DRC's Dodgy Roads Continue...

After a good sleep we were awoken around 6am at the Yema border by somebody sweeping and tidying the place up. Within an hour it became fairly clear what had happened the day before. It appears that due to it being a Sunday, although the DRC (Congo Kinshasa) side was lightly manned it was not really fully open for business. I guess that for the few workers that were on duty on a Sunday is was a sort of stand down day where they do little other than just try to pass the time. I can relate to that...
The Monday was very different though and we were finally stamped in at 10am by the efficient officials and even offered a personal apology for our delay from the director of immigration. It seems as if I’d suffered a bought of SWS (Spoilt Westerners Syndrome) just because things hadn’t been like they are at home. Silly boy, we’ve actually been very fortunate thus far with these types of things and I think I’d forgotten that.
Onto the ‘shocking’ road we rode and pretty nasty it was. Deeply rutted soft sand made for an unpleasant ride but things slowly improved with neither of us dropping our bikes despite a few saves along the way. At the end of the day the way ended up being some 80km north on the wrong road after missing the turn off to Matadi where our Angolan border crossing awaited! Bang... ”Hello Mate, delivery for Selios Kebabs?”(Do keep up!) We were then helped out by a dodgy policeman who took us to a local Auberge (Hostel) and after a quick beer and money change we walked into the town in search of food. It was quickly apparent that the place we ended up was way out of the way and rarely saw tourists or maybe even white people. No problems though as we ate goat and bread whilst being stared at by the locals, whilst mostly ignoring the immigration guy that had turned up seemingly wanting a cadeau (gift/bribe) but not really sure how to get one out of us. After retracing our steps (spins?) the next day we found our missed road and sign that actually looked more like a statue than anything else! Plus the ‘better’ road on the map was initially worse, there was no sun (shadow) and of course no GPS. Excuses over and we made it to the border with no chance of getting to Namibia in the remaining three and a half days, especially after we ran into difficulties getting out of the DRC. We were held up by slow immigration and health checks (inoculations) but more so after a row with the customs officers who were after our Carnets for our bikes which hadn’t been stamped into the country on entry. This was not good news as although now able to get to SA it meant that with only three pages left our intended reroute through Botswana would be out. With a missing Mick I decided to speak Czech which I hoped would’ve sent them away indefinitely looking for a French-Czech translator but after some persistence I told them in very broken English that we were leaving the DRC so they didn’t need to worry. I’ll never know if my ploy would’ve worked as a smiley handshaking Mick then appeared from immigration and immediately greeted them in English! I quickly went for a bit of ventriloquism and we moved onto playing the stupid European game...which went spectacularly wrong (or right as we did look stupid) as an eagle eyed customs officer spotted Mick’s distinctive yellow Carnet document in his half open pannier!! Carnets stamped and whilst still dirty and hungry we left the DRC in hope of better roads and food in Angola...