We stay in Benguela with Tony – an old friend from when I last visited the country two years ago. Benguela is the by far strongest memory of my previous travels. That time, I met Tony and Dinho in town and ended up staying with them for almost three weeks. We did practically nothing, but still I enjoyed life better than I had ever done before. It was like as if I had found what is actually important in life – pure friendship. We didn’t have to go to the movies or clubs – just hang about was good enough.

That time, I hadn’t even planned to travel to Angola to begin with, but once there it became my favorite place on the whole continent. A laid-back life, a beautiful beach, beautiful people – and for once in Africa, Benguela was also a beautiful city. We used to wake up an hour or two before noon, go visit some friend, watch some TV, listen to music, chat, eat. In the evenings, we went to the local bar where we had a few Cuca (beer) and baguette with grilled chicken, ketchup and mayonnaise. It was me, Tony, Dinho and all their friends. In the Cuban blocks where they lived, everyone was family.

I also remember the melancholy. Dinho went home to his wife in the early evening. He sat watching over her at the bedside. She was asleep with their first child still in her belly. Maybe it was Dinho’s somewhat sad and troubled, big eyes more than his overall look that made me think of Pablo Picasso, and call him Pablo ever since. I got the feeling that in Benguela no-one wanted to let go of the youth and the freedom and friendship that can only exist as long as you don’t work from nine to five and pick the kids up from the daycare center by 5.30 p.m every day. In Benguela, the guys were ‘Forever Young.’ And they wouldn’t let this thing with wife and kids to change that.

Now when I return, Tony and his girlfriend have just got their first child, Clara Nayole, and we will stay for another ten days so that we can attend their wedding. But despite the family-making, it’s still the same friends that meet by the bar in the evening to talk about life, drink Cuca and eat grilled chicken with ketchup and mayonnaise. The only difference is that Tony once or twice a week goes to his new, own home instead of his mother’s, to take care of his family – and that the evenings and the nights maybe end a little, little bit earlier than before.

Benguela is still as beautiful and somehow magic as before. Full of movement. Not physical motion, but feelings; different times present at the same time. I get shivers just thinking about it, but it’s difficult to describe. The Portuguese buildings are like theater backdrops; the streets below them like stages for the people of Benguela. Times fly past each other – some don’t exist; others survive through eternity. It is difficult to explain, but it’s beautiful!

Springsteen

“Sunday is over; the weekend is over,” Dinho says and throws away the bottle top of the beer he’s just finished. It jingles as it hits the concrete floor of the inner yard. “Tomorrow work – day of struggle,” Dinho says and continues, “If some rich man comes by and offers my wife a better life – no problem. Most important is that she is well-off. Sometimes no food on the table. Only sleep. Sometimes in my room. Light’s off. Springsteen. I’m crying.”

“You know this guy,” Dinho says as he puts on one of the CDs that I left him two years ago. When I first visited Benguela, I had brought with me a few CDs with a mix of my favorite music. On two of them was Springsteen, and most tracks were live recordings from a bootleg called ‘New Jersey Nights.’ Amongst them were a couple of powerful, emotional versions of Racing in the Streets and Independence Day. Dinho loved them from the very first time. I was happy that he liked the same music as me, but more than that I thought about how this music in particular tuned in with the life here. To be in Benguela is like living one of those tracks. Here, Springsteens lyrics intertwine with life and become reality; truth. It is that magical feeling of motion that I described earlier, and the immensely strong friendship. That feeling comes with the lyrics of Springsteen’s music, as well as on the streets of Benguela.

The beach

Benguela would be the perfect tourist destination. A beach within walking distance from the city centre, lined by palm trees, and a perfect climate of 25 to 30 degrees Celsius year-round. But where the beach walk at a charter destination would have been lined with curio salesmen, a beautiful calm instead prevails Benguela. The only thing that comes even close to touristy is a gallery accommodated in the ground floor of one of the many beautiful, old Portuguese houses. Benguela is like Malaga but without a single tourist or salesman. Calm and beautiful. And the Angolans are the most peaceful people I’ve met – not even other Africans can compare with them. And in Angola, there is no black or white; there are barely even shades of grey. We are all the same, all family. We are together.

