in no way tarnished the efforts we had made with public transport all the way down. The coward in me now wanted to fly to Joburg, to skip the DRC and the potential Angola hassle, and to find myself instantly in sunny South Africa. But at sunrise Seth woke up, and he’s braver than me. The wheels began to set in motion, towards the Congo River, where from the banks we could see, on the far side, the city skyline I had dreaded all night.