One of the many Chinese complexes springing up all over the Congo.
As it turned out, the immigration office was not our last stop in the Congo. We missed the next hut up the street, the gendarmerie. As soon as we approached, the officer begins speaking not with a greeting but with a demand of who speaks French. I barely respond and he starts ranting at me, “when did we arrive?”, “why did we not immediately present ourselves to him then” “How could we be here with out checking in with the police” (which we did, just the other office).
I started to feel shaky, not sure if it showed. We were so close to getting out with no problems and the people so far have been so lovely. It would be a shame to ruin our now positive perception with another bribe or overall problems now.
I just explained to the man that we thought we were finished last night, it was dark (there is no electricity in the village) and we didn’t see or even know that the straw hut that was the gendarmerie office even existed. The kind immigration officer just mentioned to me that we had to stop here as we were packing up the car to leave again. There was a nice Ghanaian man, Yosuf, listening in and told me that this officer is crazy. The officer storms off into his hut and Bobby coaxes me to go in after him. I ask to enter and then hand the officer our carnet for the car and all the passports. Yosuf comes in chats with us, which helped ease the tension. This grumpy officer was by far the quickest stop we had the entire time and we were soon on our way. Thank god.
By the time I got back to the car for us to go, the sweet immigration man had rounded up the village president and head minister to see us off. As we crossed into the netherworld between Congo and Gabon we came across a big truck stuck in the sand. He had apparently been stuck there for a week and still has not had any luck getting out. We tried with the little Landrover to get him out but it was like a flea trying to pull a dog out of a hole. Passed Yosuf along the road also, he showed us the stop for the gendarmerie on the Gabonese side. All of the procedures on the Gabon side were extremely quick and efficient.
We drove straight on the freshly paved asphalt all the way to Franceville. The Chinese have been buying up every bit of Africa that they can and put in the roads so that they can export the oil, lumber, rubber, etc more easily to themselves. In the middle of NO WHERE in Congo we would come across Chinese driving huge trucks down the sandy roads and brand new gleaming complexes with Chinese writing on it. It is a pity because they are taking all the raw materials and importing all of their own workers to do it. So it isn’t even like any of the local people get a chance for employment or any part in the vast amounts of money changing hands between the governments. But as I’m learning, this is the way it is in Africa.
