Day 168: Owando – Abio Site

Refuel, refill water, refill gas bottle. Yes, actually, our German gas bottle made it here and we are getting it filled up again.

We drive through magical landscapes. Jungle, sparse forests, grasslands, swamp areas, hills, mountains – very varied, including the vegetation. The many slash-and-burn practices alone disturb the picture a bit – endless smoke...

And unfortunately there is hardly any opportunity to stop along the road and there are no roads or paths leading off. Only occasional narrow, overgrown footpaths. 

By the way, yesterday a chimpanzee with a baby crossed the street in front of us.

We drive through Oyo, a larger city with a lot of representative buildings – we have to research whether the current president is from there :-)

There are huge cattle farms here and therefore also grazing land, even if we cannot identify it as such. And accordingly money. 

What is also noticeable: We encounter an incredible number of SUV convoys, always with blue lights, sirens, headlight flashers and/or hazard lights to signal “get out of there, I’m important”. In addition to government vehicles, there are also many NGOs – that's not quite as sympathetic as the money being wasted on it when you've previously driven through villages where there's basically nothing.

We reach our destination today, the Abio Site, via a 16 km long sandy track through hills and meadows that seem completely unreal after the jungle.

A simple camp with a communal kitchen on site. Besides us, there is a Dutch woman (Evelin) and two Belgians (Marc and Joost) who work in the diplomatic service, Evelin in the city of Kinshasa, which has a population of 20 million. 

We are given passion fruit from a large bag – now we know what it is on the street. They look completely different fresh than ours and taste wonderful.