(RM) To LuiKotal

To LuiKotal

16-18 March

The airstrip was at the edge of a savannah area, adjacent to the forest. While dense forest is the dominant cover, patches of savannah nonetheless dot the landscape. Flying over them, I was able to make out individual trees, and even a few termite mounds when we were low enough. No roads though, still. Just untamed land.

The village of Ipope seemed to be just next to the savannah, although I soon found out that it was a couple of kilometres walk from village to airstrip. It seemed that the entire population of the village had already assembled at the airstrip in anticipation of our arrival. They knew what day our flight was to arrive, although the hour was as much a surprise to us as it surely was to them. The plane circled once, touched down past the crowd, and taxied back to where they were assembled. Then came the throng.

The job I accepted that brought me here is ‘camp manager.’ Suddenly, I became aware of my responsibility, with some 700kg of stuff being quickly surrounded by anyone and everyone who lived in the area. We managed to get it into a pile, and sort of made a cordon around it. Our local contact, Mara, was charged with doling out individual items to various people for the first leg of the journey to camp. Suddenly, men, women, and adolescents were carting our stuff into the forest down a trail. My heaviest bag was balanced on the rear rack of a bike, with one person trying to hold it steady while another pushed the bike. I joined the procession.

We got to the small village of Ipope in just 15 or 20 minutes. There, the stuff was reallocated, and some was repackaged. I really didn’t follow what was going on, exactly. I just sort of did what I was told, and tried to keep track of my personal belongings. Ipope was not our destination for the day.

The trail quickly plunged back into the forest, and was very clearly demarcated. Thick vegetation grew on either side, and foot and bicycle traffic was somewhat regular in both directions. The hike was over an hour, with me carrying more than I should have (given that we had porters, after all). Eventually, we arrived in the village of Lompole, and made our way to Mara’s home.

Slowly but surely, our things arrived. Mara checked peoples’ names off and I tried to take stock of what all had made it. Some stuff went into a depot building across the courtyard, and our personal things went into his house. We quickly got out tents and erected them in the grass before it got too dark and before the rain got too violent. My stuff was spread by weight over several suitcases, so it was a pain to find the right combination of mattress, clothes, toothbrush, and so on, but I managed. (I was less successful over the next day or two.) The rain came down hard!

But we were in Mara’s house, eating around his table, illuminated by his light bulb that’s fed by a car battery that’s charged by a solar panel. Mara is probably the wealthiest person in Lompole, as he has a very good job working for our camp. He is our local administrator, organising food and porters, and often wheeling and dealing with local government goons on our behalf. He is the only person from Lompole to have ever left the country, since he went to Sweden and a couple of other European countries a few years ago for some missionary thing or another. (Apparently, he spent every evening for a month recounting his foreign adventures to the rest of the village.) Mara’s is the only house in the village with a light bulb.

We spent that night in Lompole in our four tents in Mara’s yard. We got up at dawn, all hoping to go to the camp, but there was much business to attend to. Everyone in the village needs something, and Gottfried needs to address these needs.

The first drama that we got to witness revolved around our bonobo project’s contribution of building materials for the village to build a church/school (some people want a church, while others want a school – the project stance is that it will help with a building, which may be used by the villagers however they choose to). The first load of building materials (sacks of concrete for the floor, corrugated metal for the roof, along with nails and other accessories) had been bought in Kinshasa and sent by boat to Lokolama, which is 60km from Lompole. It had been stolen by the boat captain, however, and sold. The next load of building materials had been sent on another boat, and actually arrived in Lokolama around 10 months ago, where it has remained ever since. It is up to the village to arrange transport – basically they need to walk down there to get it, and walk back with it on their heads or backs. They have yet to do so. So the morning drama involved one faction of villagers pushing for the next load of materials to be delivered from Kinshasa to Lokolama, while the others agreed with Gottfried that they need to first pick up what’s been sitting in the Lokolama depot before that gets stolen too. The latter faction generally benefits from the bonobo project’s presence through employment or through the sale of produce, therefore seeing a longer-term benefit from good relations, while the former faction would rather ‘kill the cow for meat today, rather than keep it for milk all year,’ or something along those lines. My favourite moment was when Gottfried got all in Papa Cameroun’s face and basically told him off in Lingala, saying that the village needs to do their part in the transport before they can expect the bonobo project to give any more. Ah, the drama.

The next drama was inside Mara’s house, among a few men. Apparently, there is some bigshot in the area who claims to be the ‘chef du territoire,’ and who therefore needs some payment for any outsiders who somehow use the territoire. This was indeed a government function back in the day, when Mobutu was dictator and graft was the only real economy. The position has ceased to really exist for quite some time now though. Nonetheless, the guy still has his 20-year-old document proclaiming him as chef du territoire, and he therefore succeeded in extracting a good hour or two of our morning before finally giving up empty handed. Fortunately, nobody else really even takes the guy seriously, including the ‘groupement,’ which is basically the regional government (based in Lokolama) that really does have some legal grounding.

