Searching the Elusive Bonobo in Congo

Category: Places | Date: Aug 19 2008 | By: teresehart

After Kindu I met John in Beni and we continued to the Okapi Reserve to meet with two TL2 team leaders. We arrived in Epulu completely beat and painfully saddle sore.

It was nearly midnight when we finally arrived at our home in the Okapi Reserve.

Traveling through Congo is never easy, but it should have improved along the RN4 (National Route 4) between Beni and the Okapi Reserve, after all the Chinese road crews had worked well over a year. What’s the problem? Since the war began and the road became impassable for bigger vehicles, John and I have ridden the backs of motorbikes more times than we can count. The war is now over and the road has been “repaired”. So, why is it worse?

Reason one: The Ituri River bridge is out so we decided to take the “short cut”. How so? Within weeks after the Chinese improved the bridge, a Kenya-bound truck carrying nearly twice the permitted weight in illegal wood tried to cross the bridge. The result below. And yes, lives were lost.

A week after collapse.

Compare this early picture of ferrying people across the Ituri to the busy commerce (below) that we found now, more than a year later

Reason two: Three days of rain had turned the “short cut” into a slick with soup filled pits. We were still traveling (sometimes on foot) well after dark.

Along the worst stretches we let the bikes struggle by themselves and we trudged behind. There were plenty of “worst” stretches.

Reason three: Face it – bad bikes. Even if the “motards” or drivers were courageous these flimsy Chinese-made SENKES did not measure up to our usual Yamaha AG100s.

So, for the return trip we followed the Chinese-repaired RN4 all the way back and crossed by boat at the Ituri.

Loading the motorbikes into a boat. It is no longer dugouts (see above) at the crossing. Big business deserves “big” boats.

Waiting our turn to pull the boat across this massive Ituri River, still 800 km upstream from where it dumps into the Congo River.

John perched in the bow as they begin to pull the boat across.

As we approached the east bank we could see the trucks lined up mainly waiting for wood.

Boys well under 16 were helping with the unloading.

The sacks on the left are full of palm oil, another forest commodity. And we are ready to take off.

We were seat sore when we got back to Beni anyway. So in the final analysis:
1. Chinese made SENKE – low grade
2. Chinese repaired Road – better than the Lebanese repaired section. The Chinese really worked!
3. Chinese repaired Bridge – it would have been fine if the Congolese military who policed it did not take bribes ….

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Category: Places, people | Date: Aug 07 2008 | By: teresehart

This note is from the far southeast corner of the TL2 “Wilderness” where the internet connection is as fickle as the electricity. I am in Kindu. From the viewpoint of “government” hill I have a panorama of the Lualaba (=Upper Congo); in the foreground red brick walls of new government buildings rise against crumbling old colonial structures.

Looking left (insert) utilitarian Belgian colonial stucco next to the government’s new utilitarian brick. And in the background the Lualaba flows past from the South.

The colonial buildings, built in the 1930s, rose with equal enthusiasm among the even older edifices of the Congo-Arab era. Just upstream from Kindu, in the 1870s, Tippo Tib reigned from Kasongo and Nyungwe over an undisputed Congolese sultanate, sending huge caravans of slaves and ivory back to Zanzibar.

The crumbling colonnade of an ancient Arab structure. An old man told me that this used to be a “barazza for the ‘Bahindi’”. And before that?

Kindu is a place for history to swirl, fossilize, and be ignored.

One Kindu fossil from the middle of the last century: this horse, now nearly extinct in its new world home, used to announce the presence of fuel. Not here. Not now. You are lucky if you can find someone with a battered barrel of fuel and a length of hose with which to siphon it.

But nobody is looking to the past here. The determination and need for a new Congo and a new province of Maniema (Kindu is its capital) are almost a physical force in the air.
Exciting for us: there is a real openness to a new national park in Maniema’s TL2 wilderness. Fingers crossed.

The governor on the left and the minister of mines and energy listen to my little presentation two days ago.

The audience was gratifyingly interested.

The governor’s attentiveness and the large attendance at my little presentation were very promising. But fingers are still crossed.

In his closing remarks the governor gave a personal commitment to eat no more bonobo meat. May his example be followed by the whole province.

In Kindu I sleep in a neat Islamic guest house where three parrots in the courtyard parody life around them. At first light they mimic the nanny shrieking endlessly after the child “babu, babu, babu, babu” until finally sleep is no longer possible. At last light the parrots mimic exactly the click of a mobile phone at the end of its electric charge. “Choeet, choeet, choeet”, they screech at an insanely loud volume reminding us that no electricity for the recharge can be expected for at least another two hours.

This is a very alert parrot with a sense of the absurd

Hey, I’m ready to move to Kindu, but hopefully with my own generator and a stock of fuel.

A few more photos from this, my first-ever stay in Kindu:

Above: a view of our guesthouse. Straight ahead the kitchen and on the left the little interior court.

A view of the Lualaba from a little restaurant outside town, dugouts are taking farm produce to market.

The mosque in Kindu

Dedieu (ICCN) and Germain (local NGO) at a buvette in Kindu. Just behind them an old boat that used to bring beer from Kisangani.

With the director of Maniema’s environmental minister’s cabinet (in colored shirt) and the legal counsel (in suit).

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