Last chance to see

by Douglas Adams

  I wasn't disturbed so much by the 'O Lord, we thank Thee for the blessing of this Thy day', but 'We commend our lives into Thy hands, O Lord' is frankly not the sort of thing you want to hear from a pilot as his hand is reaching for the throttle. We hurtled down the runway with white knuckles, and as we climbed into the air we passed a big, old, cigar-fat Dakota finally coming in to land, as if it had been delayed by bad weather over the Great Rift Valley for about thirty years.

  In contradiction of everything sensible we know about geography and geometry, the sky over Kenya is simply much bigger than it is anywhere else. As you are lifted up into it, the sense of limitless immensity spreading beneath you to infinitely distant horizons overwhelms you with excited dread.

  The atmosphere on board the plane, on the other hand, was so claustrophobically nice it made you want to spit. Everyone was nice, everyone smiled, everyone laughed that terribly benign fading away kind of laugh which sets your teeth on edge, and everyone, strangely enough, wore glasses. And not merely glasses. They nearly all had the same sort of glasses, with rims that were black at the top and transparent at the bottom, such as only English vicars, chemistry teachers and, well, missionaries wear. We sat and behaved ourselves.

  I find it very hard not to hum tunelessly when I'm trying to behave myself, and this caused, I think, a certain amount of annoyance in the missionary sitting next to me, which he signalled by doing that terribly benign fading away kind of laugh at me till I wanted to bite him.

  I don't like the idea of missionaries. In fact the whole business fills me with fear and alarm. I don't believe in God, or at least not in the one we've invented for ourselves in England to fulfil our peculiarly English needs, and certainly not in the ones they've invented in America who supply their servants with toupees, television stations and, most importantly, toll-free telephone numbers. I wish that people who did believe in such things would keep them to themselves and not export them to the developing world. I sat watching the Mia mi hats as they gazed out of the window at Africa - between an immensity of land and an immensity of sky they sat there, incomprehensible, smiling at a continent. I think Conrad said something similar about a boat.

  They smiled at Mount Kenya, beamed at Mount Kilimanjaro, and were winsomely benign at the whole of the Great Rift Valley as it slid majestically past beneath us. They were even terribly pleased and happy about coming in to land for a brief stop in Mwanza, Tanzania, which is more, as it turned out, than' we were.

  The aircraft trundled to a halt outside a sort of bus shelter which served Mwanza as an airport, and we were told we had to disembark for half an hour and go and wait in the `international transit lounge'.

  This consisted of a large concrete shed with two fair-sized rooms in it connected by a corridor. The building had a kind of bombed appearance to it - some of the walls were badly crushed and had tangles of rusty iron spilling from their innards and through the elderly travel posters of Italy pasted over them. We moved in for half an hour, hefted our bags of camera equipment to the floor and slumped over the battered plastic seats. I dug out a cigarette and Mark dug out his Nikon F3 and MD4 motordrive to photograph me smoking it. There was little else to do.

  After a moment or two a man in brown crimplene looked in at us, did not at all like the look of us and asked us if we were transit passengers. We said we were. He shook his head with infinite weariness and told us that if we were transit passengers then we were supposed to be in the other of the two rooms. We were obviously very crazy and stupid not to have realised this. He stayed there slumped against the door jamb, raising his eyebrows pointedly at us until we eventually gathered our gear together and dragged it off down the corridor to the other room. He watched us go past him shaking his head in wonder and sorrow at the stupid futility of the human condition in general and ours in particular, and then closed the door behind us.

  The second room was identical to the first. Identical in all respects other than one, which was that it had a hatchway let into one wall. A large vacant-looking girl was leaning through it with her elbows on the counter and her fists jammed up into her cheekbones. She was watching some flies crawling up the wall, not with any great interest because they were not doing anything unexpected, but at least they were doing something. Behind her was a table stacked with biscuits, chocolate bars, cola, and a pot of coffee, and we headed straight towards this like a pack of stoats. Just before we reached it, however, we were suddenly headed off by a man in blue crimplene, who asked us what we thought we were doing in there. We explained that we were transit passengers on our way to Zaire, and he looked at us as if we had completely taken leave of our senses.

  'Transit passengers? he said. 'It is not allowed for transit passengers to be in here.' He waved us magnificently away from the snack counter, made us pick up all our gear again, and herded us back through the door and away into the first room where, a minute later, the man in the brown crimplene found us again.

  He looked at us.

  Slow incomprehension engulfed him, followed by sadness, anger, deep frustration and a sense that the world had been created specifically to cause him vexation. He leant back against the wall, frowned, closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose.

  'You are in the wrong room,' he said simply. `You are transit passengers. Please go to the other room.'

  There is a wonderful calm that comes over you in such situations, particularly when there is a refreshment kiosk involved. We nodded, picked up our gear in a Zen-like manner and made our way back down the corridor to the second room. Here the man in blue crimplene accosted us once more but we patiently explained to him that he could fuck off. We needed chocolate, we needed coffee, maybe even a reviving packet of biscuits, and what was more we intended to have them. We outfaced him, dumped our bags on the ground, walked firmly up to the counter and hit a major unforeseen snag.

