The smell of fresh produce from the teeming markets and chicken grilling on charcoal fires is sporadically overpowered by the sweet, rotten stench of mountainous piles of garbage and acrid exhaust fumes.
The constantly heavy traffic further announces itself in an unending cacophony of tooting horns. The sky is bruised and the air is heavy and humid and there is a dense sea of bodies and battered vehicles all around us. Many of the buildings are either unfinished or on the point of collapse.
The unfinished skyscraper is incongruous in a sprawling city with very few high-rise buildings. At a four-way stop, I turn my attention from the tower to a giant robotic traffic cop as it swivels and raises its metal arms to direct traffic. Less than an hour after leaving the city, we arrive at Lola ya Bonobo. This sanctuary provides a safe haven for about 70 bonobos, a profoundly intelligent species of great ape found only in the DRC and severely endangered by poaching and habitat encroachment.
An eccentric and intrepid French family runs the sanctuary. The bonobos themselves are endlessly entertaining, settling even the most minor disputes with sex rather than confrontation. The staff at the sanctuary, most of whom live in the surrounding villages, see the bonobos as family and have an incredibly strong bond with them.
We arrive in the early evening and immediately head out for drinks on Avenue Nyangwe. Meanwhile, vendors weave between the drinkers, selling anything from phone chargers to grilled grasshopper kebabs. The beer is cheap, large and cold, and we eat grilled goat and manioc a traditional Congolese dish similar to stiff pap, but made from cassava flour from a roadside barbecue. We watch men watching themselves dance in a large mirror that takes up an entire wall of the venue. Their repertoire is a mixture of funk, soul, reggae and afrobeat, and they sing in English, French and Lingala.
