Up the Congo River

We followed the Congo River in Joseph Conrad’s tracks. The rhythm of the river and the fecund smell of the surrounding jungle were timeless.

The Ubanui River was a barrier that stood between us and our continued trip south.  We had been waiting two weeks in the Central African Republic for a ferry that never came. Eventually we found a fisherman that took us to the Zongo border station on the Congo side in a dugout canoe rigged with an ancient outboard motor. Without being aware of it, we were smuggled over the border. It never occurred to us to get our passports stamped when we left, or the travel permit for the motorcycle verified. 

Traveling from one country to another was both stressful and time consuming, and the fact that most of the African border stations were simple outposts in remote places manned by authoritarian military guards didn’t make it any easier. 

After crossing the Ubangui, we were waved into the compound of the border control office on the Congo side. It was housed in an unadorned mud-brick hut that was difficult to distinguish from the jungle that surrounded it. There was nothing official looking about it. The soldier standing guard took our passports and instructed us to wait until his commanding officer could approve our visas, but he wasn’t there and no one knew when he’d return. Our passports were confiscated.  

We had no alternative but to wait, so we camped outside the control station, passing the time by reading the one book we had between us over each other’s shoulders.

The border police had the power to either let us continue or arbitrarily turn us away. We understood the whole time that our entry into the Congo could have been expedited by a gift to the officer in charge, but we didn’t have much to trade, and we managed up to that point not to pay any bribes.

Three days later a soldier returned with our stamped documents and we were on our way again.

The main route south from the border station consisted of sandy ruts worn into the jungle floor from generations of unshod feet, that were made deeper by the trucks that drove to the river to unload goods or timber for the boat trip east to Kisangani, or south to Kinshasa. The ruts were as wide as a truck tire with high sides, difficult for a motorcycle when they were dry, and when it rained, an impassible muddy soup. 

The only way to plow a motorcycle through deep sand was to follow Newton's Law, "An object in motion tends to stay in motion." Let up on the gas and you immediately bogged down to the exhaust pipes.

We were overloaded and heavy on the back wheel. Every few meters the bike burrowed into the sand until it rested on its under carriage.

The back wheel was buried up to the hub and spun looking for something to bite into. The narrow tracks didn’t give me enough room to fish-tail through, so I walked alongside leaning over the bike, feathering the throttle with one hand, while working the clutch with the other. I pushed forward on the handlebar at the same time Kersti grabbed hold of the luggage rack and lifted the weight off of the back wheel.

We had been doing that on the difficult stretches for a couple of days and were only moving along at the pace of a slow walk. I could hear the engine complaining, a warning in the form of a sharp pinging coming from the pistons and cylinders that were overheating from the high revs necessary to get through the sand.  In the searing heat, there was a risk that the engine would seize. The acrid smell of the overworked clutch disc added to my worries 

Besides the risk of an engine failure, we were using a lot of petrol and had no idea of how the trail was farther along, or if there would be a village where we could rest and stock up on the few provisions that might be available.

We struggled on: plow a hundred meters: stop: let the engine cool. Stop: Start.

We were far off the beaten track and were ready to turn back and search for another route.  There was a fatigue that was creeping up on us and the track didn’t show any signs of improving. Added to that, the night before, stressed by the rapidly falling darkness, we chose a poor camping site in a damp clearing, and spent a sleepless night feeding the mosquitoes and nocturnal creepers that swarmed in and around our tent.  

Eventually, we came to a small group of thatched huts alongside the track that was the first sign of habitation that we had encountered for days. Judging from the stir that our arrival caused, it was unlikely that there were many outsiders that passed through, and that we were an exciting novelty in the routine of their days. 

The women came out and crowded around Kersti to feel and wonder over her unusually long, red-gold hair, while the men gathered around me to admire the motorcycle.

We were treated as guests in the village, and it occurred to me that often, the less people had the more they shared. I sat on my haunches in the shade and drank palm wine that still had the pungent smell of fermentation, and felt a universal comradery with our hosts.

When I asked about the track farther on, or if we could find someone in the village that could give us some information about it, they steered us to a cabin on the edge of the forest.   

We waited in the doorway. A deep throated voice bellowed from the shadows of the windowless room.

“Entrez!” 

We were exhausted and hungry and the man who welcomed us, could have been a mirage in the form of a tribal king, or a mafia war-lord. He sat behind an unfinished wooden table, the room’s only piece of furniture.

