Having
found ourselves parked on a steep hill on the track in front of the
gate, we made our way into the nearest shack, where a steady beat of the
Congolese sound was blasting from the radio. We waiting for the "official"
to painstakingly slowly complete our details in the big book but not
actually stamp the passports. Absolutely no conversation took place,
purely as the music was so loud and we found ourselves bopping away to
the tunes. We were approached by a rather jovial chap who introduced
himself as the customs man. Bonus, we can get our carnet stamped here,
we thought, as we had been told that we normally had to get it done in
Nyanga, 50 km away. He spent ages searching our car and said we were to
come to his office for the carnet stamp. But before that, we still had
to walk across the track to the "real immigration office."
Whoa, who's the daddy here? This man had four big stamps, flowers, a
somewhat kitsch Christmas tree (isn't it April already) and an enormous
and rather shiny poster of a Halberg Rassy 42 sailboat. Do we miss
yachting, you may ask? Um, nope! Finally, we made our way to the customs
and after much chit-chat, he asked us for a fiche with all our details
on it and then promptly told us we had to actually go to Nyanga to get
the stamp. Rob lost his temper at this point. "So, you're not the
Customs" he said, " You're just wasting my time" and
promptly snatched the carnet out his hand and stormed back to the car.
And so we drove the 50km to Nyanga on a pretty special road. Once again,
we were stopped at a police barrier (they block the road so you can't
just sneak though) who insisted we had to get our passports stamped
again. "But we already have our entry stamp, you see, right here"
This particular process took some time as no matter how many times we
showed him the visa and stamp for Congo, he insisted on writing the
details for our Mauritania visa down. Oh, give me strength!!!!!! We
caught the real customs man just in time as he was heading off somewhere
yonder. But once again, we keep thinking about buying ourselves a set of
fake stamps, as he made a right balls-up by filling out the exit section
instead of the entry. What a lemon!. Feeling quite exasperated at this
point, we looked for a quiet bush camp for the night and found a superb
spot amongst the tall grass. I attempted to whip up a spaghetti cabonara
but we were soon invaded by some very scary sounding buzzing creatures
and so dived into the safety of the tent to munch away. Suprisingly good
cabonara actually. Does anyone appreciate how long I have gone without
sausages? Not counting tinned ones, of course. |