This post is based on our experience crossing the border between Democratic Republic of the Congo (Lufu) and Angola (Luvo) in August 2023.
After being all but closed to outsiders for many years, and implementing a highly restrictive visa policy after that, Angola is now visa-free for many nationalities.
Before you go
All this visa stuff happened quickly. Even while we were in the process of applying for our Angolan visas from home in advance, the policy changed and they ushered in an e-visa with pre-authorization. It was meant for air-entry only, but you could use it at land borders (as we did) by bringing a printout and getting it stamped at the border. Then you could enter the country on the understanding that you’d make your way to Luanda airport in the next few days, and finalize the procedure. At the airport, you’d pay the visa fee, wait for a couple of hours, and get the sticker in your passport. So that’s what we did and it worked pretty well although we met some people on the way who were having significant problems with it (such as their passports being held at the airport for days, no visa in sight).
Anyway.
Very shortly after we went through this procedure, Angola decided to really play fast and loose with the whole visa-thing and now many nationalities don’t require a visa at all.
So, just make sure that your nationality is visa-exempt.
Bring local currency, and USD is a good idea as well. There are money changers on both sides of the border.
The border is open during regular daytime hours. As with any other border-crossing day, just get an early start.
The route
From Kinshasa you need to get to Matadi and although it’s not far, it’ll probably take forever so you might want to plan on staying the night in Matadi. From Matadi it’s another short distance/disproportionately long journey to the Lufu border, and you should get there as early as possible in the day.
In Lufu you process the border on the DRC side and carry on by foot to the other side in the Angolan counterpart-village called Luvo. Formalities on the Angolan side took us a couple of hours, due to waiting while the officer tried to get somebody at Luanda airport on the phone to approve our e-visa pre-authorizations. However now that it’s visa-free for most, I think it should be pretty quick.
Once you’re through, you can catch a ride onwards to the first town of note, M’banza-Kongo.
Kinshasa/Matadi to Lufu
Some phone calls to a couple of bus offices revealed that there’d be at least one or two buses leaving for Matadi ‘sometime’ in the morning.
We got up pretty early while the city was still quiet and it was kind of nice, for a few minutes at least. We caught the hotel breakfast before leaving, and that alone was worth getting up for.
Then we took a taxi (Yango works) to the Trans Renove bus company office at Place Commerciale. Traffic is abysmal, give yourself a lot of time for this. The Trans Renove office was dark, crowded, and pure bedlam. The people working the counter were incredibly unfriendly. They rushed us through the ticket purchase, and then revealed that the bus had already left.
So that’s how we wound up back in our taxi, now with an angry Trans Renove employee in the front seat with the driver, engaged in a high-speed chase after the bus on the motorway straight through Kinshasa. It was fairly alarming because there was some seriously reckless driving on behalf of every driver on the road, and because no one explained to us what we were doing before urgently bundling us back into the car, so we actually had no idea what was even going on for the first several minutes of the trip. The disgruntled employee called the bus driver and shouted at him to pull over. Eventually we overtook the bus and basically forced it off the road since the bus driver didn’t seem that keen on picking us up in the first place.
We scrambled out of the taxi on the side of the road into a filthy cloud of smog and exhaust and barely allowing us time to board, the bus tore off.
After all this frantic urgency: traffic slowed to a halt and we ended up parked in an intersection for hours in a snarl of vehicles, angry drivers, livestock, pedestrians, dust, and police ineffectively blowing their whistles and waving.
Traffic on this particular day was worse than ever because it was a holiday, the holiday where everyone travels to the outskirts of the city to see their relatives’ graves. So when the bus finally started moving again, it stopped repeatedly in long queues of cars and trucks piled with excited grave-visitors and still more of them straggling along on foot. At this point besides food vendors and other salespeople we also had a loudly preaching pastor on board, delivering a sermon at the top of his lungs from the front of the bus.
Then the ancient bus broke down on a steep street somewhere and we just got out and milled around with everyone else, waiting two more hours for a replacement to turn up.
We picked up some speed after finally getting out of the city, and the road to Songololo is in pretty good condition. You can stop in Songololo for the night, which makes for a shorter trip to the border the next day.
We carried on to Matadi anyway because there’s something wrong with us we were worried about finding a place to sleep in Songololo. There are plenty of hotels in Matadi and you can find them on Google maps. But the road into Matadi goes through some pretty steep hills and we sat there stuck behind stalled trucks for a couple more hours and arrived in Matadi around fourteen hours after setting off, or in other words about seven hours later than we should have got there.
The next morning the hotel staff very kindly helped us get a ride to the share taxi stand in Matadi and made sure that we got places in a share taxi from there, to the Lufu border.
Barely out of town we encountered more hills lined with stalled trucks, and the driver ditched the car by accident. Since we were tilted into a ditch on the side of a steep hill I jumped out of the back and climbed up to the road, where I was met by some worried looking truck drivers making a rolling hand-over-hand gesture and pointing at the car.
Still, some men tied our car to the back of a truck and the driver got back in and heroically managed to regain the road. Then we threaded our way between stalled trucks and eventually got going, once again.
The taxi will drop you right at the border. It took us about three hours. If everything had gone smoothly, which I doubt has ever happened, it would have taken a little over one hour.
Crossing the border
The border is pretty orderly. You register immediately at the Immigration building with some officers sitting at a table out front. Then head into the building for the passport formalities, leaving your stuff outside. The DRC officers were very friendly and quickly stamped us out. We had no issues at all with anyone trying to hold us up or ask for money.
Then you walk through customs and continue on foot over the bridge. Register with Angolan authorities right after the bridge, and then walk another 500 meters to the immigration building where you hand over your passport (and in our case, the e-visa).
Get your passport stamped and there you go! Angola awaits.
Luvo to M’banza-Kongo/Luanda
After exiting the border we walked another 500 meters straight to the taxi rank for M’banza-Kongo. If you don’t find the drivers, they’ll find you. There were plenty of moneychangers around so we changed some USD in order to pay for the trip to town. There are also overnight buses directly to Luanda.
The driver of our share taxi to M’banza-Kongo was super friendly and jolly and he drove us right to Hotel Mirage, where the rooms were pretty ok and very cheap. It has a (empty) pool and a (closed) gym and (shut down) restaurant, and we liked it a lot.
You can easily reach the bus station in M’banza-Kongo by moto. There you can book and buy printed tickets at an actual office and take a scheduled bus to Luanda. Just be prepared even after all that officialness, for the bus to pull out of town and immediately descend into unruliness and delays. It’s an 11-12 hour journey with a lot of checkpoints – leave early.
But don’t worry about all that right now. Go get yourself some pastel de nata.
Read More
Still in Republic of the Congo and thinking about taking the river ferry to DR Congo? Have a look at my report about the ferry crossing from Brazzaville to Kinshasa.
For more of our adventures (and misadventures) as we travel from Cameroon to Japan, check out the rest of my stories from the road.
We’ve crossed a lot of borders by all sorts of random transport. Have a look at our Africa border crossing reports for strange stories and sage advice, here.
