Brazzaville Blues. When good trips go bad

I awoke and peeked out of my room at Hotel Gabriella, which I’d crawled into late last night, after the 14.5 hour, 140-mile truck journey from the Congo-Gabon border to here in Dolisie. I vaguely remembered the night clerk being hopelessly inept. He’d taken a basket of keys, then counted the room doors. There were no numbers on the doors, so he had to count from left to right to figure out which door was which.

“Un, deux, trois…”

I wanted to tell him the rooms hadn’t moved. Hadn’t he done this before? But I didn’t dare interrupt as he kept starting over as it was.

I quickly packed up and left at 7am. If there was an eight o’clock train to Brazzaville, I wanted to be on it to continue my trip south all the way to Cape Town. If there wasn’t, I needed an early start on whatever Plan B was going to be as I made my way around the world.

At the railway station, Congolese women dressed in colorful handmade matching head wraps, skirts, and blouses kept pushing past me in line, but then the friendly station master spotted me. He motioned me around into his brightly lit, air-conditioned office.

Using a combination of writing, hand signals, semi-English, and semi-French, he explained to me that the train was running late and still had to go to Pointe-Noire on the coast. It would return here at 5:30pm. A first-class ticket was 15,000 CFA.

Deflated, I asked if luggage storage was available in the station. I knew there wasn’t, but I was angling for an invite. Which this friendly man cheerily provided.

“Baggage ici,” he said, pointing to a dusty cove under a counter, next to an unused stool. I could leave my baggage here until departure time.