The DRC is vast with a colorful beauty. The majority of the people I met are wonderful, with an outlook of friendliness despite the desperate poverty. They invariably say Bonjour to me, and wave while we are driving by. The people I met laugh and tease each other and listen to the popular Congolese music. They dance. There is pride in being from the DRC. Then there is the rainforest, with its rivers and monkeys, birds and the elusive okapi. It seems magical. 

But there are the difficulties. Too numerous to put into words. Life is just hard here. The corruption and the general sense of helplessness makes it hard to be optimistic about the future of this country.

There are USAID signs in most of the villages along the road. A grant from the USAID is paying for my trip here, to study the biodiversity of birds in the forest and cocoa plantations. But the many USAID signs in the villages are all rusted and faded. The people live in mud houses that are all falling apart. The walls have holes in them. Hundreds of kilometers of villages along the road, all looking like each other. And hundreds of kids in each village. For every adult I see, there are maybe 5-10 children. Nothing is obvious about any help from any source. I see what the reality is now. The USA looks to be present and seemingly generous, but I suspect it is more to assert control of this region and all of its material wealth. The mines of gold and cobalt and the vast timber in the forests. This is what the USA wants, and they want it before the Chinese get it. So, they have Americans funding projects that lead to nowhere because of the incessant corruption. A few people get some money, and everyone else lives in hovels. There are some people from the rich countries who genuinely believe they can help, and they spend years here, but I believe the reality is that there are few success stories. 

Never did I once feel threatened. It is the myth of Africa. I don’t see guns, except in the hands of Ecoguards who are supposed to protect the rainforest from poachers and miners. My impression is that the myth is to make the DRC appear scary so that people don’t come here. So that people from the rich countries don’t feel as bad about exploiting the mineral wealth, and natural resources of this quixotic place. But these tactics will not go well in the future. The population is getting too large, and there will be millions of young people without any work soon. Right now, the government with its oppressive corrupt infrastructure has power, because people have nowhere else to turn. How can people make money other than by seeking bribes, going into the mines, or selling bushmeat? I met one Ecoguard and he told me that he is constantly struggling, and only god knows why he has 8 children. Religion is strong here and another means of controlling the population. It is all about control and oppression, either by the government, the military or the church.

This trip has been hard for me from the beginning, but I am overall glad I came to the DRC. People were worried about me getting kidnapped or getting sick, but I come out of this respecting this country and having even more empathy for the people and the nature of the region.

Some pointers for travelers to the DRC:

1. IN THE DRC MAKE SURE YOU HAVE BRAND NEW 100 DOLLAR NOTES.  THEY CAN NOT BE FROM THE 2009 SERIES, THEY MUST BE FROM THE 2013 OR LATER 2017 SERIES.  ALL US DOLLARS MUST BE PERFECT, AND THEY DON’T TAKE $1 BILLS, ONLY DENOMINATIONS OF $5 OR LARGER. 

I had known about having crisp brand new 100-dollar bills, but I had about $1000-worth were from the 2009 series, and nobody would accept them. In desperation, I went to a bank in Kisangani and was swiftly brought into the back, VIP room. I changed $800 of the 2009 series and got $720 of the 2017 series bills. They take 10%. Someone is getting rich off the rumor that the 2009 ones are not legal tender.

2. HAVE SOMEONE YOU TRUST HELP YOU AT THE AIRPORTS

I wrote about this in my previous blog installment. The airport in Kinshasa is small and chaotic, and Congo Airways apparently only has one airplane. For a city of 20 million inhabitants, I think there are probably fewer than 10 international flights a day.  The Goma airport is better, and by paying an agent, it went very smoothly.

3. IF TRAVELING BY ROAD, YOU WILL BE STOPPED AT CHECKPOINTS MANY TIMES. IT IS NOT THREATENING, BUT THEY WILL FIND REASONS TO EXTORT MONEY

I was with a university vehicle, and despite the logo and all the documents, we got stopped at every checkpoint. There are more than a dozen of them on the road east from Kisangani. They can ask for anything from a couple thousand francs, up to $50 ($1 = 2300 DRC Francs).  We had to give $20 several times.  There are only two legitimate checkpoints, the one 23 km outside of Kisangani, and another at the border with Ituri.  They checked my passport numerous times to see if I had a visa (as if I could get into this country without a visa!). In the log books, I saw plenty of Chinese and Kenyan travelers, but not one from the USA or Europe. 

4. MY T-MOBILE PLAN SEEMS TO WORK WELL IN THE DRC, BUT MAKE SURE TO CHOOSE VODACOM AS THE NETWORK CARRIER. 

My iPhone worked in Kinshasa and Kisangani and many villages along the road.  But it doesn’t work in Epulu unfortunately, where I am spending most of my time.  I could get emails and Whatsapp.  Now all I get are SMSs, nothing that requires data, but even in this remote place the T-mobile is more or less working.

Some of my adventures:

We expected the travel time between Kisangani and Epulu in the Okapi Reserve to be about 10 hours. We packed the Toyota Land Cruiser with our gear, 3 Cameroonian students from Buea, one student from Kisangani, the driver and myself. In the end, it took more than 25 hours and we stayed 2 nights along the road. The road is bad, and we got stuck several times. The checkpoints that I already mentioned are numerous and can take up to an hour at each one.  We made it about half way the first day. We stayed at a roadside Hotel Lala Sangama at km 211.  $5/night. It was not exactly a Hyatt. It is a concrete building with a disco light. This was the only place with a light on in the village. There were two little kittens at the hotel trying to stay in my room with me. The room had a mosquito net and a bed, and I managed to sleep. Toilet was a hole in the floor. I would have preferred my tent, but we didn’t want to unpack everything on the roof of the vehicle.

