There is something surreal about these remarks by an aristocratic guest at the inauguration of the Congo railway on 1 July 1898. Did their author really believe that a colony soon to be exposed as perpetrating genocide might become a destination popular with package tourists? What would such a tour have been like? An ‘excursion to hell’, perhaps, as the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus would later call sightseeing trips to the Western Front (Kraus 1921, p. 93)? Or a version of the latterday ‘gonzo tourism’ whose gazetteers have titles like The World's Most Dangerous Places (Pelton 2003)? The very idea that anyone might have wanted to make a pleasure trip to the Belgianrun Congo at the end of the nineteenth century, let alone publish their experiences under the title ‘Impressions of a Tourist’, strikes the modern reader as not just absurd but obscene.