Wednesday, February 22, 2006
Delightful Formalities at the DRC/Angola border.
Our visas for DRC only permit seven days, so we needed to hustle out. It took most of Tuesday morning to track down a new battery, several fuses, a new (and equally aggravating) jack and our lucky third spare tire. Tcheke's brother accompanied us through the confusing outskirts of the enormous city until we were clearly headed for the border town with Angola. Then he returned.
Things went swimmingly for about two hours until we found ourselves in a sprawling line of parked trucks, walking people and armed men. Drivers sitting beneath their trailers told us we would probably be passing the night where we'd parked. Great. It felt like a refugee scenario; so we started speculating about guard duty and rationing.
At the front of this congestion was an obstructive truck, abandoned by its driver who was unprepared or unwilling to pay the massive sixty dollar road toll demand by the booths at the center of the two sided mangle. Tons of police and military sat around looking bored with their automatic weapons, solving no problems, but suggesting, with their presence, that everyone should remain patient.
Somehow, after two hours or so, the congestion was relieved and we made our way forward. We reached the border on the following evening and were informed that our visas for Angola, which cost $120 each and a week's worth of waiting in Libreville, would not be honored. The cockroach imbecile functionary who hastily changed the dates of validity to cover his incompetent clerical error had falsified and annulled the costly stickers. In order to make Sean and Tuuli accept these muddled visas, he equipped them with some important looking photocopied documents, which upon closer inspection proved to be neither dated nor signed.
The helpful Chief Kapi on the DRC side tried calling his Angolan counterpart, Chief Noe, to arrange for our safe passage. Everything seemed diplomatically facilitated until the Angolan saw how our papers had been modified-it was a graver problem than Chief Kapi had explained. Chief Noe expressed a willingness to admit us in order to avoid a high level diplomatic problem; but he informed us that we would probably be harassed or arrested at the first of many thorough immigration check points that we would pass through en route. He advised us to return to DRC the next morning to consult the Consular Officer of Angola in a nearby town. We spent the night legally nowhere, unofficially denied entry to Angola, under the watchful eyes of the Angolan border patrol-one of whom taught us a four person card game somewhat like simple bridge.
The next day was stressful, expensive, endless, vexing and busy. I called the US embassy to request their pressure on Angola's representative and their efforts may indeed have expedited the reissuing of visas, which we obtained at exactly four o’clock that afternoon. Their intervention did not, however, make the bloated Consular Officer refrain from charging us $80 each for the new visas, nor does it seem like the thieving cretin in Libreville will suffer for his unauthorized nonsense-despite the fact that the money swallowing Consul in DRC swore to have him sent to prison.
The secretaries added a fee for the great effort it took them to be totally brusque and unpleasant and we were charged a foolish amount of money for the unexpected passport photographs that became necessary. Despite all of this rigmarole, we were in Angola, legally, by 5:30pm and with two visas-since nobody was willing to officially cancel the former, which makes it nearly impossible for us to ever seek reimbursement.
As we began to crawl along degraded mountain roads toward Luanda, we understood nothing of the relentless length of Angola. We even looked forward to a point just a few hundred kilometers down on our Michelin map where the white unfinished road became demarcated as a red well-finished central artery.
Our visas for DRC only permit seven days, so we needed to hustle out. It took most of Tuesday morning to track down a new battery, several fuses, a new (and equally aggravating) jack and our lucky third spare tire. Tcheke's brother accompanied us through the confusing outskirts of the enormous city until we were clearly headed for the border town with Angola. Then he returned.
Things went swimmingly for about two hours until we found ourselves in a sprawling line of parked trucks, walking people and armed men. Drivers sitting beneath their trailers told us we would probably be passing the night where we'd parked. Great. It felt like a refugee scenario; so we started speculating about guard duty and rationing.
At the front of this congestion was an obstructive truck, abandoned by its driver who was unprepared or unwilling to pay the massive sixty dollar road toll demand by the booths at the center of the two sided mangle. Tons of police and military sat around looking bored with their automatic weapons, solving no problems, but suggesting, with their presence, that everyone should remain patient.
Somehow, after two hours or so, the congestion was relieved and we made our way forward. We reached the border on the following evening and were informed that our visas for Angola, which cost $120 each and a week's worth of waiting in Libreville, would not be honored. The cockroach imbecile functionary who hastily changed the dates of validity to cover his incompetent clerical error had falsified and annulled the costly stickers. In order to make Sean and Tuuli accept these muddled visas, he equipped them with some important looking photocopied documents, which upon closer inspection proved to be neither dated nor signed.
The helpful Chief Kapi on the DRC side tried calling his Angolan counterpart, Chief Noe, to arrange for our safe passage. Everything seemed diplomatically facilitated until the Angolan saw how our papers had been modified-it was a graver problem than Chief Kapi had explained. Chief Noe expressed a willingness to admit us in order to avoid a high level diplomatic problem; but he informed us that we would probably be harassed or arrested at the first of many thorough immigration check points that we would pass through en route. He advised us to return to DRC the next morning to consult the Consular Officer of Angola in a nearby town. We spent the night legally nowhere, unofficially denied entry to Angola, under the watchful eyes of the Angolan border patrol-one of whom taught us a four person card game somewhat like simple bridge.
The next day was stressful, expensive, endless, vexing and busy. I called the US embassy to request their pressure on Angola's representative and their efforts may indeed have expedited the reissuing of visas, which we obtained at exactly four o’clock that afternoon. Their intervention did not, however, make the bloated Consular Officer refrain from charging us $80 each for the new visas, nor does it seem like the thieving cretin in Libreville will suffer for his unauthorized nonsense-despite the fact that the money swallowing Consul in DRC swore to have him sent to prison.
The secretaries added a fee for the great effort it took them to be totally brusque and unpleasant and we were charged a foolish amount of money for the unexpected passport photographs that became necessary. Despite all of this rigmarole, we were in Angola, legally, by 5:30pm and with two visas-since nobody was willing to officially cancel the former, which makes it nearly impossible for us to ever seek reimbursement.
As we began to crawl along degraded mountain roads toward Luanda, we understood nothing of the relentless length of Angola. We even looked forward to a point just a few hundred kilometers down on our Michelin map where the white unfinished road became demarcated as a red well-finished central artery.
<< Home