I showed up at the Ocean du Nord bus station around 5:45am, just like I was told. Apparently there are two Ocean du Nord stations in town but somehow the taxi managed to take me to the right one (the taxi driver asked if I would be travelling from that station and he knew which one to take me to).
Of the two busses: A & B that were supposed to leave only one was created, bus A+B. I guess there were not enough passengers. The bus was big, good, but it had 5 seats in a row, 3+2, oh well. There was no coffee man at such an early hour, just a woman selling biscuits and baguettes with margarine/chocolate spread/mayonnaise.
Quite quickly the baggage men showed up to take the load into the bus, I was asked where in Brazzaville I wanted to get out. Of course I had no idea, I said I was going to La Base which is where according to booking.com and Jumia Travel the cheapest hotels were. The cheapest means 15,000cfa. The baggage man said I should get out at Moukondo.
In the matter of cheap hotels the Bradt Guide was useless, the cheapest hotel it mentions was well over 30k and the guidebook just said “if you want it cheap, don’t spend too much time in the capital”, the Petit Futé guide mentioned one guesthouse of a couple of rooms in city centre, inside Catholic school compound, 10k-20kcfa but it also mentioned that it’s always full and there is a curfew of 10pm. And La Base is a quartier just North of the airport, I thought it’d be OK. It wasn’t.
I bought a baguette with three-egg-omelette and sardines for 1000cfa.
A quite neat line started forming in front of the bus doors, the seats were unnumbered. When they finally opened the doors the neat line transformed into an unstructured crowd and the stampede ran towards the door. Chaos as usual, some people had invalid tickets, some people had tickets somehow validated by a bus that arrived and left in the meantime, of course each case had to be thoroughly discussed with the ticketman while the crowd was pushing people towards the door. I managed to get a seat in the back in the row of three seats. They were narrow so when we sat there in three, a man by the window, a maman un the middle, there was a squeeze. Still, the bus was new and not bad, if even had air conditioning, which at the beginning of the journey was actually too freezing.
We left at 7:30am. The road to Brazzaville, route nationale 1, is a newly built road. Constructed by the Chinese (I guess) it’s actually a dual carriage motorway, yet a very narrow one. I mean the lanes seemed so narrow that if you’d wanted nto overtake the bus you’d still have to go on the lanes going the opposite direction. There are 7 toll gates between Pointe Noire and Brazzaville, a saloon car would pay 500cfa at each, yet most of them are not yet operational. The road was empty except the few busses that we were passing on the road. It also leads through very empty landscape. It’s twisted the first 2-3hours to Dolisie when we went through the mountains and later on it flats out but the landscape stayed hilly, treeless gentle hills all around and sometimes this type of African nothingness that stretches beyond the horizon. There were no villages or the villages that we passed consisted of just a house or two it seemed. When we first stopped and we got surrounded by so many road sellers I was even surprised where those people came from, there were no building in sight. But I guess that was the design of the road, to bypass the villages.
We didn’t stop much. On the second stop I saw one of the passengers buying a small pack of food, packed in leaves. He unwrapped it and inside there was something that looked like cottage cheese cube. And that’s how I discovered le courge which is a paste made of ground squash seeds. I bought one, 100cfa, and it was delicious.
In the bus we all got a piece of French pastry and a small bottle of soft drink. I gave my bottle to maman sitting next to me. She took it. She also liked my groundnuts perhaps because they were the salty ones. Later on in Brazzaville all I could find were unsalted groundnuts and they are kind of dull.
It took us 10hours to cover the distance, which according to the Google was 515kms but in reality the road diverted from what Google shows on its maps. It is quite a common occurrence in this part of the world that what the maps were showing is not where the road was. Interesting and makes me wonder where does Google take its roads in Africa from? Here also I think the road was new and it hasn’t been reflected yet on the maps. I wonder when it will be.
In Moukondo I got out and took a taxi, 1000cfa to Hotel Bankazi. I found it on Jumia Travel and it showed even 8000cfa for a room with fan and not far from the bus station, about 3kms, straight down South.
As we drove the road became very sandy, at times we even drove on the sand. We had to turn left among the houses and the taxi struggled on the bad uneven streets off the main road I noticed that the houses themselves looked rather bad. Corrugated iron fences, all quite dilapidated. We had to ask some men for for directions but we arrived. On the hotel’s concrete wall a mural: a man chasing a woman as if he wants to slap her on her butt. Where am I? Obviously, the first price I heard for the room was for the passage, meaning a short stay during the day. The price for the night was even lower than on the internet, 4000cfa. The rooms itself were not bad but there was no water. The receptionist offered a bucket. No.
I asked the taxi driver to take me back to the main road. We passed some hotels there, also the men we asked for directions told us where to find better accommodation.
Next we stopped at a hotel attached to a night club. I thought about the noise at night. A big banner was advertising ladies’ free night on Thursdays. Inside three different prices: passage 5000cfa, nuitée 23h-7h 10,000cfa, séjour 14h-11h 20,000cfa. I asked the receptionist how much I’d have to pay for a night if I wanna stay at least 2 nights, she said 15k. The room she showed me was actually nice and she claimed there was even hot water in shower. The noise from the night club? “Not much” she said.
I went to yet another hotel next door, it was a bit away from the main road, the taxi tried to enter the street and got stuck in deep sand. Somehow the driver managed to back off to the main road.
Again, Hotel Kartel have me first the price for passage, the price for room with fan 10kcfa, the price for room with AC 15kcfa. The rooms with fan didn’t look too good. I tried to negotiate a better price but the owner didn’t want to. I saw the AC rooms, they looked a bit better, the shower wasn’t leaking too much, there was even a toilet seat. I managed to bring the price down to 12500cfa for a night if I stayed 2 nights. Good.
In the reception a man demanded a photocopy of my passport from me. I told him I’d bring one the next day. He seemed surprised I didn’t have one.
And when I asked him where I can eat, it was already getting dark, he said there was nothing around. What?! And true, there were some poor looking roast meat joints without any seatings and a couple of buvettes, the whole street, with its sand and no street lights looked a bit dreary.
I caught a taxi to Bacongo, one quartier I’d find food. 1500cfa. I went to Irene Banda, a small restaurant that actually isn’t on the street. There I splurged and had avocado salad and a boullion with porcupine meat. The salad was good even though it was rich with mayonnaise, the boullion was also good but I wouldn’t eat it every day, the meat was soft and tender and there was some skin. With Guinness it was all 5600cfa, quite a lot. But then Brazzaville wasn’t a cheap city.
A couple of hundred metres down the street from Irene there is a bar which is owned by Mimy’s brother. Mimy is a friend of mine that lives in Lagos. I walked there. I had some Guinness, Mimy told me to ask for her brother and he even recognised me – I was there 2 years ago. We video called Mimy too so we can have a bit of laugh. I mentioned to her brother that it’d be nice if I could stay around Bacongo – during the day it’s a big marker around – and he said he also has an auberge around and the price was 20k. Oh. I said to him I was paying 12500, he said it all depends on how many nights I was staying I said it all depends on my DRC visa but he didn’t take the subject further. I’d look for a better place to stay by myself.
The quartier I was staying was called Mouhoumi and getting the taxi back at night took some effort. Taxis either wanted 2000cfa or they didn’t want to go at all. To get from Mouhoumi to town there is a street of few hundred metres of bad dirt road and seemed like there was no way to go around it. But I finally got a taxi that took 1500cfa and took me back to hotel. The AC was a bit strong and the only way to control it was to switch it off or on but when I came late, the receptionist gave me a simple duvet to cover myself.
Coming back to Maman 