Tag Archives: Bunia

The last journey: Epulu to Bunia

Adventures, bus, drc, Travelling in Africa, ,

It’s been more than six months since we returned from that crazy, whirlwind three week trip to Uganda and the Eastern DRC. The whole trip lasted less than 21 days but it’s taken all this time to process, to remember, to understand what was crammed into that short space. I could tell more tales of more journeys – car, ferry, bus, plane – but this is the last story of the trip. The last piece of remembering pinned to the page.

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We woke early that morning, two days after Christmas, packed and went to wait by the road. Unlike our outbound trip, we were unsure what kind of transport we’d get. After all, hopping a bus where the route started in Bunia was likely to be far easier than cramming a spot on an overcrowded skorokoro already full from its starting point in Kisengani.

So we waited. The guards, who knew us of old by now, brought us blue plastic chairs to sit on. Five travellers, with their bags, by the side of the road. We took bets on how long it would take us to get a ride. We took bets on what kind of vehicle we’d end up catching. We contemplated playing cards.

Two vehicles arrived. One was an NGO landcruiser. The other was a Nile Coaches bus. After the misery of the trip here, we were reluctant even to consider another eight hours on one of those busses. Extremely reluctant. This one, however, turned out to be a semi-out-of-service bus, which, crucially, meant that it was empty. No millions of people, no masses of luggage, no white sacks, no Chinese flip-flops. An empty bus would be far better able to navigate the potholes. And it could move faster. We were sold. We climbed on board. Most people headed for the front. I found myself a seat further back. This trip I wanted quiet, to be by myself, to watch the world go by.

The world was beautiful. We passed homesteads and households. People sitting outside. Children playing. Forests. Streams. At Mambasa, we stopped for breakfast of stale chapatti and cake. Chapati – the one food I’d rather eat in Uganda.

Back on the road. Run-down vehicles-that-never-die passed us. We passed pedestrians – how far were they walking? Ituri River Bridge (Pont Ituri 22m), donated by the British government and assembled by MONUC Nepalese troops. More homesteads, more huts, more contrasts with the Southern African rural areas.

The bus took us as far as Komanda, where we’d find other transport. We sat on the side of the road, leaning against a fence. Komanda, 2pm. Dusty. Hot. Waiting for transport of any kind. The two people in our group who speak French and Swahili had wandered off. A storm was building up in the distance. We waited. Patiently. Peacefully. We weren’t rushing to be anywhere, anymore. There was an ease to the afternoon. Travelling in Africa teaches you patience. Richard dozed in the reccie hat he bought in Bunia, with his army bag, by the dusty road.

A truck passed by but they said they weren’t going to Bunia. A man offered his car for $90. We countered with $60 but he refused. Two boys came by selling hard-boiled eggs. We bought one. Then another. And another. Boiled eggs with salt on the roadside in Komanda. That’s a good memory. Someone went off and bought more stale chapati and some water. We eat more eggs.

After a time, a mini-bus taxi came past. We wandered over to find out if they were going back to Bunia tomorrow, mostly at peace now with spending the night in Komanda. It turned out they were travelling back that day. A price is negotiated, the taxi headed to town to collect other passengers while we settle back into the shade of our tin-sheeting fence, to wait.

The taxi ride was hair-raising. The driver narrowly avoided a head-on collision more than once. To be fair, this was generally the result of a car in our lane refusing to move till the last minute but still a little terrifying. The poultry were in grave danger of death-by-taxi, too. Chickens who sauntered across the road in front of oncoming traffic. Ducks who refuse to move so the driver literally had to go around. Pigeons who waddled away at the last minute, far too lazy to fly.

In between worrying about cars and poultry, we watched the gorgeous stormlight. Dark clouds across grassland with stretched-out rays creating spotlights of contrast. A relief, as always, to get back to grassland. The forests had been beautiful but the grasslands of the world will always be my heart and my home.

Back in Bunia, the taxi stopped outside MONUSCO house. What a different arrival to the first time, just a week before. We wandered down to Mama Tamara’s, where the boda-bodas had first dropped us, and booked rooms at $10 per night. Way more pleasant than the other place, even if it turned out, maybe, possibly, to be something of a brothel. The doors had locks. The rooms were clean. It was a good place to stay.

A good place to end the journey. The eastern DRC is an amazing place. Just getting there, just being there, had taken months of planning and research, plucking up courage and calming down anxious relatives and friends. I doubt it would have happened if it hadn’t been for Richard. I owe him a debt of gratitude. Him and the others who travelled with us. The people who shared the frustration of getting stuck in that horrible hotel in Bunia and the joy of discovering Epulu and Kisenyi, and the magic of movement and travel and going, just going, not to discover something new and world-changing but just to see.

