BootsnAll Travel Network



Four days in the DRC

Of all the war-torn countries in Africa, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC, once known as Zaire) remains one of the most dangerous and unstable. According to what we’ve read, the largest current United Nations peacekeeping force is the one in the DRC, which tells you most of what you need to know about the current state of affairs.

The vast majority of the country, which is as big as Western Europe, is off limits to tourists but there are a handful of places that can usually be visited, including Goma, which is a 10-minute walk from the Rwandan border in the far east of the country. That being the case, we walked across said border last Wednesday (paying $35 each for a seven-day visa and not even being asked for a bribe), and suddenly found ourselves in the DRC.

Goma, which is set on Lake Kivu and within sight of the Virunga volcanoes chain, must be one of the more unusual towns I’ve ever visited. I didn’t know quite what to expect as we began walking into town, but I certainly hadn’t envisaged seeing lots of new 4WDs and lovely gated villas on the shores of Lake Kivu belonging to wealthy Congolese. But that was something of a mirage; it turns out that an individual’s ability to build a villa far exceeds the state’s ability to provide basic services, so Goma has regular power cuts, is very often without running water, and has only a handful of paved roads. Elsewhere in town, especially towards the outskirts, the villas and 4WDs are nowhere in sight and it is a very different story. There, hundreds of locals cram into the dirt streets where vendors sell produce and other items amid volcanic debris and women walk back from the town well with buckets of water. Those streets represent one of the poorest urban centres I can remember seeing in Africa.

But most of all, to our eyes anyway, Goma is a UN town, which would have always been interesting but is more so for us now given Wendy’s new UN job in Geneva. In addition to the UNOCHA office in the centre of town, we saw four massive UN compounds on the outskirts of Goma filled with trucks, tanks and enormous supply crates. We saw UN peacekeeping soldiers driving through town, UN trucks bringing water into town, and dozens of jeeps branded either with the UN or with the initials of a UN subsidiary: UNOCHA, UNICEF, the World Food Programme, the UN High Commission for Refugees – they’re all in Goma. But the most obvious reminder of Goma’s position as an aid agency base for the DRC was the sound overhead, every 10 or 15 minutes throughout the day, of low-flying supply planes taking off from the airport close to the city centre, with UN or EU or Service Air branding.

All of this made Goma feel almost like two towns living side-by-side but completely oblivious to the other. There certainly seemed to be two economies in operation: one where you pay 500 francs (about 55 cents) for a bunch of 11 bananas from a vender on a street corner, and the other where you go into a supermarket and pay US$20, in hard currency, for an imported box of cereal.

In the end, we didn’t feel unsafe in Goma (though we didn’t go out at night), and despite the security concerns, we didn’t feel nearly the same kind of tension that we did in Xinjiang during the Uigher uprising last year. But at any rate, it was an interesting experience.

And so it was to this environment that we came, rather strangely it might seem, to hike through a jungle to track mountain gorillas.

Gorilla Tracking

The reason we came to the DRC in the first place was that gorilla-tracking reservations in Rwanda and Uganda were already fully booked by the time we started planning the trip. Our last remaining option was the DRC’s Parc National des Virungas, the oldest national park on the continent and one so large that it adjoins at least six separate national parks in Rwanda and Uganda. Unfortunately it’s not always safe, and the highest-profile example of how the turmoil in the country can affect gorilla-tracking was the 2007 execution of one of the four habituated gorilla families in the Bukima section of the park. Gorilla-tracking in the DRC was subsequently suspended, but has since recommenced, so we made our booking and hoped that the current security situation would hold up. At US$400 per person, it’s $100 cheaper than in Rwanda or Uganda, but with an extra charge of $110 for a hire jeep and $35 each for the DRC visa, it pretty much turned out to be a wash.

On the morning of our reservation, we woke up at 5:10am and 20 minutes later we were in a 4WD heading towards the park, with an army jeep escorting us most of the way. The 40km ride from Goma to the park headquarters on an increasingly dreadful road took us about 2hrs 15min – to put this in perspective, a marathon runner could have beaten us.

