I was finally off on my voyage to travel from Oyo to Brazzaville by motorbike powered paddle wheel dugout canoe, and there was no turning back now. Literally, as I did not have enough power to go upstream.
It is worth mentioning at this point that after much deliberation I had given my boat a name. I had toyed with a few - African Queen (too obvious), Heart of Darkness (too dark), Under Seige 2: Dark Territory (too obscure), but I finally settled on Thundergun Express. This was after the episode of the same name from the tv show Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia, partly as a homage to the amount of entertainment that show has provided to me on this trip, but mainly because it sounds (to quote Mac) badass.
Half an hour into the journey, and I was already getting my first "what on earth is that...?" looks from other river folks. The going was not fast - I was pootling along at about 7km/h - but leaning back in the captain's chair with the sun shining I was in no rush whatsoever. After an afternoon start the plan was to do only a couple of hours before stopping for the evening, but as I started to look for a spot to moor up, the wind started to pick up. Then there was the distant rumble of thunder. A storm was coming my way.
This was not good news; truth be told while I had finished the basics of the boat, I was planning on finishing the last few things en route, and one of those things was the storm rigging. I was going to have to work quickly. I threw my anchor (the metalworking guys made me one but I had to explain in detail what I wanted - no one else here has them) into a reed bed and it caught fast, then I set to work battening down the hatches. The shelter at the back of the boat was in no way ready for strong winds, so I lashed it down with copious amounts of nylon string, then covered all my baggage with plastic sheeting, and cut another piece of plastic sheeting to form a side wall for the shelter. I just about got it finished when the storm hit, and managed to avoid the worst of the lashing rain. Luckily it only lasted a short while and by the time I was ready to bunk down for the night it was calm again.
As the early morning sunshine woke me up, I noticed another problem. While I had a mosquito net to sleep under, the odd shape of my boat based cubby hole meant that there were gaps all over the place, and there were now more mosquitoes inside my net than outside. I was going to have to set that up more carefully in future. After fighting to get my anchor out of the reed bed (much harder than I thought it would be, and involved me pulling the boat against the flow of the river right up to where it was), I set off again. Any signs of the storm had completely disappeared, and there was now just blazing sunshine. I was starting to get the hang of the boat, and while the lack of power did make it more tricky to steer around the snaking turns of the Alima, by timing my rudder movements to anticipate the bends I could hold a decent line.
I was still fairly close to Oyo, and there was a reasonable amount of river traffic (by which I mean I saw about 10 boats). These ranged from pirogues like mine (albeit with outboards) transporting people and goods between Oyo and the Congo River town of Mossaka, to large barges laden with fuel and who knows what else, chugging noisily past, barely faster than me. Everyone waved, though some seemed more baffled than others, and from my relaxed position at the back (steering with my feet and leaning back in the captain's chair) I waved back. It was a comfortable way to travel, and as a way of passing the day it had a lot to recommend it. The jungle was thick on both sides of the river, with trees and bushes right down to the water's edge, and for the most part there was no sign of humanity at all. From time to time I would switch off the motorbike so that rather than listening to the low grumble of the single cylinder Yamaha, I could hear the sounds of birds and wind in the trees. Every 10 or 20km I would come across a small fishing village, a collection of houses that could have been home to no more than 50 people. It was hard to imagine what life there would be like, something so completely different to any of my own experiences. Even more remote, there were some places where there were just one or two houses on the bank, nestled in amongst thick vegetation.
I quickly started to develop a routine; early start, spend the day making my way downriver and then at about half past five look for somewhere to moor up, break out the stove and cook something then read or watch something before bed. However, the morning of the third day I had a bit of a problem. Rather than mooring in reed beds I had thrown the anchor on the outside bend of a river and it had caught on a submerged tree. No amount of twisting or tugging the rope was helping, and the river was running too fast to be able to get the boat further upstream than the tree to try and loosen it. On a section of the river with no one else around, my options were to either chop the rope and abandon the anchor, or dive down and pull it free. Given the speed of the river I didn't fancy being without my primary means of stopping for the rest of the trip, so I stripped off and hopped into the water. I had been informed that there were no crocodiles in this part of the river (other than maybe the tiny ones but I figured they wouldn't come after me, and if they did I would back myself to win) so with a firm grip on the rope (I didn't want to get washed downstream), I took a deep breath and pulled myself down. The anchor was wedged tight, but by pulling on the rope to give myself a bit of slack I was able to wiggle it free, then quickly swam back to the boat and climbed back in. Another lesson learned; be more careful about where you drop anchor!