The next day, again driving from 6:30 until it started getting dark.  We were 24 km away from our destination, Epulu, when we got to a roadblock, a truck stuck in the mud on the road, and we couldn’t get past. Our one-eyed driver doesn’t like to drive at night, so we turned back to the nearest village and slept out again. This time I slept in one of the student’s tents, who had his in the car, and the others slept in the car, or else on a plastic tarp under a makeshift roof in the village.  We finally arrived in Epulu the next day, in the morning around 7 am. 

We arrived and our permit was still not approved. Our biggest problem was that the rules changed regarding permits. A new director general (DG) of the ICCN (the conservation agency of the DRC) had ordered that all research permits at protected sites have to be personally authorized by him in Kinshasa. This new rule came into effect just about a week before we left for this trip, so we couldn’t exactly change our plans. Everything was bought, the airplane tickets, and all the equipment. We took a chance, and hoped the permit would be approved by the time we got to the Okapi Reserve. Unfortunately, it wasn’t. We had to rely on the slow system of hierarchies to get this approval. In the end, we postponed our trip to the forest, and did our work in agricultural areas within the reserve, where we had permission to work. The project is to determine differences in biodiversity, and disease prevalence among the birds between the deep forest and the agricultural areas, so the work was something we had planned. We camped in Epulu and I befriended some local Mbuti pygmies and bought some of their tree bark artwork. I ate beans and rice at Mama Doudou’s little restaurant in the village. It took 9 days before the permit finally came through, and we could make our departure for the Mt. Sidha area, in the integral pristine part of the reserve. The permit actually arrived the day the Director General from Kinshasa was supposed to arrive. Nearly the whole Epulu village was waiting for him at the airstrip, women wearing their best outfits and makeup. They were prepared to sing and dance for the DG. But he didn’t show up, the weather in Goma was too bad for the flight. In this country, it is exceedingly difficult to plan things. Time is different, and it stands still very often. 

Finally, we left for the deep forest. This is a huge endeavor requiring many strong men to carry all the food and equipment for a team of 13 people. The men are powerful and don’t complain. We hired some Mbuti pygmy guys and they could carry as much as everyone else. No one has backpacks, they just carry the sacks hanging towards their backs from their foreheads. Two guys carried the heavy Action Packers full of our lab gear on their heads, for about 5 km, 3 miles. They all walked faster than I did, even though I just had my one little backpack.  I soon recognize that as a tall person, I bang my head several times on low trees. This must be the selection pressure for being a small person here in the rainforest. It is telling that all the porters carried all our stuff for 90 minutes to the camp site, for $7. People don’t have money. The two cooks get $7/day each. And they work hard, getting the wood and cooking two or three meals a day. It is mostly beans and rice, but one day they made me fufu with wild forest mushrooms in a tomato sauce. The best were the beignets that the cook made one day for breakfast, they take a flour dough and deep fry it into donuts. 

We get right to work. The guys clear the forest with their machetes and we set up 20 mist nets and move to a different site every two days. We work from 6 am until 12:30, and then move the nets to another site in the afternoon. We catch hundreds of birds and mosquitoes.  Most of the birds are familiar old friends that I have worked with many times earlier in Cameroon. Yellow-whiskered greenbul, Fire-crested Alethe, Olive sunbird. But we did find some endemics to this region. We band the birds, measure them, take a couple drops of blood and release them.

Every day dawn is at about 5:45 and dusk is about 18:15. The day I got lost: I went out as usual at 5:15 am to find a toilet spot with my headlamp. On the way back, I got totally lost; completely. After about 15 minutes of going back and forth in the dark, I started shouting out, WooHoo.  But no one answered. No one should make any noise because it is actually dangerous here with the miners and poachers. While we were there, an Ecoguard was killed in the north part of the forest, north of Epulu, probably by illegal miners. We were about 5 km south, but still this disturbed us and we had to be careful. So in the end, after about 30 minutes, the three Ecoguards followed my voice and quietly approached me and brought me back to the camp, which was actually not far at all. Later, another teammate got lost too. In the end, we developed a password system. The Ecoguard should call out Dime, and we should respond with Dina. No one got lost again.

I had a lot of alone time in my tent in this forest near the stream close to the inselberg Mt. Sidha. I heard chimpanzees. There were monkeys and turacos and other wild sounds during the day and the tree hyraxes make their haunting screams at night. No one ever sees the okapis, but we know they are out there because of the hidden cameras. The ants are a continuous nuisance and I get bit every day. One big one got into my tent and punctured a tiny hole in my Sea to Summit Comfort Plus mattress, so every few hours during the night I would have to blow it up again. Fortunately, not many human-biting mosquitoes. I loved listening to the sounds and seeing the big trees. My favorite part of the day was when I would bathe in the river. I usually did this alone, and just sat in the shallow cool stream and got clean and meditated on the richness of the forest.

Now it is time to leave. The trip was a success, we got a lot of samples.  But mainly I judge my success by realizing that the students are now better at this than I am. They are now the next leaders of conservation research in the region. I will fly from Epulu to Goma in a small plane, and then leave the DRC. I lost weight, and I look older with my grey beard. I will soon be in culture shock, back in the consumerism of the west. I vow to slow down some, be less attached to my phone and computer, and make more concerted efforts to protect these precious threatened rainforests of the DRC.