Arriving on the outskirts of Kinshasa as the sun was starting to fade didn’t cause too much alarm at first.

In the hills outside the city there were a surprising amount of very nice houses in private compounds (obviously belonging to either government officials or the business elite - ok so they are the same thing), and there was a surprisingly small amount of shanty towns ringing the main road into the city, unlike Luanda’s kilometers upon kilometers of shanty towns and non-existent roads.

As I descended out of the hills towards to Congo river, I started to get more and more worried that without a GPS, map, compass, or any sense of direction whatsoever (I get lost in my hometown - regularly - this is not a joke), I was going to be up a certain creek without a paddle.  As all you excellent geography students know, part of the Congo river separates the DRC from the Republic of Congo (yes they are different), and the only way to cross is by ferry.

I knew that the road curved quite a bit to get to the port, but after a few attempts to head towards what looked like the waterfront, I found myself along a dirt path in heavy traffic along the water heading away from the city. I started asking people who didn’t look either completely insane or destitute for directions in my mangled french, and I finally after a bunch of nonsensical answers and “oui!”’s that were obviously not supposed to be “oui,” I found a guy at what used to be a gas station who spoke a little bit of english and told me not only was I headed in the completely wrong direction, but the last ferry left at 4.

Oops.

I then entered what is known colloquially as “ohshitthisisbaduhohuhohuhoh” or more formally as “panic mode.”

I turned around and started heading as fast as possible over the potholed dirt road in thick traffic as fast as possible, skidding once with both brakes applied to avoid hitting a government-ish looking tinted-window SUV that decided it was going to try to pass at breakneck speed - we both stopped about 5 feet away from each other - not a fun close call.

Another thing to note - I had been having headlight issues since Namibia, as the main fan relay had melted and I had hotwired to the fan to the the ignition. (There was another problem but I didn’t sort that out until later - you’ll just have to wait for THAT story.) The main accessory fuse that covers the headlight and fan kept blowing, and of course I blew my very last fuse sometime that afternoon in the DRC and the darker it got, the less I could see.

There aren’t really any street lights in Africa - sometimes the government likes to play pretend and build some to appease a few angry mobs here and there, but they don’t actually hook them up to power, and a good chunk of cars and little chinese motorcycles that are on the road at night don’t have headlights (why bother? who needs to see?).

So as I made my way around to where the port actually was, it was almost completely dark, I had no headlight, no cooling fan (which means that the bike will overheat quickly when in traffic), no way to catch a long-gone ferry, no map, no GPS, and I just happened to be driving around in one of the worst neighborhoods in Kinshasa.

Being in a bad neighborhood in Kinshasa is like being in a bad neighborhood in Afghanistan - WTF are you doing there in the FIRST place?

So as I am driving along, starting to get more and desperate, knowing that there is no tourist infrastructure, what few hotels there are are outrageously priced in the hundreds of dollars (i.e. full of white people from NGOs or government orgs using our tax dollars to help save the poor Africans), no maps, and I have very little information in my Lonely Planet pieceofcrapguidebook, I all of a sudden spot about 7 white people standing next to a car on the side of the main road that runs along the waterfront/port/squatter camps.

Amazing. What the hell are these people doing here?

Turns out it’s two expat Portuguese families who have lived here for 11 years, and the wife of one of the, speaks perfect English, though the rest of them don’t.

Sensing my desperation, the English speaker and her husband and daughter offer to guide me to a hotel (was hoping for an invite to crash on the floor but no such luck), and after trying four places that were completely booked (thanks, UN staffers!), we finally found a hotel owned by a Portuguese expat that was dingy but a complete steal at $80 USD vs the $150 and up prices at the other places, and the restaurant even had air conditioning (when the power was on, which of course is rare in Kinshasa especially when it’s 38 degrees C (do the math) and 95% humidity.)

The Portuguese family ended up inviting me to dinner (where we had some of the most amazing Portuguese takeout I have ever had - giant prawns like I had never seen), and I got an actual espresso thanks to a machine they had brought over from Europe.

After a rough morning and early afternoon trying to muster the strength to head down to the port (which turns out was only about 100 yards from where I was rescued by the Portuguese family), I finally packed up the bike, buoyed by the fact that the generous hotel owner had comped me on the room that was seriously out of my tiny traveler’s budget.  80 bucks wouldn’t get you much better than a Days Inn in the states, but at that rate when you’re on a tiny budget and travelling indefinitely you expect either the Taj Mahal or the shower to spit out gold coins.

At the port I expected a bit of hassle, a few shakedowns by police and locals, and the general crap that any white tourist gets at your typical African border crossing.

I was definitely not prepared for what awaited me.

The second I rolled past the gates into the port, I was besieged by about 20 screaming Africans, some in uniforms, some not, all grabbing at my and demanding documents. 

I got flustered, but tried to maintain some composure, noticing that the boat was already docked and there was a mountain of people swarming it and scurrying around hauling sacks of whatever, pushing carts of junk, and generally screaming at and pushing each other.

