River Monsters by Jeremy Wade

to Kinshasa, but
these catered only to expense-account businessmen and diplomats, costing three or four times the ‘bucket shop’ prices to India or anywhere else. On top of that, I heard I would need
pocketfuls of $50 bills to buy back my passport from immigration and bid for my luggage, item by item, from customs. The whole idea was a nonstarter. Then I found a French charter company, now
defunct, that flew an aged 707 from Marseilles to Bangui, capital of the Central African Republic (CAR). From here I could cross the Ubangui River to the small town of Zongo in the northwest corner
of Zaire. But neither embassy knew if the border was open. If it was, the CAR staff in Paris informed me, I would need to get a visa in Zaire to allow me back into CAR, but they couldn’t tell
me where I could get this. The only way to find out was to go. After crossing by bus to France, I took off in April 1985.
    When I’d come back from India three years before, emaciated and exhausted but with some fish stories under my belt and pocket change from the laughably small amount of cash I had taken
with me, I considered, along with the few other backpackers I’d met along the way, that if I could survive that – the squalid doss-houses, seething trains, days of diarrhoea – I
could survive anywhere. There was also the knowledge that, with a little more money, India could be quite comfortable. But nothing had prepared me for the Congo. From the moment I set foot in
Africa and first inhaled the hot, semiliquid, smoke- and wood-flavoured air, I felt out of my depth: the stampede at the airport, the long night drive followed by threats from the taxi
driver’s sidekick when I refused to hand over more than the agreed fare, and the hour-plus search at the border (‘Nice bag. . . . Nice shoes. . . . ’), after which I was told,
‘If you go anywhere you are not authorised, monsieur le professeur , you are in big trouble.’
    The next evening I was one of thirty-three people huddled under a plastic sheet on the back of a truck as we came to a boggy halt in a thunderstorm. We lurched into the next town the following
night, where I found a hot concrete cubicle of a room that stank of urine and had no water or light. In the corridor a man I couldn’t see asked me the purpose of my journey. I couldn’t
imagine two months like this, so I was tempted to turn back. But the view behind me was equally bleak. From time to time I sold a magazine article, but this was a long way from making a living.
And, thanks to record levels of unemployment, there wasn’t much else on the horizon. I was back living with my parents, for God’s sake, at twenty-nine years old. Should I go back to
being a motorcycle messenger in London, which I’d quit while I was still alive? Or leave the country like Martin, bumming around Europe as an itinerant English teacher? Even in my dreams, the
future back home was a wilderness. So I decided not to think too far ahead but instead just get through each day.
    I reached the river after two weeks – waiting for trucks that never came and sleeping in rat- and bedbug-infested brothels, the only places with spare rooms. I forced myself to eat the
acrid manioc paste that’s the country’s staple source of carbs as well as blackened fish corpses sold from market stalls, fish that reminded me why I was here.
    The sight of the river both lifted and overwhelmed me. What appeared to be the far bank was only an island. The true bank was a hazy band of grey-green on the distant horizon. I’ve always
found big waters intimidating: how do you find the fish in all that water? This is one reason I’ve stuck to rivers. But this was like an inland sea. Three days later I was steaming downstream
on a raft of barges pushed by the towering Colonel Ebeya , a floating city housing two thousand human passengers and a population of animals that grew by the hour, as dugout canoes
intercepted us to sell smoked monkeys and trussed