Tim Butcher's Great "Blood River"

I’ve just finished reading Tim Butcher’s Blood River (2007), an account of his 2004 journey through the Congo, following the Victorian explorer H. M. Stanley’s 3000-kilometre original route from one side of the country to the other. What a trip! Butcher calls it “ordeal travel.” But it’s not an ordeal to read. Quite the opposite – Butcher put me squarely there with him, on the motorbike as he and his driver grind their way toward the Congo River; on a Uruguayan patrol boat; in a pirogue paddling down the Congo (“The paddlers would josh and cajole each other, sure-footed as they danced up and down the delicate pirogue working their long-handled paddles”); and, most memorably, on “Pusher Number Ten,” a Congolese diesel-engine boat pushing a massive barge “red with rust and slightly scraped and battered at each end.” 

Butcher is a superb describer. Here’s his depiction of the hut in Mukumbo, where he slept overnight on his way to the Congo River:

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 hips. It was a Fred Flintstone orthopaedic bed and I found it amazingly comfortable.

Here’s his description of the rusting wrecks of old boats lining the left bank of the Congo at Kindu:

Some were huge, others more modest, but all were in ruins. 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.

Here’s his description of the rainforest:

There were trees so high I could not make out any detail of the leaf canopy tens of metres over my head. Some of the trunks were pleated into great sinews that plunged into the earth, as massive and solid as flying buttresses on a Gothic cathedral. And high above my head, but beneath the gloomy leaf canopy, I could make out boughs as square and broad as steel girders.

And here’s his description of taking “one of the world’s most dangerous showers” while he was on board “Pusher Number Ten”:

The water for the shower came straight from the river. 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 tight shut whenever I showered.

Butcher says of his time on “Pusher Number Ten,” 

I entered a zone of mental torpor. Normally I am the sort of person who needs to be doing something constantly. I am not a napper. But on the river passage, there was nothing I could do to influence our progress. We would reach our destination when we reached our destination and not a moment sooner, so I took off my wrist watch and let my days flow with the rhythm of the river.

How I love that last line – and let my days flow with the rhythm of the river. I let my days flow with the rhythm of this great book. I enjoyed it immensely.