Trip Report: Democratic Republic of the Congo – Country #190

Trip Report: Democratic Republic of the Congo – Country #190

Visited in May 2025

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The Democratic Republic of the Congo, or DRC for short, was my 190th country and my second-to-last in Africa. Before reading this article, I recommend you read the trip report on the Republic of the Congo: country 189/197. It contains some background information that is also relevant to this trip report.

If you don’t want to do that, then at least read the article about how I got to the DRC by crossing the Congo River from Brazzaville to Kinshasa. It was certainly the wildest and most nerve-wracking border crossing I have experienced in 190 countries. This story is an essential part of my DRC trip!

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After crossing the Congo River from Brazzaville to Kinshasa, I left Ngobila Beach with a transit visa in my passport. The biggest challenge I have ever faced on my journey to every country in the world was over. You can’t imagine how relieved I was.

Crossing the river and going through immigration requires quite a few bribes from travelers. However, I was spared this until the last moment. Looks like the $200 for the 7-minute boat ride already included all the bribes. But when I left the port, the person who pulled my small trolley from the boat to the visa office asked me for money. I politely declined.

The next problem was already waiting for me. My driver/guide was not there. I informed him the night before that I would be arriving on the first ferry in the morning. I wrote again from the beach in Brazzaville that I was about to board the ship. That was an hour ago. He wrote back that he was on his way…

This driver/guide was arranged for me by the guy from east-DRC who sent me the incorrect letter of invitation, which caused the rejection of my first visa application. We agreed that he would provide me with an English-speaking guide who would drive me around DRC for two days. Since this guy was no longer responding, his “boss” or whatever from east-DRC got in touch instead.

Read for yourself:

So, Muse was the guy who was supposed to pick me up. And his “boss” now wanted me to find another driver for the day.

Anyone who read my reports on Gabon and the Republic of the Congo, the two countries I visited before the DRC, will already have noticed that the tour operators were anything but good. Here in the DRC, the whole thing took on a whole new dimension, and that was just the beginning…

As you can see from my reply, I was really annoyed. This kind of thing happened all the time. And now I just wanted to get to my hotel as quickly as possible. The guy from eastern DRC then sent me another message:

Can you believe this guy? First, his driver doesn’t show up, and then he sends me advice that I need to watch out for the cops and the Kuluna, the gang of kids who are looking for trouble in Kinshasa. What a great start to DRC!

I checked how far my hotel, the Hilton, was. Only 14 minutes on foot. But somehow I didn’t dare to walk that distance with my luggage. To be honest, Kinshasa was a city that I had tremendous respect for due to its poor reputation.

However, I only had one alternative: to get into a random taxi and drive there. Not exactly an option I liked either…

When you leave Ngobila Beach, there are already a few money changers waiting to exchange FCFA, the currency of the Republic of the Congo, into Congolese francs, the currency of the DRC. It is remarkable that both countries have different currencies. The exchange rate wasn’t great, but I exchanged the equivalent of about €20 so that I would have some small change.

I gave a few bills to the guy who had asked for money just a few minutes ago and told him to organize a taxi for me. Before that, I chatted with him a bit, asked him his name, and introduced myself. As a confidence-building measure. If you know someone by name, you might not want to do anything bad to them, I thought.

The guy then got me a taxi. Beforehand, I shared my live location with the travel group I had spent the previous days with in Gabon and ROC. If anything went wrong, at least they would know where I was being taken.

In fact, my worries were unfounded and I arrived at the Hilton five minutes later. In those five minutes, I was able to get a first impression of Kinshasa. It became clear why many people do not consider Kinshasa to be a particularly beautiful city. And that’s putting it mildly…

While I was checking in at the Hilton, a new player entered the scene. A guy named Stephane wrote to me on WhatsApp. He said he was a friend of the guy who was supposed to pick me up, and since the latter couldn’t fix his car problem, he would come instead.

I asked the tour operator in eastern DRC, the organizer of my trip, if he knew a Stephane. He said no, he had never heard that name before. Shortly after, however, he sent me another message. He had checked it out and Stephane was the man who was now supposed to show me around.

By the way, the Hilton turned out to be an excellent hotel, much better than the Hilton in Brazzaville. Even though some of the prices were astronomical ($10 for a cappuccino), the rooms were great and offered a good view of Kinshasa.

