Free Last Chance to See by Douglas Adams, Mark Carwardine

her cheekbones. She was watching some flies crawling up the wall, not with any great interest because they were not doing anything unexpected, but at least they were doing something. Behind her was a table stacked with biscuits, chocolate bars, cola, and a pot of coffee, and we headed straight toward this like a pack of stoats. Just before we reached it, however, we were suddenly headed off by a man in blue polyester, who asked us what we thought we were doing in there. We explained that we were transit passengers on our way to Zaïre, and he looked at us as if we had completely taken leave of our senses.
    “
Transit
passengers?” he said. “It is not allowed for transit passengers to be in here.” He waved us magnificently away from the snack counter, made us pick up all our gear again, and herded us back through the door and away into the first room, where a minute later the man in the brown polyester found us again.
    He looked at us.
    Slow incomprehension engulged him, followed by sadness, anger, deep frustration, and a sense that the world had been created specifically to cause him vexation. He leaned back against the wall, frowned, closed his eyes, and pinched the bridge of his nose.
    “You are in the wrong room,” he said simply. “You are transit passengers. Please go to the other room.”
    There is a wonderful calm that comes over you in such situations, particularly when there is a refreshment kiosk involved. We nodded, picked up our gear in a Zen-like manner, and made our way back down the corridor to the secondroom. Here the man in blue polyester accosted us once more, but we patiently explained to him that he could fuck off. We needed chocolate, we needed coffee, maybe even a reviving packet of biscuits, and what was more, we intended to have them. We outfaced him, dumped our bags on the ground, walked firmly up to the counter, and hit a major unforeseen snag.
    The girl wouldn’t sell us anything. She seemed surprised that we even bothered to raise the subject. With her fists still jammed into her cheekbones, she shook her head slowly at us and continued to watch the flies on the wall.
    The problem, it gradually transpired after a conversation which flowed like gum from a tree, was this. She would only accept Tanzanian currency. She knew without needing to ask that we didn’t have any, for the simple reason that no one ever did. This was an international transit lounge, and the airport had no currency-exchange facilities, therefore no one who came in here could possibly have any Tanzanian currency and therefore she couldn’t serve them.
    After a few minutes of futile wrangling, we had to accept the flawless simplicity of her argument and just sit out our time there gloomily eyeing the coffee and chocolate bars, while our pockets bulged with useless dollars, sterling, French francs, and Kenyan shillings. The girl stared vacantly at the flies, obviously resigned to the fact that she never did any business at all. After a while we became quite interested in watching the flies as well.
    At last we were told that our flight was ready to depart again, and we returned to our planeload of missionaries.
    Where, we wondered, had they been while all this had been going on? We didn’t ask. After an hour or so we landed at last at Bukavu, and as we taxied up to the terminal shacks of the airport, the plane resounded to happy cries of “Oh, how wonderful, the bishop’s come to meet us!” And there he was, big and beaming in his purple tunic, wearing glasseswith frames that were black at the top and transparent at the bottom. The missionaries, the mission school teachers, and the American couple who were merely very interested in missionary work climbed smiling out of the plane, and we, pausing to pull our camera bags out from under our seats, followed them.
    We were in Zaïre.
    I think the best way of explaining what goes so hideously wrong with Zaïre is to reproduce a card we were given by a tourist officer a few