I had a few other problems too - intermittent storms and rain showers would reduce the friction on the drive belt, the belt tensioner I had built out of motorcycle bearings and rope would not stay taught enough, and a lack of attention to navigation on my part whilst looking at another problem had led to me being swept into trees on the bank and damaging my shelter. Luckily, I had plenty of tools and materials to repair things as I went so I built a cover for the mechanism out of plastic to keep it dry, replaced the rope with wire and screws to keep the belt tensioner stronger, and patched the shelter with some spare bamboo and gaffer tape.
After four days on the Alima the landscape started to broaden out with fewer trees and more open spaces and then, after a short document check by some bemused river police, I made it out onto the Congo River. Compared to the Alima, the Congo is huge. It is the second largest river in the world by discharge, the deepest in the world (up to 230m!), and due to the way it snakes around the equator it is constantly in the rainy season somewhere along its length so it never really slows down. At the interesection with the Alima there are lots of pristine white sandbanks, and I (half accidentally) pulled up on one of them. The shallow water meant that for the first time in four days I was able to leave the boat - luxury! I decided to hold up there for a while and sort a few things out. I did my washing (boring but necessary), rebuilt the shelter (this time with an adjustable, suspended roof), and just had a general tidy up of the detritus that had accumulated. Having not eaten yet that day I was starting to feel really hungry so I got out my stove and my matches and...nothing. Some water had gotten into the bucket that the matches were in and they were sodden. Without a lighter, or any other matches, this was a problem. I tried drying them in the sun but they were beyond resuscitation, and then I remembered my SAS Survival Guide. I had already used it to brush up on a few knots, and sure enough it had a tip on fire lighting too: use the battery of the vehicle. I pulled out my jump leads, stuck a couple of small lengths of wire on the end and sure enough the electric spark was enough to set off the petrol in the stove. Phew. I cooked up a palatable rice and fish dish, and sat and watched the sun go down over a river as still as a millpond.
After spending a night on the sandbank, then spending a morning freeing myself from that sandbank, I was off again downstream. The Congo was not as fast flowing as the Alima so progess was a bit slower. Doing some maths I figured that I really should try and up the speed if I wanted to get to Brazzaville in a decent timeframe; I would need to do some thinking. In the evening, just as I was looking for a place to stay came upon a small village, and rather than just sail past I decided that I would actually like to stop in at least one of these small places. I pulled into the bank and asked if it would be possible to sleep there which was met with no objections, and by the time I had got my boat into the bank, what felt like the whole village (certainly all the kids) were out watching me. I met the chief of the village, and then spent an evening what felt like holding court, sat on a plastic chair while 50 people around me asked me questions. The village survived on fishing; the people here would go out and fish in the river, then bring the catch back and smoke it before taking it up to sell in the larger markets of Mossaka or Oyo. There were about 200 people in the village (larger than I initially thought) with a huge percentage of young children. The children were lovely though, and so well behaved; I didn't have much to offer as a gift so I gave one of the villagers all of my biscuits to give to the children. They then queued up and waited to be called before taking their biscuit and saying thankyou. I bought some matches and some smoked fish in the village, and pitched my tent outside the chiefs compound, and despite an early start the next morning I still had a full committee of children waving me off.
As I made my way along, the wind started to pick up and progress slowed to a crawl. I decided that now would be a good time to make a couple of tweaks to see if I could speed things up. I made some changes to the belt tensioner to allow it to be pulled tauter, and I made a prototype larger paddle blade out of 20 litre plastic petrol container. Sadly, it was not a success; there was just not enough friction between the drive belt and the drive shaft, and the extra resistance from the larger blade just caused the belt to slip. Back to the drawing board. The wind continued to pick up, and though I battled through for as long as I could I was eventually pushed into the shore and pinned there. As the waves lapped over the side I spent the next two hours bailing water out at the same speed as it was slopping in, leading to much swearing. Eventually it died down and I was able to head off again, but the delay had set my already slow progress back even further.