Ironically, there was a meeting of the “Direction Generale de Migration,” which includes the border police, on that day. The hotel was therefore full of police officers, whom one should be wary of outside the hotel. There were literally hundreds of them. I thought to myself that I had probably rarely been in a place with such a high density of corrupt people.

Stephane showed up in the early afternoon with a driver, and it was time to see some of the city. First, I had to get some US dollars at a bank, because despite the Congolese franc, the US dollar is a common currency here in the DRC.

The traffic in Kinshasa was terrible. The city has far too many vehicles, and the streets are correspondingly congested. So we parked somewhere and walked part of the way. I’ve heard of people being arrested in Kinshasa for taking photos. Some had to pay fines of $100 or more. For this reason, I was very cautious about taking photos.

By the way, I proceeded in the same manner as I had several months ago in Niger: whenever I took a picture, I immediately deleted it in case I encountered a police checkpoint and they would check out my gallery. I could always retrieve it from the recycle bin later.

Anyway, it’s not as if Kinshasa has many good photo spots. Instagrammable places? Forget it. Kinshasa is mistakenly called “Kin la Belle” by the locals. The city has nothing to do with anything beautiful. It’s dirty, it’s chaotic, a crazy African concrete jungle with potholes, construction sites, and poor air quality.

“This is my first time doing this. I mean, showing a tourist around,” said Stephane. It was clear to me that Stephane wasn’t a guide. He was just a random dude who spoke English and who my actual guide had been able to find at short notice as a replacement.

Stephane told me that he used to work with an American for a long time and that’s how he learned English. He also told me that he would leave the DRC immediately if he had the opportunity. Life here is hard and it’s difficult to find work. I asked him where he would emigrate to and he replied, “The US or London.”

In the meantime, I had gotten my USD and walked the first twenty minutes in Kinshasa. Although the traffic was completely insane – at times, crossing the street was reminiscent of Hanoi, where you have to weave your way between passing cars – I found the city less intimidating than I had imagined.

Most people ignored me. This was certainly partly because I had a local with me, but that wasn’t the only reason. Sometimes I walked a little behind Stephane and didn’t feel like I was a target for pushy Congolese people, as I had expected.

There are hardly any sights in Kinshasa, and Stephane had to call Mussa, the guy with the flat tire, to ask where he should take me. We first drove to the mausoleum of former President Laurent Kabila.

A group of soldiers were sitting in front of the mausoleum, and Stephane said we had to ask them first if we could take a photo. Of course, with a “gift” in return. We walked over to the soldiers and they gave me the green light, but also emphasized that I shouldn’t “forget” them afterwards.

We took a few photos and then I asked Stephane how much I should give them. I suggested 10,000 francs, which is about USD 3. Stephane wasn’t sure if that would be enough. But when I gave the soldiers the bills, their eyes lit up like those of a little boy who had just received a PlayStation 5 for Christmas. Obviously, this donation far exceeded their expectations.

After this stop, we drove to the Congo River, where we wanted to take a few more pictures. However, almost the entire river promenade was cordoned off because construction work was also taking place there. The whole city resembled a huge construction site and the barriers were so high that they completely blocked the view of the river.

There was a small spot where you could still access the river. Stephane asked the construction workers if we could go through and take a photo. They replied that we should ask the “patrons,” meaning the soldiers who were there.

Of course, they also wanted a “gift,” so I gave them my remaining 3,000 francs. It was remarkable how soldiers were sitting around lazily everywhere, accepting bribes from people, while rebel troops were conquering entire cities in the east of the country…

We climbed down to the riverbank, where we could see Brazzaville on the other side. Just a few hours earlier, I had crossed this river as a diplomat, and now I was standing here on the other side.

After these two stops, I honestly didn’t know what else we could do in Kinshasa. Stephane didn’t know either. However, since we had passed a mall on the way there and I had seen some international brands advertised there, I wanted to check it out.

Incidentally, the neighborhood where we went to the riverbank didn’t look too bad. I saw a few embassies and thought the streets here still looked nice. There were trees that made the neighborhood look green, and it seemed relatively clean. I didn’t see areas like this in Lagos, a city I found terrible and thought Kinshasa would be similar to.

Don’t get me wrong, Kinshasa is definitely not a beautiful city. But at the end of the day, it wasn’t the hellhole I had expected either.

