Free Last Chance to See by Douglas Adams, Mark Carwardine Page A

holding this card is visiting our country. He is our guest.
    If he wants to take photographs, be polite and friendly to him. Do your best to have him enjoy his sojourn, and he will come back, bringing his friends with him.
    By helping him, you help your country. Never forget that tourism provides us with returns which allow us to create new jobs, to build schools, hospitals, factories, etc.
    On the welcome that our guest would have received will depend our touristic future.
    It's alarming enough that an exhortation like this should be thought to he necessary, but what is even more worrying is that this section is written only in English.
    No 'Zairean' - or Zairois as they actually call themselves -speaks English, or hardly any do.
    The system by which Zaire works, and which this card was a wonderfully hopeless attempt to correct, is very simple. Every official you encounter will make life as unpleasant for you as he possibly can until you pay him to stop it. In US dollars. He then passes you on to the next official who will be unpleasant to you all over again. By the end of our trip this process would assume nightmarish proportions, by comparison with which our first entry into
    
    
     Zaire
    
    
     was a relatively gentle softening up process, and consisted of only two hours of rain and misery in huts.
    The first thing we saw in the customs but was a picture which gave us a clue about how our expedition to find endangered wildlife in
    
    
     Zaire
    
    
     was going to go. It was a portrait of a leopard. That is it was a portrait of part of a leopard. The part of the leopard in question had been fashioned into a rather natty leopardskin pillbox hat which adorned the head of Marshal Mobuto Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga, the President of the Republic of Zaire, who gazed down on us with a magisterial calm while his officials got to work on us.
    One was a large and fairly friendly man who occasionally offered us cigarettes and the other was a small, nasty man who kept on stealing ours. This is, of course, the classic interrogation method, designed to bring the victim to the brink of pathetic emotional breakdown. It's obviously a technique they learnt somewhere and have just found the habit hard to break, even though all they actually wanted to know from us was our names, passport numbers and the serial numbers of every single piece of equipment we had with us.
    The big man in particular seemed to wish us no personal ill as he guided us gently through the insanity to which it was his duty to subject us, and I came to recognise a feeling I've heard described when oddly close and touching relationships develop between torturers and their victims or kidnappers and their hostages. There is a feeling of all being in this together. The forms we had to fill in were headed 'Belgian Congo', crossed out, with 'Zaire' written in in pencil, which meant that they had to be at least eighteen years old. The only form they didn't seem to have was the only one we actually wanted. We had been warned by friends that we had to get ourselves a currency declaration form when we entered Zaire 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 taxi-like 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 Zaire seemed to be walking, our driver kept on diving beneath the dashboard of the car for long periods at a