Fuel was starting to run low, though I had been told that I would be able to find some at Makotipoko (?), a large village. As I got to within 20 km of where I had been told it was, I asked a fisherman how much further it was, only to be told that it was not far at all. Upstream. Turns out I shouldn't have taken the distance estimates so literally, as I had already gone past it. It didn't matter that it wasn't far; just like Margaret Thatcher, Thundergun Express was not for turning! I asked about the next village downstream, and was told that it was about 14km away. I figured I had enough fuel to make it that far, and so carried onwards, this time stopping to ask directions more frequently. The signs were positive - "that way, quite far", "that way, about 5km", "that way, 3km" and then a couple of hundred yards after that "back that way". Bugger! With no sign of any village at all it seemed I had missed it again. I killed the engine and weighed up what to do. My fuel light was flashing which meant I had just under 7 litres in the tank. On the road this would be a comfortable 70 miles at normal speed, but on the river I had no idea. The next town I could see was Mpouya but that was still 30km away, a full days motoring at my current slow speed and probably beyond my range. What could I do? As I drifted along, thinking about my options I was struck by the obvious. I could keep drifting. At night, the river was very calm, and the current would carry me along at around 4km/h. With her plastic container outriggers Thundergun Express was very stable and in no chance of tipping over, and at night there was no other traffic on the river, especially not in the middle where the current was strongest. It wasn't ideal, but it might just work. I stayed awake for as long as I could, but with my genes that was never going to be very long and before I knew it I was waking up in the morning sunshine, still drifting, but now just 5km from Mpouya. It had worked!
The next step was to get ashore. The river was pretty wide at this point, narrowing from 8km to around 3km so I needed to make my way across. I fired up the engine and started to make my way, but sandbanks in the area were playing havoc with the currents and I was moving downstream faster than I wanted. I eventually washed up on a sandbank in the middle of the river and the paddle blades grounded in the sand. I decided that rather than cut straight across, I would island hop from sandbank to sandbank with a mixture of dragging and paddling. However, as I climbed around my bike to get from the back of the bike to the front I slipped. My paddle bounced on the side of the boat and into the river. I briefly considered jumping in after it but didn't fancy getting completely separated from the boat so held back, but I was now literally up the creek without a paddle. Luckily I was able to fashion a new one out of a bamboo pole, the remnants of a 20 litre jerry can and some wire, and continued with that. At one of the larger sandbanks, a fisherman pointed out a hippo in the distance, but as I couldn't see it (and as there was only one) I just carried on and made it to town. With a bit of assistance from some local kids, I bought some more fuel, restocked on bread and biscuits, ate an unhealthy amount of the local doughnuts, and headed off again. The progress I had made the previous night was too good to pass up the opportunity to do it again, and so once again that evening as the winds dropped I drifted off down river.
My wake up call the next day was not quite so gentle. Hearing banging on the boat and shouts of 'Mondele mondele' (white man) I opened my eyes to find myself resting on the riverbank surrounded by ten guys asking for money, and one guy talking about documentation. In my confused sleepy state it took me a couple of minutes to work out that I was no longer in Congo Brazzaville - I had drifted into DRC! I sat up rubbing my eyes, and played it cool. My opening gambit was I didn't have any money, the small amount of money I did have was from Congo Brazzaville not DRC, and would you like some biscuits instead. They weren't interested to start with but when I wasn't budging they accepted the biscuits and left me alone (though, sadly, now biscuitless). I pushed off into the river, grateful that it wasn't some overly officious customs people who had found me.
The next couple of days followed in the same pattern (though without the illegal entry to DRC), and before I knew it I was on the final straight to Stanley Pool and Brazzaville. The trip had taken its toll - I was out of sunscreen, and nearly out of fuel and food. My chair was broken, the paddles were bent, and I was covered in scratches and bruises. I was hungry, tired and sunburnt, but if I thought that the last stretch would be plain sailing, I was about to be taught otherwise. The worst was yet to come.