Between the tarred road and the wide beach is an as wide boardwalk. Benches of stone, worn smooth by years of human repose under the shadows of the pine and palm trees. A knee-high railing of concrete separates the boardwalk from the beach. People sit down; meet friends, read or study. But most just are. Some do sports; a few swim in the ocean. There is a net for beach volleyball tightened between two poles on the beach, but I never see anyone use it. There are the same number of people on weekdays as on weekends. The sun is just enough warm and there is a constant, cool breeze from the sea. The boardwalk is paved with small black and white stones. A pattern of waves polished by decades of Angolans looking for a chill in the water. Outside a nearby church, the stones are laid in patterns of fishes and crosses; outside a school they resemble children holding each others’ hands in a long line of friendship.

The policemen that patrol the beach pass their time by letting a couple of young shoeshining boys polish their shoes. The lean boys kneel before them. The policemen put their authoritarian, black boots on the boys’ wooden boxes and let them be polished even though spotless already. The boys look up, demeaned.

On their heads, women carry dishes with bananas and oranges that they sell. Their children are wrapped against their backs in colorful sheets. A boy walks back and forth selling soft drinks from a cooler wagon that he pushes ahead of himself.
Halfway along the promenade, a monument over slavery rises. With a bit of fantasy, it resembles a clenched fist, reaching up towards the sky and out towards the ocean. A line of wooden poles stretches out in the water. It is the remains of the pier on which slaves were brought out to the ships centuries ago, Tony once told me.

Malaria Again

After a week or so in town, I get malaria again. And cholera at the same time. Hospital for three nights. Terrible diarrhea and high fewer. Seven liters of drip and medication. A Russian (or Soviet, as the Angolans still say) doctor comes at noon each day to consult me and the other patients, but leaves after a couple of hours’ visit. The nurses don’t seem too serious: “How many injections have we given you today?” one asks. “Why have you taken our papers?” another inquires, referring to the receipt the doctor gave me to keep. They had forgotten what medicine they’d prescribed me, I guess.

The village Idifio is better known as the intersection of the roads to Huambo, Luanda and Lobito. There are more tar than houses, which almost solely holds bars and restaurants. The police, which has a checkpoint in the junction at daytime, allows us to camp under a thatched roof next to one of the bars.

When I later visit the adjacent bar, the boy behind the counter starts playing “The Base II – Guilty as Charged” on the TV, located in a corner of the room. The movie has English speech and Chinese subtitles. When I leave for a short while, he quickly swaps back to play local music videos. I guess the movie was something he showed for ‘international guests’. When I come back, he starts playing “Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow” – another such movie, although at least slightly entertaining in comparison with the first.

We camp by the edge of an escarpment in small village Barrote, a couple of kilometers off the road, towards the sea. After the sun has set behind the ocean’s distant horizon, Ernest, Salvador and the other young fishermen walk the long, steep path down to the beach below. By six in the morning, as the sun returns for another twelve hours of day, they will depart across the sea to fish.

We meet fisherman Juan. He has a small shelter made of reed next to the road, and just past that narrow piece of ground, a large river delta spreads out. His canoe rests by the water edge. Today’s catch lies left to dry on a log next to him. He takes two of the fishes and grill them in a fire for us to taste. “Caraçao [heart],” he says and points at us.

We camp a few kilometers further on, behind a roadside bar. Quickly, before the sun sets, we walk to a water outlet by the road where we bath. There, the water current is strong enough to keep parasites away.

I still feel ill, so after some 60 kilometers, we decide to hitchhike to the nearest hospital. Some Chinese road-workers give us a lift in their truck to Porto Amboim and the larger hospital there.

We are led through hallways and wards that are full with patients, sleeping on beds and on the floor with just some blanket as mattress. We are offered a private room which we – happy to be spared from sleeping on the floor, although at the same time somewhat embarrassed o being specially treated – accept. The room turns out to be the office of a North Korean guest doctor, and would probably not have been given to any others than visiting tourists anyway. Doctor Katarina and nurse Mattias take care of me. They find ‘only a little’ malaria, and I’m once again medicated.

The local patients look wide-eyed at us when we cook food out on the porch. Silently, peacefully, they follow everything we do. Mattias explains the attention given to us with his beautiful, Portuguese accent: “You are so wonderful, and they only see white people on TV otherwise!”

Just before Cabo Ledo, we pass a military base for the special forces of Angola. I’ve felt symptoms of malaria, so we cycle to the base to visit its clinic. An officer meets us at the gate and helps us to get inside, past the security. At the clinic, the doctor seems to be absent. Only after a long wait, some soldier appear with someone who calls himself a nurse. With a beautiful English – an almost feminine Portuguese accent – he begins and ends each sentence with a warm “We are together.” We are together.

