None of the travel is fun, but at least on the road, or the river, he feels slightly safer than in the towns. The first part is a gruelling couple of days on the back of a motor bike, but he also travels by UN patrol boat, by canoe, by another UN chartered barge. Every part is a major challenge, firstly organising transport in a country where there is none, and then actually moving from one to the next place. He quickly establishes that his is not adventure travel, no, he calls it ordeal travel. But I think he just had the same obsession as I had, go down that river. Or maybe he wanted to see where his mother travelled in colonial luxury in the 1950. Maybe he really wanted to travel the route the explorer Henry Morton Stanley took, in 1877, when he became the first Westerner to travel from the east to the west coast of the continent, and especially, discovered the Congo River, hitherto unknown to Western map makers. Tim Butcher did, in 2004, and wrote a fascinating book about it, “Blood River” (2006). But never dared doing so, through a country completely bankrupt and lawless. I have always wanted to travel down the Congo River, from deep in the Congo to the Atlantic coast.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |