West Africa Odyssey 2012 - Angola

Angola: Lobito and Luanda

April 1-2, 2012

Aboard National Geographic Explorer

We enjoyed experiencing Angola, which just ended a recent civil war. Because of that war it has only the beginnings of a tourist industry. This made our arrival, immigration and customs procedures more challenging because they really didn’t know what to do with a passenger ship.

Sunday, April 1 we pulled into the large deep-water port of Lobito, Angola in the southern part of the country. Although port pilots were requested to board the ship at 6:00 a.m. they showed up much later and, as with Namibia, they wanted to do a “face check” for all passengers and staff. This meant that we got our passports, went to the Chart Room and had them individually stamped. Fortunately, the ship’s purser keeps our passports, so we don’t have to worry about where we placed them.

Angola was under Portuguese rule from the mid 1800s until it became independent in the early 1970s. That touched off a 27-year long civil war that ended in 2002. Lobito has started the process of reconstruction and is on a path to development.

The passengers were divided into two groups. Our group boarded buses and was driven through the town and countryside to Benguela. There were signs of progress everywhere and the roads were being worked on. At the town center there was a group of performers singing and dancing for us, which was lovely to watch.

At mid-point in the morning we arrived at the railway station where we rode the train back to Lobito. The other half of the passengers did the trip in reverse. The Chinese have spent a lot of money on the rail line including providing new cars. The line is not yet open to the public, but we were treated as special guests.

There was one new, air-conditioned car and they also had two old cars built in 1927, a galley and a sleeper, that we used. They were more fun, and since the windows opened, we could wave to the people along the way.

Wyza Bakongo

After dinner we went up to the lounge to listen to a music concert by a well-known Angolan musician, Wyza Bakongo. It was very interesting. The ethno-musicologist on the ship’s staff had arranged for many local musical experiences for us along the way.

Monday, April 2 we were in Luanda, the capital city of Angola. Again, we waited for the port pilot for over two hours, which threw all the rest of the schedule off. Luanda is a city of over 6 million, overwhelmed by refugees from the civil war. Again, the Chinese were building high-rise structures and roads everywhere. The oil found there fuels the Chinese interest in Angola. Traffic was extremely dense and it made getting around slow and difficult.

We were divided into four groups, all supposed to go to the same places, but in a different order. Our first stop was at the Cathedral where a group sang for us. The music was beautiful. From then on things didn’t go exactly as planned and we saw some parts of the city several times. The people in Angola are not used to tourists, like I mentioned, which made photography challenging. One needed to get permission to take a person’s picture. This could be implied by the use of gestures, however, but occasionally we were turned down.

After lunch, back aboard, the US Embassy Deputy Chief, David Brooks, talked to us for a while about the role the US is playing in the country.  We import 9% of our oil from Angola so it is very important to have a good working relationship there. Then we heard about the work of the Mission at Vivana, which provides day-care and schooling for poor families. After that, we decided to take the afternoon off and rest instead of heading back out into the hectic traffic to finish our city tour. I know we were not alone.

The next day we were in Pointe Noire, Congo.

That's it for now. Grace and Paul