Porcupine Anyone??

OK.........Once again, I stole (with permission) Jenica's Blog.......She captured our outing to Dolisie so well! Praise God Jenica for your creative writing abilities that you are blessed with!!!

Bianca, Kathy and I headed off the ship at 0530 for the train station. Destination: Dolisie. Purpose: mini vacation/ see more of Congo.

We took the train up, a 4 hour ride, as long as everything is working and on time. Our train took 7 hours.

We sat on board at the station for 45 minutes then left at 0745, instead of 0700, and made it to Fond Tie Tie (pronounced Chee Chee) which is the big Congolese market. It’s about a 30 minute taxi drive or 7 minute train ride. We then sat for 2 hours people watching and making friends with some little girls outside the window who were transfixed by the mundelays (white people). We would wave, they would shyly smile and wave back over and over again for a good 40 minutes. There were technical problems with the train and we were told we were waiting for the technician; hopefully we would be leaving by 1100… it was 0915 at this point. Glad we brought snacks!

Tie Tie Market

Happily though, by 1000 we were moving again and had no further problems. We voyaged through the grasslands, rolling hills, and straight into the “heart of darkness,” a little Conrad for you literature folks, the rain forrest for the rest of you.Pressing in on all sides, the railroad was literally machete-ed through this thick, lucious, beautiful jungle. A little excerpt from my journal:

The scenery on our way was beautiful. More grasslands with white sand bluffs and then rain forrest. It looks like they just hacked through it, the jungle pressing in on both sides with a little river far below. So gorgeous. These random little villages flashing by, 2-10 shacks on the side of the road. Some adorable kid standing next to them or a family with buckets on their heads. Quintecential Africa snap shots. The kind you really want to take to show back home. See? This is the real Africa, this is the real Congo. Not Pointe Noire with all it’s oil money and fancy roads. But you reach for your camera, you blink once, and it’s gone. So they’re just mental snap shots to carry with me forever.

Around 1345 we rolled into Dolisie. Honestly, wow. The beauty of the place! Red dirt roads, buildings that used to be white are now red tinged. And the nature! Green trees, grass, rolling hills, beautiful flowering bushes, fresh clean air. It was like paradise to me after living in a grey flat port city for the past 7.5 months!

Arriving in Dolisie

Train Depot

There was a little bit of confusion with getting off the train… namely we couldn’t. And the train was headed to Brazzaville… which takes another 8 hours… hard pass. But all the doors were locked on the inside, there was no getting out and the train was getting ready to depart! It was getting a little stressful! Somehow all these people had gotten onto the train at Dolisie to go to Brazzaville but we couldn’t get off. So we were swimming upstream in these tiny aisles with our back packs, dodging around the other people trying to find seats and store luggage, going from locked door to locked door, trying different cabins, thinking “this is cool, we’re going to spend the rest of our lives on a train. We did not bring enough snacks for this.” Eventually some of the other passengers took pity on us poor mundelays and started shouting for the guards to open the doors and let us off. They started hammering at the doors, shouting, rocking the door back and forth a bit. I began to worry a bit about a riot breaking out to let the mundelays off the train! Luckily it didn’t escalate that far and a guard came to unlock the door and let us off. About 2 minutes later the train was gone.

We took a taxi up the hill to a Protestant guest house we were staying at. These are fairly common in Congo. They are basically hotels associated with the church- Protestant or Catholic.  You don’t have to profess a faith to stay there and they are normally nice, clean, cheaper than hotels but more rustic. In Kathy lingo, they’re “cute” (insert sarcasm here)- no AC, running water when you ask, bucket showers the rest of the time. But there was a fan and a toilet. It more than suffices for the night!

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After settling in we took a nice wander down the hill, taking in the beautiful scenery, saying hello to everyone we passed. Mundelays aren’t common in Dolisie, it’s very different from Pointe Noire where there is a large ex-pat community. I didn’t see another white person the entire time we were in Dolisie, so we created quite a sensation

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Bianca made friends with an African mamma we met on our walk who showed us the way to the Grande Marche. This Grande Marche is in a two story building, not outdoors like the one in Pointe Noire. Therefore, the smells are much stronger because they are enclosed in a building but the floor is much cleaner. Which is good, because walking through the red dust we were already dirty enough! The market is divided into food downstairs and clothing upstairs. It was interesting to look at the food, especially the meat- some very different things available in comparison to Pointe Noire. In Pointe Noire the main thing is ocean fish: fresh, BBQ. or dried with salt. In Dolisie it was forrest game: things that looked like overgrown rats/ Texas sized possums, baby crocodiles, river fish. Not as many fruits available but more vegetables.

After a nice drink at the market we decided it was time to wander back towards dinner. On our way we stopped at a Catholic church, just to look around, and met the priest, Pere Philippe. He was very friendly and bonus, even spoke a bit of English! He is Congolese but studied in Quebec, Canada, then lived there for 16 years and had just returned to Dolisie, his home town, last year. We asked him if he had a favorite local restaurant he frequented and after careful consideration, he decided he would show us his favortie restaurant.

