Halfway down the Danube

Jacob is five

I was away on his actual birthday.  Got back from the Congo a day later.

But the next day we went to a toy store together -- he chose a toy backhoe; he loves construction machinery -- and then I took him in the afternoon to the Wasserkuppe.

The Wasserkuppe is a small mountain about half an hour away from here.  It's famous for sailplaning, and also for a Cold War era radome on the summit that's now a museum.  But it also has a small amusement park near the top, which includes a couple of... I don't know what they're called, exactly.  Summer sleds?  The toboggan things that go on wheels down a track.  The tracks are a couple of km long, so you can build up some pretty good speed going down the mountainside.

It was a cloudy, foggy day but (as it turned out) the top of the Wasserkuppe just poked above most of the clouds, so it was half-sunny, cool but nice.  The amusement park was open, but not busy at all -- we could go on all the rides without waiting in line more than a few moments.

As it turns out, Jacob is the kind of kid who likes going on rides, but doesn't care to go on them twice.  (I did not know this.  I have learned something new about my son.)  So in an hour or so, we'd been on every ride -- there aren't that many.  We rode on all three (slow, fast, and whoa) that go down the mountainside and back.  We went on the "witches broomstick", which is a roller-coastery sort of a thing, and on the slow-turning kiddie swing.  (Think of a metal T-bar with playground swings hanging from the crossbars.  Now rotate it slowly.)  We ate french fries with ketchup and then, on the way out, an ice cream cone.

Jacob was... not exactly wiggling with delight.  More like, very content.  He spends a lot of time in the shadow of his two older brothers, and I think he was enjoying being away from them and alone as much as he was liking the rides and all.

-- One thing that struck me.  Germans are so!  much!  less! concerned about safety issues than litigation-happy Americans.  For instance, several of the rides had /no operators/.  The kiddie swing?  Just a big button with a sign saying "stops automatically".  Granted, it wasn't exactly a life-threatening blur of speed and raw metal.  But still.  And the witches broomstick, which is a real, no-kidding amusement park ride, was coin-operated.  Sit down, close the safety bar, put two euros in the slot, and off you go.  The playground had a huge, fast slide; at the base of the ladder was a box of sacks you could bring up, to sit on and go even faster.  It was awesome -- there was a constant stream of kids going up and down -- but the American part of my brain was all "shouldn't someone be on duty there?  what if one of those kids is careless and gets hurt?"

But nobody did get hurt (at least, not while we were watching) and we both had a really good time.  Happy birthday, little boy.

The Mouth of the Congo again

This is another post about two topics I discuss a lot, viz., "infrastructure" and "why Congo is screwed".  If those topics don't interest you, move on.

So Congo touches the Atlantic Ocean, but it doesn't have a proper ocean port.  There's Matadi, 150 km up the Congo River.  (Nothing goes past Matadi because of the rapids.)  But it turns out that the lower stretch of river from Matadi to the ocean is choked by sand bars.  The maximum draft?  Currently about 6 meters. 

That's not much.  You can't bring big ocean-going ships into Matadi.  Back in colonial times, it was tolerable. But the average ocean vessel today is something like ten times bigger than the average in 1950.

-- You'll notice I said "currently". That's because the lower river can be dredged.  In fact, Congo has a couple of big dredges to do the job!  But they're not working because of deferred maintenance, lack of spare parts, the usual.  A team from the Netherlands is trying to get them going.  But even if you dredge like crazy, it only increases the maximum draft to 8 meters -- better, but still not good.

So how do you get goods into Matadi?  Two ways. 

One, you ship it in a smaller freighter.  This happens.  Not all the world's freight traffic is carried in immense, 100,000 ton vessels.  A fair amount of Congo's imports, especially from Europe, come in smaller ships.   But they're more expensive, and you can't easily get them for long-hauls (i.e., to and from China).

