By the time I made it to the Angola/DRC border, it was getting dark, I was severely dehydrated and hadn’t been able to keep down hardly any food.

I had read somewhere online that the border was open until 6PM, so with my 5:45 arrival time and the fact that the border was remote and had almost no truck/commercial traffic led me to believe I would be able to squeeze past and get to my intended destination of the Catholic Mission (where you can camp for free) in Matadi, the DRC border town.

The Angolan side in Noqui was in fact open until 6PM - score!

However, the DRC side closed at 5 (of course), so I was forced to stay the night on the Angolan side.  There was nothing remotely resembling a hotel or guesthouse or anything like it among the concrete and mud huts that made up Noqui, but I was welcome to camp on the porch of the police station.

I could barely walk, and unloading my bags and setting up my tent took almost an hour.  The police officers were extremely helpful however, and brought me sachets of water (no bottled water in the part of the world - just sealed plastic bags), and after a tour of one of the police officer’s homes (just a concrete walled, thatch-roofed, and dirt-floored 10 ft by 10ft hut), this particular toothless officer let me bucket shower outside his hut and had a local woman prepare me a huge plate of rice and mystery meat.  I gorged myself until I passed out, face smeared with rice and sauce, still amazed that I had actually made it.

The next morning I was awake bright and early.

That doesn’t mean I was able to move.

My entire body was covered in bruises, I had severely pulled an ab muscle (how do you do that?  seriously), and strained both my calves pretty badly.

I limped around slowly packing my gear, while avoiding the incessant asking by my toothless policeman “friend” if he could have various items, from my shoes to the soccer jerseys I bought to give me “something to talk about” with the constant police roadblocks (of course the only conversation topic is “hey can I have that?”).

Now there is plenty of begging in Africa, and all Africans assume white people are fabulously wealthy and have come to Africa to give Africans stuff and then high-tail it out of there.  This is (just one!) of the the ugly sides of foreign aid, and based on my constant observation one of the many things that holds Africa back in development.  This of course does not apply to all Africans or even the majority, but there is a significant minority that has simply been trained to think and act this way.  (This topic is worthy of another post, let alone an entire book or field of study, but I digress.)

So after completing the formalities on the Angolan side, I rolled my bike downhill the 100 meters to the DRC immigration hut.  Note that like most African borders, there is some sort of boom or piece of wood that approximates a gate, but thousands of people stream back and forth all day long, and without fail, there are thousands of people living/working/doing business in the space between the borders (which is anywhere from a few meters to 100 kilometers of “no man’s land.”)

I have no idea what citizenship these people claim, but it doesn’t matter - they all speak the same tribal language and are of the same ancestry as people on both sides, and the fact that there is a border between them is a legacy of ignorant and idiotic colonialists.

Prime example:  The Angola/DRC border is mostly defined by the Congo river.  If you’re some colonialist power, and it’s say, 1885, and you’re carving up Africa for resource extraction, and you see this big huge river and apparent natural barrier, you’d say “damn that looks like the obvious place to split these two countries!”

And you’d be wrong, since as long as people had been walking upright, they have been swimming/fjording/canoeing/whatever across the river on a daily basis, one tribe of people sharing a common language and history.

Anyways, I get my official immigration stamp at the immigration shack, and start to waddle down to the customs shack.  Remember - borders that are porous aren’t important, it’s the effing stamp that is important!  Africans loooooove stamps - if the West really wants to have an impact with foreign aid, it should air drop millions of stamps and inkpads across the continent - the locals will crap themselves with joy.

At the customs shack, after waddling 200 meters in full gear and blistering heat (left my bike under the slightly twitchy lazy eye of the stuttering immigration officer - note that this is not the first nor the last stutterer working in official capacity - there must be some sort of continent-wide hiring policy), I find out that since it is Sunday, the customs guy is not at his post, but is instead at church.

Of course.

The border is open on Sundays, but they will be damned if anyone crosses without a customs stamp! So I waddle back up the hill to wait at the immigration shack, as I am told that since it is almost 10AM, the customs officer should be back “any minute.”

If we were playing Jeopardy, the category would be “Bureacracy for 100, Alex,” the answer would be “The Great African Waiting Game,” and I would buzz in immediately with “What do I spend most of my time playing in Africa?” and I would be killing it, but it isn’t, so I’m not, and I sat my ass down in the sweltering heat until about 2pm until the customs officer arrived.

Take note that both the Angolan side and the DRC side were basically hassle-free, staffed by very friendly and helpful officers who wanted to chat about Barack Obama, soccer, and how nice the people of their countries were. 

Also note that the Lonely Planet guide for Africa, which for half the countries I have/will visit on this trip say it’s “too dangerous” to go in person and instead published a friggin’ guidebook by doing a few minutes of internet research, describes the Angola/DRC border as “rarely attempted by foregners and you could be faced with reams of bureacracy and a whole lot of hassle…unless you’re a truly intrepid overlander avoid at all costs.”  

The idiot responsible for this “research” is Brendan Sainsbury, and I hope he Googles himself one afternoon, finds this blog post, and then subsequently punches himself in the nuts for supplying such completely wrong information.

So - after finding Jesus and stamping my bike customs document, the customs officer sent me on my way, and with only 4 hours of daylight left, I hightailed it northward to Kinshasa on the only tar road in the entire country.

The road was in relatively good condition with the usually stretches full of axle-breaking potholes, and was too curvy for traffic to go more than 90k/hour at a time, which of course didn’t stop the usual ridiculously overloaded diesel trucks and minibuses from flying around corners at breakneck speeds.

Highlights of the ride include:

1.  Giant twisted-metal gaps in the guardrails every few kilometers or so where a car or truck had blasted through at highspeed on the way to certain death, with the occasional rusted-out wreck visible below (NB:  not the first or last time.)

2.  Minibuses passing me doing at least 120k with twice as many passengers as seats and goats on all fours on the top somehow managing to stay on top as the bus careened around corners.

3.  An old Peugot 504 taxi (they are everywhere in Africa) in worse than usual shape doing about 40k/hour and with at my last count 23 people on or in the vehicle.  There were about 10 people inside the sedan, with a sets of legs poking out each window, about 7 or 8 standing on the roof holding on to each each, and 6 or 7 standing on the hood like they were trying to set a car-surfing record.  The weight was distributed so poorly that the car was turned leftwards about 30 degrees yet still headed straight, with a tire about to explode any second.

I arrived on the outskirts of Kinshasa around 5:15pm, and had about 45 minutes of daylight left to find the port, get on the boat to Brazzaville, and exit the DRC.

That didn’t happen.

In fact my week was going to get a lot worse before it got better, and I was going to get a lot more acquainted with a good chunk of Kinshasa than I would have liked.