Last Chance to See

We had been warned by friends that we had to get ourselves a currency-declaration form when we entered Zaïre or we would hit trouble later on. We repeatedly asked for one, but they said they had run out. They said we could get one in Goma and that would be all right.
    They toyed with the idea of confiscating my Cambridge Z88 laptop computer just in case we were planning to overthrow the government with it, but in the end the small nasty man merely confiscated Chris’s car magazine on the grounds that he liked cars and then, for now, we were free.
    We went into the town of Bukavu in a sort of taxilike thing. The town turned out to be an enormous distance from the airport, probably at the insistence of the taxi drivers. As we bounded along the appallingly rutted road that followed the margin of the lake and along which a significant proportion of the population of Zaïre seemed to be walking, our driver kept on diving beneath the dashboard of the car for long periods at a time. I watched this with some alarm, which was severely increased when I eventually worked out what he was doing. He was operating the clutch by hand. I wonderedwhether to mention this to the others but decided that, no, it would only worry them. Mark later mentioned that we had not passed any other motor vehicles at all on the drive, except for a couple of trucks which had been parked for so long that they no longer had any rear axles. I didn’t notice this myself, because once I had identified what the driver was doing with the clutch, I simply kept my eyes closed for the remainder of the journey.
    When at last we arrived at the hotel, which was surprisingly airy and spacious for such a dilapidated town as Bukavu, we were rattled and exhausted and we started to yawn at one another a lot. This was a kind of unspoken code for being fed up with the sight of one another despite the fact that it was only six in the evening. We each went off to our respective rooms and sat in our separate heaps.
    I sat by the window and watched as the sun began to go down over the lake, the name of which I couldn’t remember because all the maps were in Mark’s room. From this vantage point, Bukavu looked quite idyllic, situated on a peninsula which jutted into the lake. Lake Kivu. I remembered the name now. I was still feeling very jangled and jittery and decided that staring at the lake a bit might help.
    It was placid and silvery, shading to grey in the distance where it met the fading shapes of the hills that surrounded it. That helped.
    The early-evening light cast long shadows over the old Belgian colonial houses that were stepped down the hill from the hotel, huddled about with bright blossoms and palm trees. That was good too. Even the green corrugated roofs of the cruder new buildings were soothed by the light. I watched the black kites wheeling out over the water and found that I was calming down. I got up and started to unpack the things I needed for the night, and at last a wonderful sense of peace and well-being settled on me, disturbed only by the sudden realisation that I had once again left my toothpaste in lastnight’s hotel. And my writing paper. And my cigarette lighter. I decided it was time to explore the town.
    The main street was a grim hill, wide, disheveled, and strewn with rubbish. The shops were for the most part concrete and dingy, and because Zaïre is an ex-Belgian colony, every other shop is a
pharmacie
, just like in Belgium and France, except that none of them, as it happened, sold toothpaste, which bewildered me.
    Most of the other shops were in fact impossible to identify. When a shop appeared to sell a mixture of ghetto blasters, socks, soap, and chickens, it didn’t seem unreasonable to go in and ask if they had any toothpaste or paper stuck away on one of their shelves as well, but they looked at me as if I was completely mad. Couldn’t I see that this was a ghetto blaster, socks, soap, and chicken shop? Eventually, after trailing up and down the street for half a mile in either direction, I found both of them at a tiny street stall which also turned out to sell ballpoint pens, airmail envelopes, and cigarette lighters, and in fact seemed to be so peculiarly attuned to my needs that I was tempted to ask if they had a copy of
New Scientist
as well.
    I then realised that most of the essentials of life were available out on the street. Photocopying, for example. Here and there along the street were rickety trestle tables with