On it was a pile of bank notes thrown about as though someone had emptied a large sack in front of him. The money was scattered on the table top like bandit loot that was going to be divvied up among the gang that was waiting eagerly alongside him for their share.

The gold crowns on his incisors glittered in a shaft of light that came from the doorway, as did the heavy gold watch on a wrist as thick as a young tree. His large, clear eyes glowed in luminescent circles of white in the gloom.  

We explained to him that the track was too difficult for our motorcycle and that we were thinking of turning back. We asked him if he knew how the conditions were further on, or if we could hitch a ride on the truck that was parked a bit from the hut.

“C’est tres bien", he said, with a broad smile that once again exposed his impressive garniture.

He seemed larger than life, a force of nature whose surrealistic presence in that small dark room was overwhelming. His animated gestures and enthusiasm were infectious, and he assured us once again that the sandy ruts ended a short distance past the village.   

He got up, took my hands and then Kersti’s between palms that were like slabs of granite and wished us “bon voyage”.

We left the shack, a little dazed and blinded by a return to the sharp sunlight.

We went back to the motorcycle, floating rather than walking.

Maybe it was the effect of the palm wine I had been drinking earlier, but more likely it was a sudden infusion of optimism and energy that our unlikely meeting gave us. I started the engine that was the heart that gave life to our trip.

He was right. The trail got easier - by Congo standards.

The road was easier but came to an abrupt stop where the Mongala and Congo Rivers merged.  It was there we took shelter from a downpour.

We were deep into one of the world’s least explored regions, following tracks that were just sketchily mapped through a jungle that was almost the size of continental Europe. We had travelled between two extremes, from the vast empty landscape of sand dunes and stone of the Sahara, to the thick tangle of jungle in the Congo.

The foliage high above us was a membrane that filtered the light that reached the ground to the point where it seemed as though we always travelled in twilight.  We were badly insect bitten, low on rations and our reserve fuel cans were nearly empty when we stopped to take shelter from a deluge in a village at the river junction.

When the hammering rain let up, we went looking for a way to get to the other side and heard from some villagers that that we should talk to a Greek trader named Mamakos. We found him encircled by a crowd, the only white face in a sea of color, emmeshed in a heated argument with a Congolese matron.

She was at least a head taller than him with a girth that was three times his. He was short and wiry, wearing faded khaki shorts and a sun-bleached cotton shirt. His dark sunglasses, gave him the appearance of a river pilot in a contemporary version of Joseph Conrad’s novel,” The Heart of Darkness.”   

We kept our distance, prudently staying in the background until the situation calmed down.  When he finally gave up and walked away he took off his glasses and pulled down the bottom of his eyelid with his index finger as if it was a threat or warning, while the woman threw up her arm in a gesture that said, “I dare you.”

We assumed later that that he wasn’t haggling over the price of freight or the labor to load it with the woman, but that it was a discussion over the two girls that we met by accident that evening and that would be his company for the night.  

Not knowing what to expect, we approached him and asked if he could ferry us to the opposite shore. He thought about it for a moment and answered that it wasn’t possible, that he and his boat were on the way to Kisangani but to our surprise he added, “if we wanted, we could follow along. 

We spread out our map over the seat of the motorcycle, and while following the river’s twisted path through the jungle, realized that even if we crossed the Mongala that there were no roads marked out. The only alternative if we wanted to get to the Atlantic coast south of Kinshasa, would be dependent on the remote chance that there was a boat going in that direction.   

We were at the fork of the river and we had an offer to travel east.  By a twist of fate instead of crossing the Mongala and continuing south, we hitched a ride to Kisangani. The choice was more coincidence than design and was a voyage that turned out to be a journey back in time, where we definitely left the outside world behind. 

Even if the logical route was to travel on the river south to where the Congo flowed out into the Atlantic, we were in need of a break and realized that the long boat trip into the deep of the rainforest would be an adventure, and climbing off the motorcycle for a while would give us a needed rest.

It didn’t take much convincing for us to abandon our plans of traveling to Kinshasa.  Without giving it too much thought, we accepted the Greek’s invitation to follow him east to Kisangani through the wilderness where Conrad had sailed eighty-five years earlier and was the inspiration for his celebrated novel.