In 2008, I travelled into Africa for the first time, with an amazing group of people. Since then I have been to two other continents and seven more African countries. I have learnt that the end of one journey is invariably the beginning of another and that journeys start and end far beyond the actual days of travel; the anticipation, the remembering are part of it too.

That last morning in Bunia, I sit on a cement ledge and watch a little microcosm of this foreign-familiar world. Men and boys fetch water in yellow gerry-cans. A woman in a black dress and gold hairnet washes shoes in a bucket. Crows come to rest in the tree next door. A white rooster wanders around, contemplating crowing. A boy teaches his sister French counting words outside a wooden shed. Someone is sweeping the yard. It starts to rain. The camera pulls back and the shot fades out. It’s time for the planning, the anticipation of the next adventure to begin.

You can check out any time you want but you can never leave

Adventures, drc, Travelling in Africa,

That hotel in Bunia became more and more unbearable as the days went by. It was hot and unpleasant and it smelled. I used to think indoor plumbing was a necessity. Then I stayed in places where the water no longer works. I’ll take outdoor sanitation over indoor toilets with no running water any day. The nights dragged. The days were hot and dusty. We kept trying to leave and it kept falling through.

So we stayed in Bunia and played journalist. Or to be fair some of the group spent the days being journalists. I spent the time remembering why am not a journalist. We met with NGOs and aid workers. I like talking with people who work in development and aid but instead of talking with them, we interviewed them. We visited NGO projects. It felt too much like work for a holiday. I was restless. I wanted to be gone.

There were high points in Bunia, too, of course. One morning we found a place called Cafe de la Paix. The building is old and the walls are painted apple-green. The cafe has been open since 1956. Chairs and tables sit on a little covered veranda, protected from the prying eyes of passers-by by wooden lattice-work over the windows. In the dark little shop itself are clusters of old couches and coffee tables. On the sheves are rows of coffee and tea, tinned foods, porridge and mazena. On the wall is an old moth-eaten impala head. Behind the counter stand a young, beautiful black woman and an older lady who doesn’t look like she is from here. We learn later that she is part Congolese, the descendent of an Iranian who came to Bunia many years ago and married a local beauty. She has come back all these years, all this time, through the wars: Bunia is her home. Cafe de la Paix serves Nescafé coffee and fresh chapatis and toast and cheese omelettes. It’s one of the best breakfasts I’ve eaten in ages and ages.

One evening we found a cafe for dinner and had Talapia and chips. It was delicous. Talapia is my new favourite fish. Although probably a good thing I’m not easily scared off, because the fish comes whole, complete with eyes. The little cafe, near the post office, also served a buffet which others in the group seemed to like. We wondered if the post office still works. We went back there several times and it was there that we made perhaps the most important discovery of our time in Bunia: chocolate spread and cheese.

Another afternoon, on our way back to Bunia, we stopped at an old abandoned colonial house. The house stood, roofless and empty, on the top of a ridge, looking out into the distance towards Lake Albert. The view was beautiful. The house was solid. Built in so much the same style as the familiar colonial farmhouses of South Africa. The linoleum kitchen floor. The huge windows. The red-polished steps, now faded for lack of polish. The house has been there since Belgian times. One of the ex-pats we met came here to Bunia because this is where his grandparents were missionaries for many, many years. They were people like those who lived in this house. The recent history of the Congo makes it difficult to see the complexity of the local history. This house is abandoned now. When we there, people were talking about rebuilding it, reoccupying. It makes sense – it is a beautiful spot. And so the history moves on.

There is a university in Bunia. When we stayed there on our way back, we met someone who is studying there. It’s on the main street, opposite the tax office. The student we met is studying agriculture. He tells us that the area around Bunia used to be prime cattle country. I can well believe it. Rolling hills flowing with grass blowing in the breeze. It’s not hard to imagine richly-fed, healthy, hearty cattle. The young man we talk with plans to become a farmer and bring back the area’s most important industry.

Ultimately, Bunia is just another town. With quirks and character, but just a town. There is traffic on the main road. There is a China shop where we bought pens and a blow-up Santa. There is a second-hand shop that sells hats and another with baby prams and handbags. There are cafes and restaurants and bars. There is a hotel balcony where you can sip tea while typing an email and looking out over the rooves of the town. One afternoon, sitting at Hotel Moscou while people checked email, I sat looking out over the rooves at a helicopter flew over, looking for all the world like a traffic chopper over a hazy, hot summer Joburg afternoon.

Welcome to Bunia, aid capital of Ituri

Adventures, drc, Travelling in Africa,

Some stories take longer to tell. Longer to share. Every time I open a newspaper now, I read about the Congo. This story begins to feel like I need to pin it to the page quickly before it is gone.