The calm of the evening and early morning gave way to a brisk headwind, and while the motor combined with the strength of the current meant I was still making headway it was against waves that were now starting to lap over the edge of the boat. It took a lot of concentration to stay on course; if I allowed myself to be pushed too far around then I wouldn't be able to turn back to point downstream without some serious manual paddling. The rocking of the boat caused by the waves was also causing me some consternation - not only was the bike now wobbling alarmingly (though the straps were thankfully holding), the drive belt kept slipping as a result. The sudden loss of power would result in TG Express drifting side on into the waves, pitching and rolling furiously while I tried to repair the damage. After battling all day I was getting very close to Stanley Pool, and as the weather calmed in the evening (plus the threat of thunder coming from behind me) I decided to press on and see if I could make it there that night. Progress was reasonable and by midnight I had passed Maluku and prepared to make the turn off from the main flow of the river and into the Congo side of Stanley Pool. I fired up the engine, and started to make my way across, but as I got closer I found that the current was too strong. No matter what I tried, I just couldn't get any closer to the shore. I changed direction, tried a different tack, and even started paddling to give me a bit more forward momentum, but nothing worked. Not only was I not getting any closer to the shore, I was being slowly pushed downstream into DRC territory! To add to this, I had no idea how much fuel I had left. My warning light was flashing, and said that I had done '15 miles' since it started flashing. I had seen it go as high as 30 miles on this trip, but had no idea what the limit was as consumption on the river was very different to on land. With some basic maths I figured that as the bike thought it was travelling at 10mph, I had at least 1.5 hours, after which who knows. When I finally checked the time after battling away at the current, I realised that I had already been going for an hour and that I was running out of time. If my fuel ran out I would have no chance of making it ashore, and would definitely be pushed into DRC and who knows what would happen then. While technically I had a visa, the police there are not renowned for their honesty and I could end up being thrown in the cells and my bike confiscated.
In a last ditch effort to avoid this, I tore down the shelter at the back of the boat to allow me to stand up, and started paddling furiously. Despite having not eaten anything other than a few mouthfuls of haricot beans, sardines and mayonnaise that day (it had been too rough to get the stove out), I called on my last reserves and started, painfully slowly, to make progress to the shore. Just as I thought I could see a light at the end of the tunnel, I heard a scraping and metallic groaning that I had come to recognise only too well. I had run aground on a sandbank. Sure enough, I hopped out and the boat was in less than a foot of water. This time however, the current was so strong that it was pushing the boat downstream through the sand. I grabbed the strap on the boat to hold it fast. It was now gone two in the morning, I was alone in the middle of the second most powerful river in the world, trying to stop half a ton of dugout canoe being swept into DRC with muscle power alone. There was no way that this was a sustainable position; I would tire quickly and then there would be nothing I could do. I decided I would try walking the boat to the shore and so with the strap over my shoulder, leaning into the current, I started dragging the boat inland. The soft sand under my feet was slipping away as I walked, and as the water got a bit deeper it was becoming almost impossible to stand up against the flow. I changed tactic, holding the boat instead of the strap, and that seemed to work better. I was making good progress but then, a tantalising 30 yards from the shore, the sand bank disappeared and ahead of me was just a channel of fast flowing water.
I was tired and out of options. I couldn't go back, I couldn't stay where I was, and I didn't want to get washed into DRC and the vagaries of their immigration system. I put the strap around my chest, bandolier style, and swam for it. Swimming with such a heavy boat is tough, and consisted really of a series of short bursts where I would swim as fast as I could and as the strap became taught, jerk the boat a few inches closer to the shore. Tough as it was, this was working, but halfway across I could feel that the current was starting to take the boat. With no chance that I was going to be able to fight that I changed tack, swimming downstream at an angle, overtaking the boat but getting closer to the shore at the same time. Spotting a tree sticking out of the water I summoned up every last bit of speed that I could and got to the tree and wrapped the strap around it just before the force of the boat in the current pulled it taught. I breathed a huge sigh of relief, pulled the boat closer into the shore and then collapsed inside. I had made it.
