nowonmai wrote:Seems like you're expendable. Hope the day rate was worth it.
haha, i do too!
as promised, here's some more pics and hopefully this paints kind of the story. i thought i'd share this because it was one of the most bizarre trips i have ever taken, and a bit exciting towards the end there
Well, so super long story short - we got in the day the allied democratic forces (ADF), a local rebel group, went on a 40 person killing spree very close to the town we were headed. But got in, and the congolese border police chief tried to get us to hire out his security for 1500/day. That wasn't happening. So for revenge, he basically had our security guy arrested - and set the "bail" at $1000. So we left his ass in jail - it seems funny in retrospect
us leaving the checkpoint where our security guy was "arrested". he's stuck in that building, and we waited 30-45 minutes for him to get out, and eventually left his ass there
then got into the town of Beni, which is kind of like that crappy town in star wars where all the riff raff show up - in this case UN trucks with mongolian troops in it, random technicals with militia, and just a bunch of zombie looking people milling about, and then eventually found a spot, which was a walled compound / hotel that also catered to the Russian mafia, gold dealers, and congolose warlords (which is basically what they are). was trapped there with no security or guide until we could get a new one: old one arrested - second guy bailed when he found out what happened.
so in the middle of this jungle and right outside this giant shanty-town is this mansion, surrounded by nice, thick walls. each room started at $60 - not bad??
had a beer at the pool while planning our next move. to my left at this table were a bunch of russian mafia types, with their congolese prostitutes, and they were chucking glasses at the wall and yelling at the waiter. the warlord / colonel to my right (next table) was in a white adidas track suit - this is the guy who was RPG'd to death 48 hours later.
the colonel's "technicals". a couple land rovers with 12.7mm Dshk's on the back
\
Third security guy took us to a mine eventually. But we had to bribe our way across countless checkpoints. As we got close (it was raining hard in the morning and now intermittently raining), we got to our last village before the "town" by the mine, and you could see villagers on their hands and knees, literally picking gold off the streets. that's how much gold is there - to the point where the streets run with it...
and now about 50 miles - as the crow flies - further west. there's this little crappy town at the base of this mountain - which used to be covered in jungle, but is now stripped and half of it looks like a giant red dirt mount (i didn't get a good pic of it)
We hiked around this mountain for a bit and came to a village. now, to see the mine operations itself, the guides i was with persuaded the village chief i was some rich american investor and i might be interested in investing in some machinery to speed up their manual operations...
you can even see rocks with gold in it
in my first post, you saw a 1-2 gram gold "nugget" / flake. the ground here was shiny with all the gold specs in it, and if you look hard enough you can find one of those baby nuggets every other minutes. a gram costs $40 in the US - that's how much gold is apparently here...
anyway, after i had documented all this, we tried to leave. but as we strongly suspect, our "security" guy had us held up at a checkpoint on the way back. they snagged our passports and said they would detain us until their village chief got back. had to tap into our emergency money to bribe our way out of that one, but eventually got back into Uganda.