maandag 20 mei 2013

Week 10 – Kinshasa - Democratic Republic of Congo


Week 10 – Kinshasa - Democratic Republic of Congo

 

Ok, so after visiting Chad, we took a small airplane from Sarh to the Central African Republic. It wasn’t meant to be though since 2 of my friends fell ill with fevers stomach complaints on our second day there.

 

So now we’re in Kinshasa, Congo! In order to enter Congo though we first had to prove that we had gotten a yellow fever vaccination, luckily we were prepared for that and we got through. Now, this country has so much history that we couldn’t help but having a ton of respect for the inhabitants, the environment, … and basically everything. Kinshasa is located along the south bank of the Congo river, which is the 2nd largest river in Africa.

 

We were staying in the West side of Congo and luckily the war zones are in the north-eastern areas, however I must say that during our time in Kinshasa we often didn’t feel safe when walking around. The gap between the rich and the poor is huge and crime is ever present. Almost everywhere we went we saw streetchildren. Watching us with unpleasant eyes or not watching us at all, living in misery, day in day out. A local shop owner told us that there are approximately 20.000 children living on the streets of which a quarter are beggars.

 

We decided to leave this behind and visit some things we found on tripadvisor. Lola Ya Bonobo was our first stop. A reservation park for Bonobos. This was an amazing day, the Bonobos seemed incredibly intelligent and we could look at them for hours, not once feeling bored. The seemed also seemed extremely committed to their tasks of taking care of them.
 We also visited the Kinshasa University which was unbelievable to see. This showed us once again how big the gap was between the rich and the poor.

For the rest of our week we travelled around most of the time by bus, we did make sure though to always stay in group with some other tourists we met when heading for more secluded areas.

 


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