In this great book, Tim Butcher chronicles his harrowing forty-four-day, three-thousand-kilometer journey through the Congo in 2004 – “great” because it’s vivid, detailed, and unforgettable; “harrowing” because of the many dangers he faces.
His trip follows the historic route of journalist-explorer Henry Morton Stanley, when he mapped the Congo River, 1874-1877. It unfolds in eight stages: (1) Kalemie to Kasongo by motorbike (500 km); (2) Kasongo to Kindu by motorbike (200 km); (3) Kindu to Lowa by UN patrol boat (150 km); (4) Lowa to Ubundu by pirogue (200 km); (5) Ubundu to Kisangani by motorbike and pirogue (150 km); (6) Kisangani to Mbandaka by UN push-boat and barge (1000 km); (7) Mbandaka to Kinshasa by UN helicopter (600 km); (8) Kinshasa to Boma by jeep (400 km).
1. Kalemie to Kasongo
This is the riskiest leg of Butcher’s journey. He says, “I knew the river descent would be hard, but the thing that worried me most was this overland section.” The terrain is impenetrable jungle, and the trail is narrow and overgrown. To make matters worse, rebel soldiers roam the bush. Butcher recruits a man from an aid group called Care International. His name is Benoit Bangana. Benoit has a colleague named Odimba. They have two Yamaha 0ff-road bikes. Benoit advises that “Motorbikes are the only way to travel” from Kalemie to Kasongo. The plan is that Butcher would ride with Odimba on one bike, and Benoit would ride on the other one with all their luggage. But then another man, Georges Mbuyu, a member of a pygmy rights group called La Voix des Minoritiés, agrees to join the expedition. Georges travels regularly in the bush. However, he doesn’t have a motorcycle. If Georges is to accompany them, they need a third bike. They find one owned by a man named Fiston Kasongo. For a price, Fiston agrees to go with them and drive Butcher on his bike.
And so, one morning in August, 2004, the journey begins. Butcher writes,
I love starting a journey very early in the day. It offers the comforting sense that if something goes wrong, there is still the whole day to sort it out. As we left Kalemie before dawn that August morning, I felt a strong sense of well-being. The track was overhung with dew-drenched branches and twigs, and within a few minutes my wet clothes showed why Benoit and Odimba were wearing waterproofs. But the fact that I was soaked did not dim my spirits. After all the planning and worry, I was finally on the track of Stanley in the Congo, picking my way from Lake Tanganyka across the ridges and valleys that he had traversed in 1876. I can remember feeling excitement. And I can remember just how the euphoria began to ebb a few kilometres down the track when we had our first flat tire.
That first flat is on Odimba’s bike. Odimba fixes it expertly. The next three flats are on Fiston’s bike. His rear inner tube is a disaster, patches on patches. It’s decided that Fiston can’t go on. After fixing his tire one more time, he and Georges leave the group and head back to Kalemie. Butcher, Benoit and Odimba continue toward Kasongo on the Yamahas. They overnight in a bush settlement called Mukumbo. Butcher describes his lodgings:
Benoit returned to lead me to the hut that the chief had had prepared for me. It had walls of dried mud on wattle, a roof of heavy thatch and a door panel made of reeds woven across a wooden frame. Without a hinge, it worked by being heaved across the doorway, which I soon found had been cut for people quite a bit shorter than me. There was nothing modern in the room whatsoever. On the beaten-earth floor stood a bed – a frame of branches, still in their bark, lashed together with some sort of vine. The springs of the bed were made of lengths of split bamboo anchored at only one point halfway along the bed, so that when I put my hand down on them they bent horribly and appeared close to collapse. But the design was ingenious because when my weight was spread across the entire structure, the bamboo screen supported it easily, giving and moving with the contour of my shoulders and hip. It was a Fred Flintstone orthopaedic bed and I found it amazingly comfortable.