It is worth mentioning at this point that after much deliberation I had given my boat a name. I had toyed with a few - African Queen (too obvious), Heart of Darkness (too dark), Under Seige 2: Dark Territory (too obscure), but I finally settled on Thundergun Express. This was after the episode of the same name from the tv show Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia, partly as a homage to the amount of entertainment that show has provided to me on this trip, but mainly because it sounds (to quote Mac) badass.
Half an hour into the journey, and I was already getting my first "what on earth is that...?" looks from other river folks. The going was not fast - I was pootling along at about 7km/h - but leaning back in the captain's chair with the sun shining I was in no rush whatsoever. After an afternoon start the plan was to do only a couple of hours before stopping for the evening, but as I started to look for a spot to moor up, the wind started to pick up. Then there was the distant rumble of thunder. A storm was coming my way.
This was not good news; truth be told while I had finished the basics of the boat, I was planning on finishing the last few things en route, and one of those things was the storm rigging. I was going to have to work quickly. I threw my anchor (the metalworking guys made me one but I had to explain in detail what I wanted - no one else here has them) into a reed bed and it caught fast, then I set to work battening down the hatches. The shelter at the back of the boat was in no way ready for strong winds, so I lashed it down with copious amounts of nylon string, then covered all my baggage with plastic sheeting, and cut another piece of plastic sheeting to form a side wall for the shelter. I just about got it finished when the storm hit, and managed to avoid the worst of the lashing rain. Luckily it only lasted a short while and by the time I was ready to bunk down for the night it was calm again.
As the early morning sunshine woke me up, I noticed another problem. While I had a mosquito net to sleep under, the odd shape of my boat based cubby hole meant that there were gaps all over the place, and there were now more mosquitoes inside my net than outside. I was going to have to set that up more carefully in future. After fighting to get my anchor out of the reed bed (much harder than I thought it would be, and involved me pulling the boat against the flow of the river right up to where it was), I set off again. Any signs of the storm had completely disappeared, and there was now just blazing sunshine. I was starting to get the hang of the boat, and while the lack of power did make it more tricky to steer around the snaking turns of the Alima, by timing my rudder movements to anticipate the bends I could hold a decent line.
I was still fairly close to Oyo, and there was a reasonable amount of river traffic (by which I mean I saw about 10 boats). These ranged from pirogues like mine (albeit with outboards) transporting people and goods between Oyo and the Congo River town of Mossaka, to large barges laden with fuel and who knows what else, chugging noisily past, barely faster than me. Everyone waved, though some seemed more baffled than others, and from my relaxed position at the back (steering with my feet and leaning back in the captain's chair) I waved back. It was a comfortable way to travel, and as a way of passing the day it had a lot to recommend it. The jungle was thick on both sides of the river, with trees and bushes right down to the water's edge, and for the most part there was no sign of humanity at all. From time to time I would switch off the motorbike so that rather than listening to the low grumble of the single cylinder Yamaha, I could hear the sounds of birds and wind in the trees. Every 10 or 20km I would come across a small fishing village, a collection of houses that could have been home to no more than 50 people. It was hard to imagine what life there would be like, something so completely different to any of my own experiences. Even more remote, there were some places where there were just one or two houses on the bank, nestled in amongst thick vegetation.
I quickly started to develop a routine; early start, spend the day making my way downriver and then at about half past five look for somewhere to moor up, break out the stove and cook something then read or watch something before bed. However, the morning of the third day I had a bit of a problem. Rather than mooring in reed beds I had thrown the anchor on the outside bend of a river and it had caught on a submerged tree. No amount of twisting or tugging the rope was helping, and the river was running too fast to be able to get the boat further upstream than the tree to try and loosen it. On a section of the river with no one else around, my options were to either chop the rope and abandon the anchor, or dive down and pull it free. Given the speed of the river I didn't fancy being without my primary means of stopping for the rest of the trip, so I stripped off and hopped into the water. I had been informed that there were no crocodiles in this part of the river (other than maybe the tiny ones but I figured they wouldn't come after me, and if they did I would back myself to win) so with a firm grip on the rope (I didn't want to get washed downstream), I took a deep breath and pulled myself down. The anchor was wedged tight, but by pulling on the rope to give myself a bit of slack I was able to wiggle it free, then quickly swam back to the boat and climbed back in. Another lesson learned; be more careful about where you drop anchor!