Unfortunately, they don’t have the equipment to take a proper blood sample for malaria, but only a disposable quick-test. It consists of a mixture of chemicals that – together with a blood sample – presents a varying number of lines on a plastic stick depending on the result. My test presents negative, but it only works on certain types of malaria and thus is not 100% reliable. They write off the case and show no interest to further investigate my fatigue. The nurse said that he’d studied medicine in Los Angeles, but his English and “We are together” rather indicated that he studied in Cuba or Russia. His lack of knowledge pointed towards neither one of them.

Following the malaria test, they suddenly show interest in our culture, and begin to ask question about or sexual habits: Married or single? No sex during this trip because of the HIV risk? But you have a lot of HIV in Switzerland – here very little! Aha, Sweden? OK, but you have HIV too, someone says, proud to at least know our country. We then refuse more questions. When I instead continue to question my fatigue, they come up with a household remedy: Drink a lot of water and fruit juice and eat loads of tomatoes, and you’ll be just fine!

“You have to carry with you this paper [the results] throughout your journey,” the nurse says before we leave. He continues, now with pride; straight-backed: “If they ask you in Namibia or South Africa about malaria, you just show them this and say: ‘No, look here. I got tested in Angola!’” He seemed unaware of that a test today doesn’t prevent me from contracting malaria tomorrow.

So we set off again – head pounding, legs aching. We leave the military base for Cabo Ledo not far away. There, we get to camp with the police that has a proper station in the middle of the village.

We camp with the police at a roadblock in Barra do Cuanza. They let us use their stove to cook food on, we watch some TV with them in the evening, and one of them gives us a bottle of mineral water. The latter is quite expensive here, so it’s an appreciated gift.

To extend our visas took longer than we’d ever imagined (read more below), but in company of Maria and Juan Carlos, we were far from bored. They took us with to friends and through town: Movie night with a gathering of Swedish expats, traditional Swedish Easter dinner, lazy beach days at the Ilha (an island in central Luanda) and barbeque at Prédio Suéco. It was all a stark contrasts against the previous days’ camping life. Huge thanks to Maria and Juan Carlos for hosting us so comfortably, helping us with the immigration and above all keeping us in such great company. Imagine all embassy staff being as kind as you?

To Extend a Visa
On Thursday, we visit the immigration first thing in the morning. In hope of getting our applications considered within 24 hours, we buy the application forms and fill them in. Despite being intended for non-citizens, four of five forms are in Portuguese, so it takes quite some time. And only when we are about to hand in our application at the office, we’re informed that application days are Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays only. We couldn’t have had less luck.

Come Monday, we return and arrive just past seven in the morning. Once again a surprise awaits us – one has to arrive by five in the morning to be able to get one of the forty desirable tickets that are handed out each day. Only with one such ticket, which resemble those by a supermarket meat counter, one is allowed to enter the office and hand in ones application.

But just like past Thursday we start discussing the issue with the staff. We try to make us seen and heard amongst as many of the immigration staff as possible. The immigration consists of a number of single-floor buildings that enclose an inner yard on which we wait with a hundred or so other hopeful. Each house hosts different departments of the immigration. One counter sells the application forms, another helps citizens to apply for a new passport and yet another assists those looking for a work permit. On the yard, staff runs back and forth occasionally, and it is them that we try to halt to ask for assistance; beg to help us review our applications.

We are lucky – by two p.m., we’re finally let inside the office in which we can hand in our application despite having no valid ticket. But even after being let inside, we have to yet again attract the attention of someone in the staff – someone on the other side of the counter – whom can accept our application. Just that takes us two, three hours. Another 45 minutes later, we’ve received our receipts.

While waiting, we got the less conventional tip from one of the staff to simply continue to the border of Namibia without visa and once there pay the official fine of seven dollars per day of illegal stay in the country. But the fact that one official here say so doesn’t mean that the police officers along the road will agree, we thought.

I also spoke with a French man who had been working in Angola for a decade. Not even then, he had the sufficient contacts to get his working permit in time. After having waited for nine months he still hadn’t received his permit. He said that the ‘regular’ application fee is 5,000 kwanza (about 70 USD), but if you pay 5,000 USD under the table, you can receive you permit in just a few days.

Thursday, we return once again to the immigration to mingle with the staff, hour after hour, but without receiving any news. It seems as if our applications has yet to be considered. Come Friday, we do the same thing – inquire and complain – and finally get promised that our visas will be there for us to receive come Monday.