The restaurant we went to was off the beaten path. Very simple but pretty and delicious food! We ate like kings, again, two nights in a row! River fish, porcupine (yes, you read that correctly), eggplant, bread, manioc, saffou (vegetable- purple on the outside, bright green on the inside, tastes like a mixture between a lemon and artichoke heart), and good wine (first time in 8 months). It was a really nice evening, really enjoyable conversation, good weather, good food- what more can you ask for? Oh, what was the porcupine like you wonder? Tough, chewy, gritty, did I mention chewy? Like you’re chewing the same piece for 5 minutes and that piece was only the size of a quarter chewy. Yup.

The following morning we got up to sunshine, birds, blue skies and green grass. Can you tell I was loving being so close to the outdoors? This summer, give me some granola and I’ll just live outside, soak it all in. No problem :) We then went to the agriculture site that Mercy Ships is involved with. It’s about 3km outside of the city. It’s a government site where they teach farmers more effective methods of farming. Mercy Ships partners with local farmers in every country and does an agriculture program where they teach sustainable, effective farming. The idea is they teach farmers with a passion for teaching and equip them to re-teach what they’ve learned to others. This way the program is sustainable and has a lasting impact long after we have left the country.

Here in Congo, we partnered with what the government started. The program through Mercy Ships officially finished a few weeks ago and all the farmers have returned to their villages and farms. There are three farmers remaining to farm the agriculture site. We met two of them and they showed us around. One of the farmers was explaining to us how grateful he was for our partnership. He said that the buildings were built by the government but prior to our arrival there were lots of high weeds and not a lot of land cleared for farming. He told us that he had gone to university for agriculture and his passion was to teach others how to farm, how to be sustainable, and how to use farming as a means to climb out of poverty. He told us how the course from Mercy Ships helped him further his goals, learn new techniques (like composting), and through this he has been able to form 40 small groups of farmers to teach what he has learned.

The farm is very impressive. It’s very orderly and the vegetables all look delicious- plump and juicy. Some of the vegetables are sent to the ship. Others are sold in town. They are very proud of their work, skills, and knowledge and it shows in the way the farm is taken care of. There’s also bunnies on the farm. Apparently they, like goats, are very expensive here. They are a delicacy, but no, I did not eat any. Just held them!

  

After the agriculture site we had brunch at a patisserie in town. Gotta love the French influence on the bakeries here! After, we had some time to kill before meeting up with Pere Philippe to get our return bus tickets so we decided to go back to our hotel for a bit. The previous night he had generously offered to get our tickets for us since he knew where to go. (Only in Africa, aka OIA). We gave him our money and told him we’d return the next day at noon since the bus left at 1400. (OIA) When we got back to our hotel the mamma who runs it was in a tizzy, worried because a priest had come looking for us (OIA). The time of the bus had changed to 1200! Again, OIA! It was 1140. Luckily we had a taxi waiting for us so we quickly grabbed our bags, said au revoir to mamma and went to the church to meet Pere Philippe, who gave us the tickets through the open window and told the taxi driver to go vite vite (fast fast) to the bus station. We made it with 5 minutes to spare!

…. and then sat.

For 30 minutes.

Before the bus showed up.

Only in Africa, right?

The bus was very nice, very modern, with air conditioning. It was a beautiful drive back to Pointe Noire. It was a very hilly drive with lots of switch backs but our driver took everything very slowly and carefully. My stomach was very grateful for that, as was the rest of me, especially after seeing multiple buses and taxis flipped on their sides rusting away on the side of the road. The road itself was in amazing condition and there was a lot of maintenance road work going on. The Chinese have been investing a lot into Congo’s infrastructure. I’m not positive why but they have had a hand in a lot of major construction projects throughout the country. It was a very hot day and there were a lot of men working on tarring the road, paving it, and hand-chiseling steps in the rockside for water run off to prevent flooding on the road during rainy season.

 

The bus held 24, I think max we had about 26 people in there. Randomly we would stop on the side of the road and see if someone needed a ride to Pointe Noire. They’d hop in, pull out a fold down chair and we’d keep going. We also stopped at two road side stands to buy food. One of them was about 300 yards away from the road. To see the mammas rush the van with their avocados, peanuts, bananas you’d have thought we were celebrities. I got some delicious massive avocados- I love that they’re in season right now!

Funniest moment of the trip was when the man behind Kathy told her to give him her water. She did so without thinking and he proceeded to down half of it in one big gulp, hand it back and that was that. No thank you. Just obviously that was the way it was.

The only haphazard we sustained on the way back was a flat tire about 30 minutes outside of Pointe Noire. So everyone trooped off the bus, the tire got changed in about 10 minutes and then we trooped back on and continued our way into the city.

L to R: Bianca, Kathy, Jenica

All in all it was a lovely weekend, full of adventure and all things Africa!