So the next drama involved the groupement, of course. Word had gotten back to the government folks there that four westerners would be arriving by plane on or around when we arrived, so they were apparently on their way to levy whatever fees they could think of. We couldn’t leave the village with the groupement people on the way, as that would appear to be fleeing, but on the other hand, we didn’t really know for sure if anyone was actually coming. Eventually, it was determined that Gottfried would hang out for another night in Lompole, while Ian, Andrew, and I would start the trek to camp with a few porters. It was already too late to make the whole trip, though, so not many porters wanted to even go. We finally ended up going with six porters, carrying three of our bags and three barrels of provisions from the plane. We hit the trail around 1pm.

This trail has been in existence for some 80 years or so, at least, to connect the village of Lompole with the fishing camp of Yaca and then onwards to the former village of LuiKotal. For the past four or five years, the trail has been used several times a week by porters provisioning our camp, as well as by other villagers heading to the fishing spots near Yaca. So it’s a fairly well-travelled thoroughfare, though not necessarily used on a daily basis.

The first stretch was through forest. The trail was pretty straightforward, though unmarked. It was probably about an hour and a half or two hours through there, when we reached the big savannah. The porters sat down and asked for a round of cigarettes, which I distributed.

Then came the plains. This means high grass, and no shade. Termite mounds dotted the landscape, and there was the odd tree every so often. The grass was often as tall as me. The trail through the grass was pretty difficult to see, since the grass was so high, but you could follow it if you were on it. Really, it’s just a strip of hardened soil about the width of a boot, so walking was a pain. And hot in the sun. Not too exciting.

After another hour or so, we were back to another stretch of forest. Another break by the porters, and another round of cigarettes. That forest entry actually had some benches built of the surrounding trees and other branches, so we could sit and chill. Then onwards. More forest trail, and I think even some wading. By wading, I mean that the adjacent river has inundated the surrounding forest, so the trail was then underwater. Boardwalks existed in a couple of places, but not much. By boardwalk, I mean lines of straightish branches forming a platform. Not too sturdy, but somehow better than being knee-deep in water and mud.

Our stopping point for the night was the fishing camp of Yaca. This spot is used seasonally by villagers who come to fish in the Bompindji River adjacent to it. There’s approximately one little hut per family, in various states of repair. I guess they need some touching up whenever the families actually use them. Our porters set up shop in one of them, where they built a fire and set up thatch cots to sleep on. I doled out another round of cigarettes.

The three of us went down to the end of the village and put our tents up in some (shortish) grass. Andrew and Ian tried to find the river, but were unsuccessful. I was led by one of the porters down a forest path towards the Bompindji, which was a good 15 or 20 minute walk. We came to a point where we had to wade in up to our waists before reaching the river proper. The river has a log wedged across it serving as a bridge. We perched on the log and collected flowing water in our bottles to drink for the night. The forest was dark as we walked back up to the camp.

As the sun set, the three of us white folks ate sardines with our fingers and tried to identify constellations. There were a lot of stars. It was a good first night in the bush.

Up at 5, the porters were ready to go as soon as enough light penetrated the forest path. I didn’t even bother putting on my boots, knowing that we would be trudging through inundated trails soon enough. We got to the log/bridge over the Bompindji, which was followed by a few ‘boardwalks’ of precariously-balanced horizontal branches. I imagine that people spill off of them fairly regularly.

This seemed a good time to take some interesting photos, so I lagged behind the group as I attempted to organise my gear. The water was also chest-deep in places, so I had to reorganise my bag to balance it on my head for the walk. But where was the ‘trail’? I headed down one stream, which soon closed up. I went back, and found a second, but that, too, soon closed up. I was lost. I had lost my group. I tried calling and whistling, but no response. Uh-oh. Where the hell is the trail!? Somebody eventually noticed and came back to fetch me, leading me on the ‘trail’ that is far from evident. But we soon caught up with the rest of the group. Soon we even hit high ground and got to put our pants and boots back on. Luxury.

Forest trails continued from the Bompindji to the Lokoro for an hour or two, and were fairly easy to follow. I think the inundated stretch immediately after log bridge is really the only spot where you definitely need to know the route, whereas the rest of the route is fairly straightforward. Soon we reached the river’s edge, and found the pirogue (dugout canoe) where it was supposed to be. The first load of passengers and luggage loaded up, and were ferried down the river. I waited with the rest of the porters and photographed the boat disappearing in the distance. They were gone for a while.

When it came back, the rest of us loaded in. The boat is pretty precarious, with the edges basically level with the river. Water came in when we wobbled. Down the river a bit, we headed into the forest, down what appeared to be similar to the trails we had walked down earlier in the trip. It would have been impossible to turn the boat around, and even navigating some of the curves was a multi-person task. The stopping point was a little less than waist-deep, with the trail continuing underwater for some time. The last stretch was dry, and we were soon at LuiKotal.

It was such great sight to arrive in our civilised little encampment. We were greeted by several of the local staff at their cooking hut, and then by Tim and Kek. I was so glad to see the size of Tim’s beard and afro – he’d obviously been here a while. We chilled out at the table in the shade, exchanging stories and drinking water. Andrew drilled the team about the bonobos, while Ian and I asked questions about life at the camp.

I had left Arizona over a month before. I’ll be here for nine months. It was good to be ‘home,’ after so much travel. Time to settle in.