Dust and grime had had seeped into every one of our pores from our outdoor life. We hadn’t had a proper wash since we bathed in the Ubangui a few weeks before.  We must have looked pretty scruffy because Mamakos showed us the boat’s bathtub and gave us a bucket and a rope. 

We pulled up silky, sun-warmed water from the river and after our months of riding on bone-rattling trails, it was a luxury to just sit and soak.

We hadn’t eaten a meal sitting at a table since we left Algiers on the North African coast months earlier. That evening our first dinner was fried catfish caught from the side of the boat an hour earlier.  We washed it down with tepid beer from the abundant cargo we were carrying.

Darkness falls abruptly on the equator.  The sun sinks below the horizon as though it falls into a hole, and without electric light brings a quick end to the day. We were exhausted and happy to turn in early.

In the middle of that first night, we were awakened from a deep sleep as though from a nightmare by the grunting, guttural shouts of primitive war cries. On the deck beneath the wheelhouse where we had rolled out our sleeping bags, were the native scenes that Conrad had also witnessed. 

Crew members barefoot and half-naked, were fighting on the deck below us. They were chasing one another with spears and shielding themselves with empty beer crates.  As if it was any protection from the mayhem outside, we locked the thin plywood door that stood between us and the combatants.  When the tumult ended, we couldn’t help but wonder what it was that we had gotten ourselves into.

Our heavily loaded boat chugged upstream trough an uninterrupted wall of green veiled by a leafy canopy that blotted the sun and didn’t let in any light except an occasional thin sliver. At times it was as though we sailed on a river within a river, where the islands we passed could easily be mistaken for the opposite shore.    

Conrad wrote that “travelling on the Congo River was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings.”

And as we made our way against the greenish current trying to avoid the shoals and sandbars that blocked our path, I felt like Conrad did, that I was “seeing the forest and its inhabitants as they had always been. “

During the day we didn’t do much more than sit on the deck and watch the river pass. The air was warm and thick, humid in a way that was oppressive and inhospitable. To cool off I dove from the front of the barge and grabbed on to the stern as it passed, or a member of the crew tied a rope around my waist and let the boat tow me.

It never occurred to me, that had I lost my grip on the rope, or missed the hands that waited to yank me in, that I would have been just an insignificant speck lost in that wide river and an easy meal for a school of hyper aggressive tiger fish, or reptile food for the crocodiles that lurked unseen under the surface.  

I had never heard the native proverb that said “the river gives you life, but under it is death,” and it was only later that I was aware of the general warning, “Don’t swim in the Congo River.”

Currents and rain continually redrew the channels and we often found ourselves stranded on a sandbar. Our navigation aid was a crewman on the bow taking soundings with a pole, thrusting it down into the water and signaling the depth up to the wheel house with a raised arm.

Finding the channel was hit or miss, and on the upper reaches of the river we ran aground several times a day.

At night we flashed a powerful searchlight on markers that were placed at intervals on the shore and followed the river bank.

If we got stuck, we stayed put until morning, hoping the current would dislodge us, or if it didn’t, reversing the propeller and then rocking forward and backward until we found the channel again. When that happened the engine’s water pump sucked in sand and to make myself useful, I took it apart and cleaned it.

The interior villages were isolated by impenetrable jungle and could only be reached by footpaths from the river. The appearance of our boat gave people that seldom encountered strangers, a glimpse of the outside world. It wasn’t unusual that when we passed, children swam out a bit or went down to the shore to watch.

This was a remote country unto itself, where more than almost any other place, its peoples retained their traditional ways of life. There weren’t any roads, or schools, newspapers or police. There wasn’t electricity or postal service and village life was regulated by the tribal laws and customs that were handed down through the generations.  

Medical help was all but nonexistent and malaria, dysentery and other tropical diseases were commonplace.  Cholera was endemic to the Congo and when we saw a U.N. hospital ship we tied up alongside it so we and the crew could get a cholera booster. We passed through areas where both Aids and Ebola originated and I believe that it was somewhere on the river that I was infected with malaria.

River commerce

The lattice work of tributaries that fed the river were the main transportation network through the jungle whose inhabitants subsisted off the resources of its waters and the surrounding forest. To earn a little cash, farmers and fishermen paddled their pirogues out to intercept us and sell their goods and produce. Mamakos and the crew usually bought whatever they had.  From their store we bought fresh fish, a crocodile for the crew’s dinner, papayas and bananas and even bought a beehive dripping with jungle honey complete with dead bees and larvae.