A little later, we arrived at the Galleria Mall, a mall that could just as easily have been anywhere in Europe. The mall had brands like Decathlon, Paul&Shark, Hackett London… things I definitely wouldn’t have expected to find in Kinshasa. It looked like there was an upper class in Kinshasa that could afford such brands.

We spent an hour there but after that, none of us knew what else to do, so I said we should go back to the hotel. At the parking lot, we realized that the parking fee could only be paid in francs, not dollars. Since I had given my last francs to the soldiers in Congo, I asked Stephane what we should do now.

Stephane had absolutely no solution to this minor problem. He casually suggested that I discuss it with the guy at the gate. But I politely told Stephane that I had hired a local specifically for such cases, so that he could help me with issues like this.

I don’t hold it against Stephane, because he didn’t seem to really know what his job was today. Maybe he thought I was paying him and the driver $100 just to keep me company. In the end, they were a last-minute solution because my actual guide had problems with the car. As nice as they were, the two of them weren’t really cut out for this job.

This day wasn’t really anything special, but that was okay. Because the highlight in the Democratic Republic of the Congo wasn’t supposed to happen until the next day. A visit to the Bonobo Sanctuary. These apes can only be seen in the DRC, nowhere else.

The sanctuary is only about 40 km from Kinshasa, but apparently this route can sometimes take up to three hours due to traffic. Since I had a flight that same evening after visiting the sanctuary, I told Stephane that we had to leave by 10 am at the latest. I said it twice and he seemed to understand.

To be on the safe side (also because traffic in Kinshasa seems to be unpredictable), I wrote to him again in the evening to ask him to be at the Hilton at 9 am. I knew that if we agreed on 9 am., it would be 9:30 at best…

Of course, it happened as it had to happen. The next morning at 9 am, he wrote that he was on his way. At 9:45, however, he still hadn’t arrived at the hotel. He said that the traffic was too heavy. That was exactly why I wanted him to be there at 9 am and not at 10.

Furthermore, it turned out that he wasn’t traveling with the driver, who was allegedly unavailable. At 10:30, he wrote that he was at the hotel, but without a car. He suggested that we ask any taxi on the street to take us to the bonobos.

Since I wanted to go straight to the airport afterwards, I didn’t like the idea of leaving my luggage in a random taxi driver’s car while I visited the animals. Overall, I also felt that Stephane wasn’t the right person for a trip like this, where a lot could go wrong.

So I canceled the tour. On the one hand, I felt sorry for Stephane. But on the other hand, he had one job to do, which he had just screwed up royally, even though I had repeatedly told him to be there on time. Somehow, it didn’t sit right with me that he complained about not having enough work and then, when he had an opportunity, didn’t take advantage of it…

The bonobos would certainly have been the highlight of my stay in Kinshasa. Now I had a second day in “Kin La Belle,” where I had already run out of things to do after three hours the day before.

I went into town again that day, had an excellent meal at an Italian restaurant called Limoncello, and visited a mall again. I also met some guest workers. One was Mohammed, a waiter from Morocco who had been working at the Hilton for a few months. He asked me what Brazzaville was like. Since he asked if it was “just as bad” as Kinshasa, I could guess how much he liked it here. But apart from that, it was a wasted day.

The drive from the hotel to the airport took almost two hours, even though the distance between the Hilton and the airport is less than 25 km. “We’re lucky today,” said the driver, “sometimes it takes much longer.” In fact, there were several times when the car just stood still for a long time and didn’t move at all.

At the airport, you have to pay a hefty departure tax of $55. Corruption is also rampant here, with many police officers (and others) taking every opportunity to ask passengers for money. I observe how the locals always give something. Presumably, this is simply part of everyday life here in the DRC.

My journey to the last “difficult” country was now over. Although it was far less eventful than expected, the DRC will probably go down as one of my most memorable countries ever, if only because of the river crossing. As for Kinshasa, it’s certainly not a nice city, but it’s not the hellhole I expected either.

It wouldn’t be fair to judge the DRC based on my short stay in Kinshasa anyway. The country is huge and is perhaps one of the last countries in the world where you can still experience real adventure. Whether I will ever do that here is more than questionable at this point, but we’ll see.

I then flew on to Addis Ababa in the early hours of the morning. From there, I had a flight to my last country in Africa, Chad. And my seventh last country before reaching the 197!

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Click here to find the trip reports of all 197 countries I have visited!