I had a few other problems too - intermittent storms and rain showers would reduce the friction on the drive belt, the belt tensioner I had built out of motorcycle bearings and rope would not stay taught enough, and a lack of attention to navigation on my part whilst looking at another problem had led to me being swept into trees on the bank and damaging my shelter. Luckily, I had plenty of tools and materials to repair things as I went so I built a cover for the mechanism out of plastic to keep it dry, replaced the rope with wire and screws to keep the belt tensioner stronger, and patched the shelter with some spare bamboo and gaffer tape.
After four days on the Alima the landscape started to broaden out with fewer trees and more open spaces and then, after a short document check by some bemused river police, I made it out onto the Congo River. Compared to the Alima, the Congo is huge. It is the second largest river in the world by discharge, the deepest in the world (up to 230m!), and due to the way it snakes around the equator it is constantly in the rainy season somewhere along its length so it never really slows down. At the interesection with the Alima there are lots of pristine white sandbanks, and I (half accidentally) pulled up on one of them. The shallow water meant that for the first time in four days I was able to leave the boat - luxury! I decided to hold up there for a while and sort a few things out. I did my washing (boring but necessary), rebuilt the shelter (this time with an adjustable, suspended roof), and just had a general tidy up of the detritus that had accumulated. Having not eaten yet that day I was starting to feel really hungry so I got out my stove and my matches and...nothing. Some water had gotten into the bucket that the matches were in and they were sodden. Without a lighter, or any other matches, this was a problem. I tried drying them in the sun but they were beyond resuscitation, and then I remembered my SAS Survival Guide. I had already used it to brush up on a few knots, and sure enough it had a tip on fire lighting too: use the battery of the vehicle. I pulled out my jump leads, stuck a couple of small lengths of wire on the end and sure enough the electric spark was enough to set off the petrol in the stove. Phew. I cooked up a palatable rice and fish dish, and sat and watched the sun go down over a river as still as a millpond.
After spending a night on the sandbank, then spending a morning freeing myself from that sandbank, I was off again downstream. The Congo was not as fast flowing as the Alima so progess was a bit slower. Doing some maths I figured that I really should try and up the speed if I wanted to get to Brazzaville in a decent timeframe; I would need to do some thinking. In the evening, just as I was looking for a place to stay came upon a small village, and rather than just sail past I decided that I would actually like to stop in at least one of these small places. I pulled into the bank and asked if it would be possible to sleep there which was met with no objections, and by the time I had got my boat into the bank, what felt like the whole village (certainly all the kids) were out watching me. I met the chief of the village, and then spent an evening what felt like holding court, sat on a plastic chair while 50 people around me asked me questions. The village survived on fishing; the people here would go out and fish in the river, then bring the catch back and smoke it before taking it up to sell in the larger markets of Mossaka or Oyo. There were about 200 people in the village (larger than I initially thought) with a huge percentage of young children. The children were lovely though, and so well behaved; I didn't have much to offer as a gift so I gave one of the villagers all of my biscuits to give to the children. They then queued up and waited to be called before taking their biscuit and saying thankyou. I bought some matches and some smoked fish in the village, and pitched my tent outside the chiefs compound, and despite an early start the next morning I still had a full committee of children waving me off.
As I made my way along, the wind started to pick up and progress slowed to a crawl. I decided that now would be a good time to make a couple of tweaks to see if I could speed things up. I made some changes to the belt tensioner to allow it to be pulled tauter, and I made a prototype larger paddle blade out of 20 litre plastic petrol container. Sadly, it was not a success; there was just not enough friction between the drive belt and the drive shaft, and the extra resistance from the larger blade just caused the belt to slip. Back to the drawing board. The wind continued to pick up, and though I battled through for as long as I could I was eventually pushed into the shore and pinned there. As the waves lapped over the side I spent the next two hours bailing water out at the same speed as it was slopping in, leading to much swearing. Eventually it died down and I was able to head off again, but the delay had set my already slow progress back even further.