As I slapped hands away from my bike and by tank bag, the head screamer in what appeared to be a port police uniform was demanding anywhere between $50 and $100 USD to get on the boat, telling me half in French half in what I assume was Likongo (one of the local tribal languages) and a third half in the form of flying spit that the boat was leaving shortly and I better pay him if I wanted to get on the boat

Now there are no signs here – no official anything, and no fixed prices, and the only people in uniform were either screaming at me or beating old ladies with braided rope.  Seriously. 

The level of violence and viciousness was unreal – port police or whatever they were randomly beating the absolute crap out of a bunch of peope, half of whom looked to either be drunk on palm wine or methylated spirits or sniffed-out on glue, including two little old ladies who may have been missing most of their teeth due to a lifetime of similar beatings.

After about only 30 seconds of this madness, I finally started to yell back at the police/touts/etc. and tell them there was no way I was paying over $30 USD (which was the going rate as per the locals in town) for myself and the bike.

This did not go over so well.

After a few minutes of arguing, the quasi-authority figure told me that $30 wasn’t enough, and I would have to come back tomorrow and was going to miss the boat.

As much as I wanted to get the hell out of Kinshasa, there was no way I was getting ripped off by those idiots, so I decided to take my ball and go home (i.e. turn around and go back to the hotel.)

Back at the hotel I drowned my sorrows in a few beers in the thoroughly refreshing 39 degree C heat and 95% humidity after taking an evening stroll around the filthy neighbourhood to observe a few locals beg me for change, yell “mundele mundele mundele!” at me over and over again, and most impressively, one guy squatting and building a garbage fire in the dirt and filth in front of a bank while simultaneously urinating on it – a feat of unparalleled post-modernist third-world irony, not to mention sniper-like aim and concentration.

Back at the hotel, a local government official who was dining at the hotel restaurant with several of his mistresses who happened to be vaguely in charge of the ports got wind of my story.

He immediately got on his cell phone and spent 10 minutes screaming at various underlings for mistreating a tourist and assured me that the next morning everything would be completely smooth sailing.

Ha!

The next morning, the scene was identical – so much for THAT.

But this time, I was prepared.  I parked by bike where I could see it from all angles and inside the various warehouse buildings with no signs that I figured I had to go get my little stamps from (cause as we all know by now, it’s the stamps that count in Africa).

I enlisted the help of a “friendly” tout who spoke decent English to guide me through (figuring I could pay him a few bucks for his trouble and save myself an hour of arguing), and we waddled around to the various warehouses to get meaningless stamps and my information written down seven times in various ancient primary-school notebooks, with every item in the wrong column (of course), and voila, thirty minutes later and $35 USD poorer, I was ready to run the gauntlet – squeezing myself and the bike onto a barge built for about 100 but packed with over a thousand Africans all jostling, pushing, and climbing over each other and everyone’s pushcarts made out of rebar and more sacks of the most random crap you’ve ever seen.

After paying the tout less than he asked for and physically shoving him off despites his protestations and his threatening to through my documents in the river (thanks, friend!), I squeezed on into what was probably the dead center of the barge, much to the amusement of the locals.

One thing to note about this barge is that the vast chunk of its passengers are Congolese heading over to Brazzaville to sell goods in the market, and for some godforsaken reason, a good chunk of those are cripples, some missing a limb or eye or something else not terribly essential, but most commonly shrivelled legs from polio.

Yes – polio – totally wiped out in the Western world and countered by a simple and cheap vaccine, but sadly still a terrible fact of everyday life in many parts of Africa.

I spent the next hour sitting uncomfortably on my motorcycle while teaching the locals what all the universal symbols for begging, give me money, I’m hungry, etc. mean to Americans.  So the next time you run into a Congolese who thinks that rubbing your stomach and holding your hand out means “what time is it?” and rubbing your thumb and forefinger together mean “I want to be your friend” you’ll understand why.

After docking on the Brazzaville side and finally rolling my bike onto the dirt in front of a bunch of unlabeled concrete buildings with a bunch of Africans waving papers at a bunch of guys without uniforms sitting at children’s school desks from the pre-colonial period (sadly no secret drawer to stash the answers to tomorrow’s geometry quiz), I was able to get my official stamps.

After a laughable shakedown attempt by a hustler to tried to tell me the port was “private” and I had to pay him for the privilege of arrival, I fired up the bike, ran over the fat guy’s foot, and hightailed it out of there.

In fact – I hightailed it around Brazzaville for about three hours looking for the hotel/guesthouse that supposedly allowed camping for overlanders (thanks to no GPS and all Africans universal inability to give directions – yes this is a scientific fact), I finally found it, of course located down the one side street I hadn’t turned down yet.

The Republic of Congo definitely had a more laid back feel, which was a welcome relief after the edginess of the DRC, and I was looking forward to a few days of relaxation before I had to attempt the Congo-Gabon border crossing, 250k of a deep rutted sand, which I was absolutely dreading.  And it was definitely going to suck.