The next day, rising at 3:00 AM, the trio continue their travel. Butcher suffers from dehydration (“The bottles I had drunk the day before were simply not enough, and I had not had a drop of water overnight, leaving me with a whopping headache and a pain behind my eyes”). He also has a sore ass (“My backside had stopped being numb and had moved into a painful phase, each buttock screaming to be relieved of the pressure of being squashed against the plastic of Odimba’s motorbike seat. I learned to lean on one side and then the other to alleviate the pressure, but it was agony”). Whenever they encounter soldiers, they speed up, and though the soldiers jump up, grab their weapons and shout at them, they’re too late; the bikers are already by them, disappearing down the trail into the bush.
Finally they reach Kasongo. Butcher writes,
I remember little about the arrival, apart from the vast jug of filtered water that I gulped down and the smell of the previous night’s hut on my mosquito net, in which I wrapped myself before collapsing.
2. Kasongo to Kindu
Benoit stays in Kasongo. Butcher and Odimba continue on by motorcycle to Kindu, on the upper Congo River. Butcher describes his first sighting of the great river:
We simply turned a corner and there, unheralded, in front of me, lay one of the natural wonders of the world. The object of so much mystery for generations of outsiders, and the thing that had fired my imagination through years of research, oozed lazily downstream between two thickly forested banks almost a kilometre apart. The midday sun was directly overhead, my least favourite time of day in the Congo when all the colours of the trees are washed out and the heat is at its most suffocating. In the flat light, the river appeared viscous and still.
Butcher, Odimba, and their loaded motorbike cross the Congo River in a pirogue:
Eventually its bow slid onto our bank with the lightest of kisses. The dreadnought was heavy and the river too inert to make it swing downstream, so it just sat there like a compass needle pointing in the direction I needed to go, straight across the Congo River. A dozen or so passengers disembarked, carrying bundles of fruit wrapped in banana leaves trussed up with cords made from vines. One man had with him a type of home-made bicycle where part of the frame, the front forks, were made of rough branches of wood still in their bark. There was brief moment of negotiation between Odimba and the oldest paddler, before a tariff was agreed and our motorbike, still laden with luggage, was picked up bodily by four men and dropped into the canoe. The hull was deep enough for one of the paddlers to sit on the bike and freewheel it down to the lowest and most stable point.
It takes Butcher and Odimba another two days of hard biking to reach the port of Kindu.
3. Kindu to Lowa
In squalid Kindu, Butcher struggles to find a way downriver. Eventually, after five frustrating, uncomfortable days, he hitches a ride on a UN river patrol boat. The region is in its dry season; the river is low. The helmsmen drive the boat slowly, nosing it through sand banks, searching for a navigable channel. The slow pace affords Butcher the opportunity to look around and study his surroundings in detail. Here, for example, is his description of some of the rusting wrecks of old boats that used to ply this stretch of river, but which now line the left bank for well over a kilometre:
One ship had been completely overrun by a reed bank and its old smokestack could just be seen poking from the vegetation with ivy, not smoke, spewing out of the top. Another hulk was lying on its side clear out of the water, the panels eaten away by rust to reveal bulkheads like ribs in a whale carcass. But my favourite was an old stern-paddler, a rust-red X-ray image of the Mississippi steamboats of my imagination. The panels were all gone, but the superstructure remained in skeletal form. At the stern was the octagonal tubular frame on which the wooden blades of the paddle once stood.
The boat takes him 150 kilometres downriver, at which point its patrol in that direction ends. Butcher decides to go it alone from there. He’s deposited on shore near the village of Lowa.
4. Lowa to Ubundu
This is my favorite section of the journey. In Lowa, Butcher hires a pirogue and four paddlers to take him to Ubundu. This move brings him just about as close to the Congo River as he can get without swimming in it. You can tell from the beauty of his descriptions that he relishes the experience. For example:
The paddlers would josh and cajole each other, sure-footed as they danced up and down the delicate pirogue working their long-handled wooden paddles. About three metres long, they were shape of spades from a deck of cards, only stretched out to mansize, with shafts that were thin and shiny, polished by years of being slid through calloused hands.
