Congo document photos online

Stand on the riverbank in Brazzaville and you can see another country's capital staring back across the water. The Republic of the Congo's capital and Kinshasa, capital of the neighbouring Democratic Republic of the Congo, sit barely five kilometres apart on opposite banks of the Congo River, the only two national capitals on Earth facing each other across a single river. It makes for one of the world's strangest passport-control experiences: a short ferry ride between two sovereign states, two sets of documents and two countries that share a name, a river and almost nothing else.

• Travel quirk Brazzaville and Kinshasa are the two closest national capitals in the world (Vatican City aside), and the only pair standing on opposite banks of the same river within plain sight of each other.
• Passport power The Republic of the Congo passport gives visa-free or visa-on-arrival access to roughly 46 destinations, ranking around 86th worldwide on the Henley Passport Index.
• Shared name To tell the two Congos apart, the world nicknames them by their capitals: this country is 'Congo-Brazzaville' (a former French colony), while its larger neighbour is 'Congo-Kinshasa' (a former Belgian colony).
• Currency Congo's money is the Central African CFA franc (XAF), pegged to the euro at an unchanging 655.957 francs per euro and printed in France by the Bank of France since 1945.
• Currency twin A near-identical West African CFA franc circulates with exactly the same euro value, yet the two are separate currencies and the banknotes are not interchangeable between the regions.
• Capital namesake Brazzaville is one of the few world capitals named after a single person, the Franco-Italian explorer Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza, whose remains lie in a marble mausoleum in the city.
• Wartime capital From 1940 to 1943 Brazzaville served as the symbolic capital of Free France, and in 1944 hosted the Brazzaville Conference where Charles de Gaulle mapped out post-war reform of France's African empire.
• Deepest river The Congo River, which forms the border and carries the cross-capital ferry, is the deepest river on Earth, plunging to around 220 metres near Brazzaville.
• Independence The former French colony of Middle Congo became the independent Republic of the Congo on 15 August 1960, with the priest-politician Fulbert Youlou as its first president.