Fuel was starting to run low, though I had been told that I would be able to find some at Makotipoko (?), a large village. As I got to within 20 km of where I had been told it was, I asked a fisherman how much further it was, only to be told that it was not far at all. Upstream. Turns out I shouldn't have taken the distance estimates so literally, as I had already gone past it. It didn't matter that it wasn't far; just like Margaret Thatcher, Thundergun Express was not for turning! I asked about the next village downstream, and was told that it was about 14km away. I figured I had enough fuel to make it that far, and so carried onwards, this time stopping to ask directions more frequently. The signs were positive - "that way, quite far", "that way, about 5km", "that way, 3km" and then a couple of hundred yards after that "back that way". Bugger! With no sign of any village at all it seemed I had missed it again. I killed the engine and weighed up what to do. My fuel light was flashing which meant I had just under 7 litres in the tank. On the road this would be a comfortable 70 miles at normal speed, but on the river I had no idea. The next town I could see was Mpouya but that was still 30km away, a full days motoring at my current slow speed and probably beyond my range. What could I do? As I drifted along, thinking about my options I was struck by the obvious. I could keep drifting. At night, the river was very calm, and the current would carry me along at around 4km/h. With her plastic container outriggers Thundergun Express was very stable and in no chance of tipping over, and at night there was no other traffic on the river, especially not in the middle where the current was strongest. It wasn't ideal, but it might just work. I stayed awake for as long as I could, but with my genes that was never going to be very long and before I knew it I was waking up in the morning sunshine, still drifting, but now just 5km from Mpouya. It had worked!
The next step was to get ashore. The river was pretty wide at this point, narrowing from 8km to around 3km so I needed to make my way across. I fired up the engine and started to make my way, but sandbanks in the area were playing havoc with the currents and I was moving downstream faster than I wanted. I eventually washed up on a sandbank in the middle of the river and the paddle blades grounded in the sand. I decided that rather than cut straight across, I would island hop from sandbank to sandbank with a mixture of dragging and paddling. However, as I climbed around my bike to get from the back of the bike to the front I slipped. My paddle bounced on the side of the boat and into the river. I briefly considered jumping in after it but didn't fancy getting completely separated from the boat so held back, but I was now literally up the creek without a paddle. Luckily I was able to fashion a new one out of a bamboo pole, the remnants of a 20 litre jerry can and some wire, and continued with that. At one of the larger sandbanks, a fisherman pointed out a hippo in the distance, but as I couldn't see it (and as there was only one) I just carried on and made it to town. With a bit of assistance from some local kids, I bought some more fuel, restocked on bread and biscuits, ate an unhealthy amount of the local doughnuts, and headed off again. The progress I had made the previous night was too good to pass up the opportunity to do it again, and so once again that evening as the winds dropped I drifted off down river.
My wake up call the next day was not quite so gentle. Hearing banging on the boat and shouts of 'Mondele mondele' (white man) I opened my eyes to find myself resting on the riverbank surrounded by ten guys asking for money, and one guy talking about documentation. In my confused sleepy state it took me a couple of minutes to work out that I was no longer in Congo Brazzaville - I had drifted into DRC! I sat up rubbing my eyes, and played it cool. My opening gambit was I didn't have any money, the small amount of money I did have was from Congo Brazzaville not DRC, and would you like some biscuits instead. They weren't interested to start with but when I wasn't budging they accepted the biscuits and left me alone (though, sadly, now biscuitless). I pushed off into the river, grateful that it wasn't some overly officious customs people who had found me.
The next couple of days followed in the same pattern (though without the illegal entry to DRC), and before I knew it I was on the final straight to Stanley Pool and Brazzaville. The trip had taken its toll - I was out of sunscreen, and nearly out of fuel and food. My chair was broken, the paddles were bent, and I was covered in scratches and bruises. I was hungry, tired and sunburnt, but if I thought that the last stretch would be plain sailing, I was about to be taught otherwise. The worst was yet to come.