But no pleasure lasts for long in the Congo. As Butcher nears Ubundu, his sense of unease begins to build. What’s his next step? The river is navigable only as far as Ubundu, at which point he will have to continue overland for 100 kilometres around a series of rapids and cataracts known as Stanley Falls, until he reaches Kisangani, the large port city built at the bottom of the seventh and final set of rapids. Butcher writes, “All in all, I knew Ubundu was always going to be one of the major troublespots on my journey.”
5. Ubundu to Kisangani
But it turns out Unbundu isn’t that bad. Butcher finds lodging in the church of St. Joseph’s. And three motorbike drivers from the aid group International Rescue Committee volunteer to take him to Kisangani. His description of the trip is superb. Here’s a sample:
There was absolutely no work taking place on the road. The advancing jungle had choked it to a single-track footpath, snaking around mature trees growing up from the centre of the old carriageway and past vast mudslides and dramatic rockfalls. Bridges had been washed away, making us pick our way down to the bottom of water courses and then charge up the other side. Recent rains made the whole exercise a dirty and dangerous one as the bikes slithered in the glutinous mud time and again, often pitching me onto the deck. One fallen tree caused a twenty-minute delay as the only route for our convoy of three bikes was up and over the top. This meant unloading everything, carting it over to the other side and then heaving the bikes over the fallen trunk, all the time sliding in mud that stood no chance of drying out because the dense leaf cover kept out any direct sunlight. The sticky heat felt as if we were toiling inside a hothouse.
6. Kisangani to Mbandaka
This section contains one of the book’s most memorable lines. Butcher is aboard a UN pusher traveling 1000 kilometres downriver to Mbandaka. He says, “To pass the time I would drag out my daily ablutions, taking perverse pleasure in the slow process of boiling water for a meticulous, slow shave, before taking one of the world’s most dangerous showers.” He explains that the water for the shower comes straight from the river. He says,
Against the creamy ceramic of an old shower cubicle, the water ran brown like tea. It reminded me of Scottish hill water tainted with peat, only it was much warmer and the chemicals that leached brown into the Congo River were more terrifying than those found in Highland soil. Somewhere to our north ran the Ebola River, a tributary of a tributary of the Congo River, but a name that is associated with a horrific medical condition. It was near this river that a virus was first discovered that caused its victims to die in a spectacularly horrible way, bleeding to death from every orifice. Several of the world’s other spectacularly horrible haemorrhagic fevers were first discovered in the Congo. I kept my mouth shut whenever I showered.
Nevertheless, whether it’s from the shower or some other source, Butcher becomes sick. By the time he gets to Mbandaka, it’s all he can do to climb off the boat and back onto terra firma.
7. Mbandaka to Kinshasa
In Mbandaka, feeling too ill to face another delay of unknown duration, Butcher decides to travel the 600 kilometres to Kinshasa by UN helicopter. He says, “The shame I felt at temporarily abandoning Stanley’s route was more than outweighed by a growing sense of relief that my ordeal was nearing its end.”
8. Kinshasa to Boma
In Kinshasa, Butcher enters the world of the Congo super-elite. He stays at the headquarters of a cobalt-mining company, “a brand-new, luxury villa built on a prime piece of city-centre real estate fronting directly onto the Congo River.” It’s only after two days of “sleeping in a bed with laundered sheets, drinking clean water, eating healthy food and dosing myself with antibiotics” that he feels strong enough to undertake the final leg of his journey. Using a jeep loaned to him by the mining company, he and two others drive the 400 kilometres to Boma, on the Congo River estuary.
As he rides in the jeep, Butcher reflects on his 3000-kilometre Congo journey. He says, “In six harrowing weeks of travel I felt I had touched the heart of Africa and found it broken.”
Blood River is one of my favorite books. The above outline doesn’t come close to doing it justice. Maybe in future posts I can do better, explore it more deeply. My next post in this series will be on structure.
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