  The girl wouldn't sell us anything. She seemed surprised that we even bothered to raise the subject. With her fists still jammed into her cheekbones she shook her head slowly at us, and continued to watch the flies on the wall.

  The problem, it gradually transpired after a conversation which flowed like gum from a tree, was this. She would only accept Tanzanian currency. She knew without needing to ask that we didn't have any, for the simple reason that no one ever did. This was an international transit lounge, and the airport had no currency exchange facilities, therefore no one who came in here could possibly have any Tanzanian currency and therefore she couldn't serve them.

  After a few minutes of futile argument we had to accept the flawless simplicity of her argument and just sit out our time there gloomily eyeing the coffee and chocolate bars, while our pockets bulged with useless dollars, sterling, French francs and Kenyan shillings. The girl stared vacantly at the flies., obviously resigned to the fact that she never did any business at all. After a while we became quite interested in watching the flies as well.

  At last we were told that our flight was ready to depart again, and we returned to our planeload of missionaries.

  Where, we wondered, had they been while all this had been going on? We didn't ask After an hour or so we landed at last at Bukavu, and as we taxied up to the terminal shacks of the airport the plane resounded to happy cries of `Oh, how wonderful, the bishop's come to meet us!' And there he was, big and beaming in his purple tunic, wearing glasses with frames that were black at the top and transparent at the bottom. The missionaries, the mission school teachers and the American couple who were merely very interested in missionary work climbed smiling out of the plane, and we, pausing to pull our camera bags out from under our seats, followed them.

  We were in Zaire.

  I think the best way of explaining what goes so hideously wrong with Zaire is to reproduce a card we were given by a tourist officer a few days later.

  One section of it was written in English, and is for the benefit of the tourist. It goes like this:

  Madam, Sir, On behalf of the President-Founder of the MPR
, President of the Republic, of his government and of my fellow-citizens, it is agreeable for me to wish you a wonderful sojourn in the Republic of Zaire. In this country you will discover majestic sites, a luxuriant flora and an exceptional fauna. The kindness and hospitality of the Zairean people will facilitate your knowledge of the tradition and folklore.

  Our young nation expects much from your suggestions and thanks you for your contribution in helping it to welcome the friends you will send us in a much better way.

  Minister of ECNT.

  That seems fair enough. It's the other section which makes you begin to worry a bit about what you might in fact find. You are meant to show it to any Zalrois you actually meet and it goes like this:

  ZAIREANS, HELP OUR VISITORS The friend holding this card is visiting our country. He is our guest.

  If he wants to take photographs, be polite and friendly to him. Do your best to have him enjoy his sojourn, and he will come back, bringing his friends with him.

  By helping him, you help your country. Never forget that tourism provides us with returns which allow us to create new jobs, to build schools, hospitals, factories, etc.

  On the welcome that our guest would have received will depend our touristic future.

  It's alarming enough that an exhortation like this should be thought to he necessary, but what is even more worrying is that this section is written only in English.

  No 'Zairean' - or Zairois as they actually call themselves -speaks English, or hardly any do.

  The system by which Zaire works, and which this card was a wonderfully hopeless attempt to correct, is very simple. Every official you encounter will make life as unpleasant for you as he possibly can until you pay him to stop it. In US dollars. He then passes you on to the next official who will be unpleasant to you all over again. By the end of our trip this process would assume nightmarish proportions, by comparison with which our first entry into Zaire was a relatively gentle softening up process, and consisted of only two hours of rain and misery in huts.

  The first thing we saw in the customs but was a picture which gave us a clue about how our expedition to find endangered wildlife in Zaire was going to go. It was a portrait of a leopard. That is it was a portrait of part of a leopard. The part of the leopard in question had been fashioned into a rather natty leopardskin pillbox hat which adorned the head of Marshal Mobuto Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga, the President of the Republic of Zaire, who gazed down on us with a magisterial calm while his officials got to work on us.

  One was a large and fairly friendly man who occasionally offered us cigarettes and the other was a small, nasty man who kept on stealing ours. This is, of course, the classic interrogation method, designed to bring the victim to the brink of pathetic emotional breakdown. It's obviously a technique they learnt somewhere and have just found the habit hard to break, even though all they actually wanted to know from us was our names, passport numbers and the serial numbers of every single piece of equipment we had with us.

  The big man in particular seemed to wish us no personal ill as he guided us gently through the insanity to which it was his duty to subject us, and I came to recognise a feeling I've heard described when oddly close and touching relationships develop between torturers and their victims or kidnappers and their hostages. There is a feeling of all being in this together. The forms we had to fill in were headed 'Belgian Congo', crossed out, with 'Zaire' written in in pencil, which meant that they had to be at least eighteen years old. The only form they didn't seem to have was the only one we actually wanted. We had been warned by friends that we had to get ourselves a currency declaration form when we entered Zaire or we would hit trouble later on. We repeatedly asked for one, but they said they had run out. They said we could get one in Goma and that would be all right.

  They toyed with the idea of confiscating my Cambridge Z88 laptop computer just in case we were planning to overthrow the government with it, but in the end the small nasty man merely confiscated Chris's car magazine on the grounds that he liked cars and then, for now, we were free.

