Drifting on the Congo river

We were following the Ubangi river to Bangui. We finished haggling with the ferryman over the price for poling us across a tributary only a hundred or so yards wide, one of those many surprises not important enough to be staked out on our Carte Michelin d'Afrique. We unpacked the bike and piled our load, jerry cans, sleeping bags, tent and spares, on the river bank. the ferry which consisted of half a dozen logs lashed together with hemp rope was tied to a branch five feet below us a bit out in the river. There was no way that we could lift a 350 lb. motorcycle down onto it. There was no alternative if we wanted to cross. I backed up, opened the throttle with my right palm, held my fingers on the front brake lever ready to pull it hard as soon as the bike was airborne. If and when I landed on the ferry I'd have three feet to stop or else I'd continue into the river and our trip would end with our transportation under twenty feet of dark river.

We were physically and mentally exhausted. The road deceptively marked out on our Michelin Carte d’Afrique as the main route south from Bangui was nothing more than several ruts, a foot or so deep, gouged out of the sandy jungle floor by the trucks that made their way to the river to unload their goods for boat trip east to Kisangani or south to Kinshasa. We were overloaded and the bike was heavy on the back wheel. Every few yards it burrowed deep until the under carriage and hub were bogged down and the engine stalled. The narrow tracks didn’t give me enough room to fish-tail and slide through the loose sand, so I walked along side, leaning over, feathering the throttle, with one hand while working the clutch with the other, pushing 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 did that for a few hours and were only moving along at the pace of a slow walk. I smelled the overworked, slipping clutch plates and could hear the engine complaining before it seized, a warning in the form of a sharp pinging coming from the pistons and cylinders that were overheating from the high revs and ninety degree heat.

After six months of hard travelling we were ragged and worn. The fine red dust of the jungle tracks had crept into every pore. The Sahara crossing with three and a half thousand kilometers of sand and stone with a minimum of food, water and petrol, in comparison would prove to be one of the easier legs of our odyssey. But so far we had been lucky. The bike was running well, we hadn't been ill, and we hadn't had any serious mishaps. We were hitching upriver to Kisangani with Greek traders and had been on their boat two weeks and were beginning to get back our energy. The river was so wide that it was easy to mistake the islands that we passed for the opposite shore. We had all but forgotten the claustrophobia of the jungle, the insect bites, snakes and scorpions and the high wall of green that let only stray feathers of light flutter down to the tangled undergrowth. 

Mamakos’s boat made hardly a ripple as it headed farther into the Congo Basin, an insignificant intruder sailing deeper into Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness.”  This was Africa as I had imagined it, day after day of gliding through the impenetrable wall of jungle on the silky slow moving river. The tropical sun bared it´s teeth as it did every afternoon. To get a respite from the heat and humidity and relieve our boredom, we swam from the front barge. We grabbed a rope in one hand and jumped from the bow catching the stern when it passed, or just let the boat tow us along while we floated on our bellies as it plowed upstream. We had obviously never heard the warning “Don’t swim in the Congo River.” Who thought about the fearsome giant tiger fish with its voracious appetite and two inch long teeth, or the ubiquitous crocodiles, or maybe just losing our grip on the rope, missing the stern and getting left in the middle of that wide river.

There was a crewman on the bow taking soundings with a seven foot staff, thrusting it down into the water and shouting the depth up to Mamakos who was in the wheel house. The sandbanks were continually shifting. Finding the channel was hit or miss, and we ran aground several times a day. At night if we got stuck, we simply stayed put until morning, hoping the current would dislodge us, or if not, reversing the propellers and then moving forward foot by foot until we found the channel again. I took apart the water pumps on the twin Volvo diesels every day and cleaned the sand out of them. At night we used a powerful searchlight flashing it on markers that were placed at intervals on the shore and followed the river bank.  If we missed a marker or it was too difficult to navigate, we tied up to a tree, and continued on at dawn carefully backing out from our temporary mooring.

The gold caps on his incisors shone in the dim light of the open doorway. His pupils captured the stray rays that filtered into the room and were surrounded by whites clear and unmarked except for the sadness that seemed to seep out of them. His eyes were the same bleached color as his large teeth that were framed by lips that had difficulty turning upwards into a smile. We sat a while and I asked him why he was so quiet and he quoted a proverb from, his native language, “you have two ears and one tongue, therefore you should listen twice as much as you speak."  Eventually he told me that his family was killed in the Biafran War. The ones that didn’t starve to death were shot or hung. He said, " judging by the evil and horror that were perpetuated everywhere it was difficult to believe in God every day, but   I´m trying."