Just about my least favourite part of visiting a new country is the airport transfer. How much should you pay? Do you need local currency?
Is it safe? So it was a great pleasure to walk through customs in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, and be met by someone who whisked me off to an air conditioned room to wait for my luggage to be collected. All of this had been arranged by Gregory and the Running Club de Kinshasa.
As was just about everything else during my time in Kinshasa including the Saturday morning city tour with Djambo. We started at the train station and the fresco commemorating the Europeans and African and Asian lives lost while building the first railway line. You get the sense the European deaths may have been more carefully recordedโฆ. They also arranged the run that evening which featured about 30 of us in total including Ambassador John Murton, Nick and Nico from the British embassy.
And a very nice run it was too taking in the Congo river,. Altogether an excellent 24 hours in Kinshasa. In the meantime, it just remains for me to say a huge thank you to Gregory and the Running Club de Kinshasa, and to the Ambassador and Nick and Nico from the British Embassy. It is sometimes referred to by its former name of Zaire , which was its official name between and It is the second-largest country in Africa after Algeria , the largest in Sub-Saharan Africa by area and the 11th-largest in the world.
With a population of over 78 million, the Democratic Republic of the Congo is the most populated officially Francophone country , the fourth-most-populated country in Africa and the 16th-most-populated country in the world.