  We went into the town of Bukavu in a sort of taxi-like thing. The town turned out to be an enormous distance from the airport, probably at the insistence of the taxi-drivers. As we bounded along the appallingly rutted road that followed the margin of the lake and along which a significant proportion of the population of Zaire seemed to be walking, our driver kept on diving beneath the dashboard of the car for long periods at a time. I watched this with some alarm, which was severely increased when I eventually worked out what he was doing. He was operating the clutch by hand. I wondered whether to mention this to the others but decided that, no, it would only worry them. Mark later mentioned that we had not passed any other motor vehicles at all on the drive, except for a couple of trucks which had been parked for so long that they no longer had any rear axles. I didn't notice this myself, because once I had identified what the driver was doing with the clutch I simply kept my eyes closed for the remainder of the journey.

  When at last we arrived at the hotel, which was surprisingly airy and spacious for such a dilapidated town as Bukavu was, we were rattled and exhausted and we started to yawn at each other a lot. This was a kind of unspoken code for being fed up with the sight of one another despite the fact that it was only six in the evening. We each went off to our respective rooms and sat in our separate heaps.

  I sat by the window and watched as the sun began to go down over the lake, the name of which I couldn't remember because all the maps were in Mark's room. From this vantage point, Bukavu looked quite idyllic, situated on a peninsula which jutted into the lake. Lake Kivu. I remembered the name now. I was still feeling very jangled and jittery and decided that staring at the lake a bit might help.

  It was placid and silvery, shading to grey in the distance where it met the fading shapes of the hills that surrounded it. That helped.

  The early evening light cast long shadows over the old Belgian colonial houses that were stepped down the hill from the hotel, huddled about with bright blossoms and palm trees. That was good too. Even the green corrugated roofs of the cruder new buildings were soothed by the light. I watched the black kites wheeling out over the water and found that I was calming down. I got up and started to unpack the things I needed for the night and at last a wonderful sense of peace and well-being settled on me, disturbed only by the sudden realisation that I had once again left my toothpaste in last night's hotel. And my writing paper. And my cigarette lighter. I decided it was time to explore the town.

  The main street was a grim hill, wide, dishevelled and strewn with rubbish. The shops were for the most part concrete and dingy, and because Zaire is an ex-Belgian colony every other shop is a pharmacie, just like in Belgium and France, except that none of them, as it happened, sold toothpaste, which bewildered me.

  Most of the other shops were in fact impossible to identify. When a shop appeared to sell a mixture of ghetto blasters, socks, soap and chickens, it didn't seem unreasonable to go in and ask if they'd got any toothpaste or paper stuck away on one of their shelves as well, but they looked at me as if I was completely mad. Couldn't I see that this was a ghetto blaster, socks, soap and chicken shop? Eventually, after trailing up and down the street for half a mile in either direction I found both of them at a tiny street stall which also turned out to sell biros, airmail envelopes and cigarette lighters, and in fact seemed to be so peculiarly attuned to my needs that I was tempted to ask if they had a copy of New Scientist as well.

  I then realised that most of the essentials of life were available out on the street. Photocopying, for example. Here and there along the street were rickety trestle tables with big old photocopiers on them, and I had once or twice been hailed by a street hustler and asked if I wanted to have something photocopied or sleep with his sister. I returned to the hotel, wrote some notes on the writing paper, which for some reason was pink, and slept as if I were dead.

  The following morning we flew to the town of Goma.
Here we discovered that even when making internal flights in Zaire you still had to go through the full rigmarole of immigration and customs controls all over again. We were held under armed guard while a large and thuggish airport official interrogated us in his office as to why we hadn't acquired any currency declaration forms at Bukavu.

  The fact that they hadn't had any currency declaration forms to give us at Bukavu cut no ice with him.

  `Fifty dollars,' he said.

  His office was large and bare and contained just one small desk with two sheets of paper in a drawer. He leant back and stared at the ceiling, which had obviously seen a lot of this sort of thing going on. Then he leant forward again and pulled the palms of his hands slowly down over his face as if he were trying to peel it off. He said again, `Fifty dollars. Each,' and then stared idly at the corner of his desk and rolled a pencil slowly in his fingers. We were subjected to an hour of this before he finally tired of our appalling French and let us go.

  We emerged blinking from the airport and, miraculously, met up with the driver that some friends of Mark's had organised to take us up into the Virunga volcanoes where the mountain gorillas lived.

  The gorillas were not the animals we had come to Zaire to look for. It is very hard, however, to come all the way to Zaire and not go and see them. I was going to say that this is because they are our closest living relatives, but I'm not sure that that's an appropriate reason. Generally, in my experience, when you visit a country in which you have any relatives living there's a tendency to want to lie low and hope they don't find out you're in town. At least with the gorillas you know that there's no danger of having to go out to dinner with them and catch up on several million years of family history, so you can visit them with impunity. They are, of course, only collateral relatives - nth cousins, n times removed. We are both descended from a common ancestor, who is, sadly, no longer with us, and who has, since Darwin's day, been the subject of endless speculation as to what manner of creature he/she was.