The calm of the evening and early morning gave way to a brisk headwind, and while the motor combined with the strength of the current meant I was still making headway it was against waves that were now starting to lap over the edge of the boat. It took a lot of concentration to stay on course; if I allowed myself to be pushed too far around then I wouldn't be able to turn back to point downstream without some serious manual paddling. The rocking of the boat caused by the waves was also causing me some consternation - not only was the bike now wobbling alarmingly (though the straps were thankfully holding), the drive belt kept slipping as a result. The sudden loss of power would result in TG Express drifting side on into the waves, pitching and rolling furiously while I tried to repair the damage. After battling all day I was getting very close to Stanley Pool, and as the weather calmed in the evening (plus the threat of thunder coming from behind me) I decided to press on and see if I could make it there that night. Progress was reasonable and by midnight I had passed Maluku and prepared to make the turn off from the main flow of the river and into the Congo side of Stanley Pool. I fired up the engine, and started to make my way across, but as I got closer I found that the current was too strong. No matter what I tried, I just couldn't get any closer to the shore. I changed direction, tried a different tack, and even started paddling to give me a bit more forward momentum, but nothing worked. Not only was I not getting any closer to the shore, I was being slowly pushed downstream into DRC territory! To add to this, I had no idea how much fuel I had left. My warning light was flashing, and said that I had done '15 miles' since it started flashing. I had seen it go as high as 30 miles on this trip, but had no idea what the limit was as consumption on the river was very different to on land. With some basic maths I figured that as the bike thought it was travelling at 10mph, I had at least 1.5 hours, after which who knows. When I finally checked the time after battling away at the current, I realised that I had already been going for an hour and that I was running out of time. If my fuel ran out I would have no chance of making it ashore, and would definitely be pushed into DRC and who knows what would happen then. While technically I had a visa, the police there are not renowned for their honesty and I could end up being thrown in the cells and my bike confiscated.
In a last ditch effort to avoid this, I tore down the shelter at the back of the boat to allow me to stand up, and started paddling furiously. Despite having not eaten anything other than a few mouthfuls of haricot beans, sardines and mayonnaise that day (it had been too rough to get the stove out), I called on my last reserves and started, painfully slowly, to make progress to the shore. Just as I thought I could see a light at the end of the tunnel, I heard a scraping and metallic groaning that I had come to recognise only too well. I had run aground on a sandbank. Sure enough, I hopped out and the boat was in less than a foot of water. This time however, the current was so strong that it was pushing the boat downstream through the sand. I grabbed the strap on the boat to hold it fast. It was now gone two in the morning, I was alone in the middle of the second most powerful river in the world, trying to stop half a ton of dugout canoe being swept into DRC with muscle power alone. There was no way that this was a sustainable position; I would tire quickly and then there would be nothing I could do. I decided I would try walking the boat to the shore and so with the strap over my shoulder, leaning into the current, I started dragging the boat inland. The soft sand under my feet was slipping away as I walked, and as the water got a bit deeper it was becoming almost impossible to stand up against the flow. I changed tactic, holding the boat instead of the strap, and that seemed to work better. I was making good progress but then, a tantalising 30 yards from the shore, the sand bank disappeared and ahead of me was just a channel of fast flowing water.
I was tired and out of options. I couldn't go back, I couldn't stay where I was, and I didn't want to get washed into DRC and the vagaries of their immigration system. I put the strap around my chest, bandolier style, and swam for it. Swimming with such a heavy boat is tough, and consisted really of a series of short bursts where I would swim as fast as I could and as the strap became taught, jerk the boat a few inches closer to the shore. Tough as it was, this was working, but halfway across I could feel that the current was starting to take the boat. With no chance that I was going to be able to fight that I changed tack, swimming downstream at an angle, overtaking the boat but getting closer to the shore at the same time. Spotting a tree sticking out of the water I summoned up every last bit of speed that I could and got to the tree and wrapped the strap around it just before the force of the boat in the current pulled it taught. I breathed a huge sigh of relief, pulled the boat closer into the shore and then collapsed inside. I had made it.