Two, you ship it to the nearest deep-water port that can handle large freighters.  In this case, that's Pointe Noire, 250 km northwest of Matadi, in the country of Congo-Brazzaville (aka The Other Congo).  At Pointe Noire it gets offloaded into one of several smaller ships that run a shuttle service back and forth, along the coast and up the lower Congo river to Matadi.

There are a couple of additional wrinkles.  One is that Matadi is a horrible, horrible port.  It's overcrowded, most of the equipment doesn't work, and it's afflicted by broad, profound and relentless corruption.  It's rated as one of the most expensive ports in the world, while at the same time being one of the slowest.

Another is that the Matadi-Kinshasa rail line is in terrible shape.  It's run by a state-owned company, so it's slow, dilapidated, and corrupt.  Normally it's much cheaper to move stuff by rail than by road, but the Matadi-Kinshasa line is so bad that 80 to 90 percent of stuff coming in from Matadi uses the road instead.

So, to summarize, most imports to Kinshasa go to Pointe Noire first; get unloaded and reloaded into a much smaller ship; go to the horrible port of Matadi and get unloaded again; and then travel the last 300 km by road. 

Okay, this is pretty bad.  Are there any solutions on hand?

Well... maybe.  With help from -- can you guess? -- China! -- the government of The Other Congo is building an excellent new road from Pointe Noire inland to its capital, Brazzaville.  Brazzaville, you may recall, sits right across the Congo River from Kinshasa.  Once that road is finished (sometime next year), it will be possible to skip Matadi altogether.  Big ships can unload at Pointe Noire, then stuff can come by road to Brazzaville, then cross the river to Kinshasa.  The last leg will need a container ferry (there's no bridge), but that's surely doable.

It'll still be pretty Rube Goldberg for the country's most important transport link.  But nothing comes easy in Congo.  Baby steps.

Congo: conversation with a forestry guy

Edited, paraphrased, and details elided for confidentiality.

"You'll meet people who say we shouldn't log tropical forests at all.  Greenpeace, lots of NGOs.  Just say no.

"Logging is one of the biggest employers in the Congo.  Three hundred thousand people.  It's mostly legitimate, registered companies that are paying a legal wage.  They're businesses, they're not angels, they're not perfect.  But they have addresses.  You can find them.  Most of them have been in the business for decades -- there are family firms going back a century or more.  They're long-term thinkers.

"A mature tropical hardwood tree will gross you around fifty thousand dollars, F.O.B. Antwerp.  That's a lot of money.  Somebody is going to cut those trees. 

"You can do this sustainably.  In fact it's easier to do sustainable logging in a tropical forest, because it's more diverse.  You have ten or twenty different species on a hectare instead of two or three.  So you say, this time we're going after this species, only.  And you harvest one or two or three trees per hectare.  It's the farthest thing from clearcutting you can imagine.  Come back in a year, take another species.  One, two, three trees.  The forest recovers.

Back from Bandundu

Well, that was interesting.

Bandundu is a town of a couple of hundred thousand people about 400 km north and east of Kinshasa.  By road, this takes about seven hours.  Which is, by African standards, not bad!  The first couple of hundred km is paved, even.  (Recent development, last couple of years. It hadn't been paved for long time before that.)

Bandundu sits where two large rivers come together, just a few kilometers before flowing into an even bigger river (the Kasai), which in turn flows into the truly immense Congo River. 

Let me digress a moment and note that the Congo River is really frickin' huge.  Put it next to the Mississippi/Missouri: the Congo's capture area is comfortably larger, and its discharge volume is more than double.  On my last visit, I noted that nature had played a cruel joke on Congo by putting some of the world's largest, nastiest rapids near the mouth of the river, rendering it non-navigable from the sea.  It turns out that situation's even worse than I realized; not only are there rapids, but the mouth of the river is choked by sand bars.  But inland from Kinshasa, it's navigable for hundreds of miles inland, with tributaries going off in all directions.

So Bandundu -- sitting by the intersection of a bunch of large rivers, a few hundred km upstream from the capital -- hould be a pretty major river port.  Right?

Ah hah hah oh dear.  No.