In any case, it was fascinating to go past the villages along the way and see what the DRC is like outside the ‘haven’ of Goma. The villages closest to Goma were the most prosperous, with most houses built of wood with tin roofs, though even here there were signs of much hardship. Some houses had no roofs at all and instead had UN tarpaulins for shelter, while the local women had to walk several kilometres to fetch water from the nearest pump well. Meanwhile, the men transported bamboo, bananas, sacks of grain etc on a device extremely ill-suited for such a task: a home-made bicycle made entirely of wood with neither a seat nor pedals called a trottinette, which, interestingly, is the French for scooter in the developed world. (In Goma, a gaudy golden statue of a man wheeling a trottinette adorns a roundabout, utterly out of place in war-torn DRC. We were told that the rich local man who funded the building of the statue began life as a poor villager with a trottinette; the statue, odd as it is, enhances the vehicle’s status as one of the symbols of the DRC.)

Further on, the people were poorer and lived in shacks constructed only of bamboo and earth. It wasn’t the most poverty we’ve seen in Africa – the climate is conducive to successful farming, especially of banana trees, whereas in the semi-desert of the West African Sahel the people have absolutely nothing – but it wasn’t far off. Hundreds of kids in rags ran to our 4WD to smile and wave at us, and only as we got closer to the park headquarters did they start sticking out their hands hoping for money or sweets.

We arrived at the park at about 8:15am and were delighted to find that we would be the only tourists tracking the Munaga group that day (there is a maximum of six tourists per family, and I think it’s quite rare even in the DRC to have the gorillas to yourselves). With an entourage of a guide, an armed guard and a machete-laden jungle hacker, we headed into the forest towards the slopes of one of the volcanoes of the Virungas chain in search of our gorillas.

After 45 minutes we met the advanced tracking party, who had been sent out ahead of us to find the gorillas. Fifteen minutes later, a silverback was barging towards us, crashing through the jungle as he went and causing us to hurriedly back away – and after all these years of talking and dreaming about seeing mountain gorillas in the wild, here we were.

The Munaga family is apparently rather special as it consists of three silverbacks as well as two adult females and one baby of nine months. We watched them go about their daily lives – the adults climbed trees in a hugely destructive fashion while the cheeky baby did tumble turns on the ground and made funny facial expressions. They were much more active than I had expected and to see a silverback really charge is quite an extraordinary sight. Overall, the hour that we spent with these fascinating creatures (which is all you are allowed) was one of the great highlights of our travels, and worth every penny.

Nyiragongo Volcano

The next day, we relieved ourselves of a further $450 and returned to the park for the 5.5 hour hike to the crater of the Nyiragongo Volcano. We walked with three other foreigners and three armed guards (with more stationed at various points along the trail, if you could describe lying under a tree as being ‘stationed’), as security at the volcano is even more precarious than it is for the gorillas. In fact, the volcano was only reopened to tourists in March 2010 after being closed for 18 months. Even then, it was closed for another week in April, so we were fortunate that it was open for us. And beyond the security issue, there’s also the active volcano issue: in 2002, it erupted and buried Goma under two metres of ash and lava.

It was a tough hike and we struggled a bit, especially towards the end as we scrambled over volcanic rocks on approach to the 3400m crater. We knew there was a lava lake below but we weren’t really prepared for the sight that awaited us at the top: an enormous, desolate crater with a circular lava lake raised up on a platform far below in a way that seemed too perfectly designed to have been crafted entirely by nature. In the ‘lake’ itself, smoke billowed up from the shifting and erupting lava pockets to create a truly awesome scene – one that looked even better a few hours later as night descended on the volcano and the lava lake lit up in a brilliant orange that can be seen, reflected on the smoke, from Goma.

We camped on the crater rim for the night and headed back down the next morning, exhausted but thrilled with the experience. We’ve climbed our fair share of volcanoes over the years, but this one was by far the most spectacular. It was completely worth both the expense and the tough trek up – even though as I type this two days later we are hobbling around the Ugandan town of Kisoro on extremely sore legs.

We might have rested another day in Goma before continuing on, but we wanted to avoid today’s presidential elections in Rwanda just in case. To that end, yesterday, one day after coming down from the volcano, we crossed back into Rwanda and then continued into Uganda, our last East African country before we head back to Nairobi to fly to Madagascar.



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