Our arrival in Bunia was not auspicious. Five people on the back of five not particularly powerful motorbikes with all of our luggage, 40km away from where we’d started. Who knew holding onto the back of a motorbike could be so tiring. Especially when you are not sure you trust the drivers. The drivers were quite keen to get this over with as quickly as possible, even if that meant driving quite fast (or what seemed fast to us) over a dirt road gone down to bedrock through the hills. A road also used by large trucks. The boda-boda drivers also had a particularly special strategy for dealing with FARDC (army) roadblocks. They would speed up just as they came to the roadblock and wave and race through quickly before anyone noticed they were carrying mzungus.

The views were beautiful – this really is a beautiful, beautiful country – but my legs had cramps and my feet went to sleep. My hands and back were aching and legs shaking when we finally got off the bikes in Bunia. In the bar/restaurant of the place we were, was a man who works for the UN in some capacity. What capacity was never established. He tried, or at least claimed to try, to be helpful when our boda-boda (motorbike) drivers decided they wanted more money. It was the first time someone tried to rip us off in the DRC and, to be honest, one of the only times. Our group was split down the middle in terms of how we should reacted. Half of us were keen to write it off as someone trying to rip us off and walk away. The rest felt that these might be useful contacts one day so we had to pay them extra. At the time, I just wanted them all to go away. We were tired and dusty and just a little bit miserable. Too tired, at least me, to appreciate that this is what happens when there is no reliable system of law and order. People wonder why things take so long to happen in not-particularly stable states. Part of the reason is that, without law and order, painfully slow negotiations are the only way to keep things functioning. We paid half of the extra they wanted and went on our way.

We went with the UN guy who knew a guy who knew a place we could stay. Hotel A Cote. A dump: no running water, stinking toilets, torn mosquito nets and tiny rooms, all for just $25 per night. Unfortunately, between NGO money distorting the local economy and the basic law of supply and demand – in a place people are scared to visit – that seemed pretty reasonable. The main hotel, we were told, was $65 a night.

Things improved after that. For all my years working in African development, I haven’t spent a lot of time in NGO-compound land. This was an aid worker world. We wandered down dusty streets, populated by local people selling fruit door-to-door – like the ladies with their brooms and feather dusters in the Joburg suburbs. Fruit sellers and branded landcruisers. On all sides high walls and security-guard-controlled metal gates carried the brands of the major NGOs. I played NGO bingo when we were in Gulu – making notes of every NGO we saw to try and come up with a total. There were even more here. Too many for the game. Some of them were different ones; more serious NGOs. Gulu is safe and settled. Bunia is more risky. OCHA and ECHO Flight and all the UN agencies share the streets with international NGO compounds.

We went in search of an NGO Richard has made contact with. Confused directions along footpaths and dirt tracks later, we found outside a different compound. The guards didn’t know the place we were looking for but they called someone from inside. His name wes Antonio. He invited us in. It feels like an important moment, visiting an NGO compound. People live here. Aid worker people. The old house. The rooms out back. The radios. Antonio works for an Italian NGO, doing water and sanitation work in a little place further north. He was there on his way home for Christmas. He was friendly and talkative and said he’d see us later at MONUSCO house. As we left, I notice they were growing herbs and chillies in their garden.

Much later, after visiting Moscou Hotel to check email (yes, they have internet in Bunia), we headed to MONUSCO house. They say that aid workers in far flung places eventually discover that they have more in common with the soldiers in those places, also far from home, than they do with their own colleagues at headquarters (except that aid workers generally trust their head offices less than the soldiers do). In Bunia, MONUSCO house is where the expat aid workers and foreign peacekeepers meet. There is a gym and tennis courts and an outside meeting area and a restaurant and pool table. We left our passports (only expats allowed here) and walked into what felt like an old-fashioned small town club in SA. A bar, tables, a christmas tree, a TV showing South African soccer (Chiefs vs Amazulu) and two or three men watching intently.

We were informed, apologetically, that the chef who does the Indian and Pakistani menus was away for the holidays, so they’d only be able to offer us the western menu. The food turned out to be excellent. The company, too. We met up with expat NGO types that one of our group had made contact with via the internet. Then we met their expat aid worker and UN friends. People came over and chatted. We drank Congolese beer (Primus) and terrible box wine. The Italians arrived and played pool with the guys in our group.

Around nine or nine-thirty, the place cleared out. Aid workers have curfews, even in Bunia. We wrapped up the evening and got a ride home with a security guy from the UN peacekeeping mission, MONUSCO. Probably unnecessary, as we would realise later, but it felt safer on that first night in Bunia.