The immigration is, to say the least, disordered and messy. Another group of tourists applied the same day as we did and got their new visas Friday. But then they’d been there each day from four a.m. until 6.30 p.m. – close to 52 hours during five days. Probably more than most staff.

Monday so, we finally receive our visas, and we leave the capital the next day after almost two weeks’ rest.

Angolan Visa Extension Details
Address: Serviços de Migração e Estrangeiros (SME), nearby the British Embassy.
You need: Three photos, five filled-in forms, which you buy at the office, and your passport.
You come: On Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday to apply and on Thursday or Friday to receive your visa/permit. The day that you come to apply, you need to be there at five a.m. latest if to get one of the 40 tickets that gives you admission to the office. To speed things up, it might be worth asking for Balthazar who is the boss at the office, or trying to get even higher up in the ‘food chain.’ You need to ask a lot, chat and complain. Spend at least five hours a day there if you’re in a hurry to get your application considered.

We continue the last forty kilometers to Luanda. At the police checkpoint yesterday, one of the policemen mentioned that he knew someone at the Swedish Embassy, and that he could contact them and possibly arrange a place for us to stay at. We had inquired the police about accommodation earlier, because the commercial alternatives in town begin at a prodigious 200 USD a night. Luanda is believe it or not the world’s most expensive city to live in for expatriates. Anyway, the policeman started making phone calls, and ended up giving us the number to Maria at the Swedish Embassy. The connection between them seemed rather vague, but we really needed all the help we could get and were happy to accept the contact. So upon reaching the bustling outskirts of Luanda, cycling along the muddy, potholed main streets that lead towards the center, we halt at a small kiosk. There, we call Maria from a pay phone.

It’s a bit noisy around us, and difficult to make any plans over the phone, so we agree to meet in town instead. We find her outside Prédio Suéco (‘the Swedish estate’), where she lives together with her husband Juan Carlos. Maria surprises us by inviting us to stay with them – we are happy to accept the offer. The downtown apartment house, built by Swedes in the 1980’s, is worth the visit by itself. Everything is Swedish: door handles, elevators, windows and stoves. Swedish simplicity and order in the middle of a town that else embodies chaos.

Our visa will finish tomorrow, so unless we want to risk imprisonment (although unlikely) or heavy fines, we have no choice but to hitchhike to Luanda where we can extend the visas at the immigration. A couple of kilometers before the police checkpoint at Loge River (Rio Loge), by the border of Zaire and Bongo provinces, we’re lucky to be given a ride with the very first truck that passes us. The driver and his two colleagues lift our bikes and bags onto the trailer and we get to sit up front in the reasonably new truck.

When we reach the next checkpoint at Quifangondo, we get off. The police there let us camp with them, and help us with a bucket of water to shower with in the station’s toilet. Tomorrow, we’ll pedal the last few miles to the capital.

The road is continuously quite bad. Reaching Mucula, we are told that a bridge ahead has collapsed. We’re initially told that the only alternative is a detour inland, but after a while the locals change their mind and tell us that the coastal road is the best alternative anyway. We take a chance and hope for there being fishermen with boats or canoes, that can take us across the Mebridege River (Rio Mebridege) where the bridge once stood.

To the river, the last twenty or so kilometers of road is nothing more than a narrow path. The closer we get to the river, the worse it gets. It is often so overgrown that it is even difficult to locate. With grass that reaches high above ourselves, it feels like cycling through a wild field. It is hard to imagine that the path was once a major, tarred road. Nature has reduced it into almost nothing; past recognition. The grass whips our bare legs; the skin stings badly after a while.

At least our trouble wasn’t in vain. When we reach the river, there are two fishermen in their canoes, taking people across with their luggage. They bring us over one at the time, together with our bikes and bags. After that they’ve rowed us across the hundred or so meters wide river, we give them a dollar for the job. The bridge must have collapsed a long time ago, considering how bad the road was. But then the government here is also infamous in how little it does for its people.

In N’Zeto, just a few kilometers south of the river, I visit the hospital. I have malaria – again. It’s a public hospital, so the test and medicine is free of charge. Angola’s party in office – the MPLA – used to be explicitly Marxist-Leninist, and it seems that even though the roads are still largely uncared of, the hospitals bear some trace of that ideology.

Anther ten kilometers south, we stay to sleep in small village Aldeia Kikando.