Scary Monsters and Super Creeps

I sat on the rotating stool at the seafood bar in Terminal Four and tried to ignore the Russian couple sucking face right next to me.

I was heading to Brazzaville, capital of the Republic of Congo, by way of Nairobi. Stacey had been freaked out by the Congo. I’d tried to explain that I was going to the ‘good’ Congo as opposed to the ‘bad’ Congo. ‘Good’ Congo being the old French colony, the Republic of Congo. Yes, it had just had a civil war, but it was OK at the moment. ‘Bad’ Congo is the Democratic Republic of Congo, the old Belgian Congo. Experience has taught me that any country calling itself ‘democratic’ is always anything but (see East Germany and North Korea). The good and bad Congos face each other over the mighty river of the same name.

To make things worse there had been a Code Red terrorist alert in Nairobi on the eve of my departure. I had absolutely no idea what a Code Red was or what I should do about it. I’d tried to mouth some platitudes about this making the airport even safer but she was already in a tizz about the whole trip.

‘You’re going off on your own into the middle of bloody nowhere to look for a dinosaur? For fuck’s sake, Dom, you’ve got responsibilities . . .’

She was right, of course: it was unnecessary. But then again, if you play by those rules then everything is unnecessary – and she had to remember that I was one of the world’s foremost monster-hunters and knew no fear . . .

The more I looked into the Mokèlé-mbèmbé, the ‘Blocker of Rivers’, the more intrigued I became. In the vast swampy borderlands between Cameroon and the Congo is said to exist an aquatic creature that looks very much like a dinosaur. There have been reports of sightings going back to the very first Western explorers and local tribes have stories that go a lot further back in time. If there’s something undiscovered in the world, this is the sort of place where it might reside. The area is almost inaccessible and very few Westerners have ever been there – the combination of war and remoteness has kept most people away. This was going to be a proper, middle-of-nowhere adventure: just a guide, porters and me heading off into the heart of darkness.

My two destinations were the village of Boha and then Lake Tele, where the creature is supposed to live. Information was scarce but it seemed to be a two-day walk after an EU-blacklisted flight, a seven-hour car ride and an indeterminate boat journey. This was it. I was an adventurer, an intrepid explorer . . .

‘Excuse me . . .’ A sixteen-year-old blonde girl interrupted my reveries. ‘Were you on I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here!?’ She looked at me enquiringly having clearly been egged on by her pre-shaving companions in the queue for the plane to Nairobi . . .

‘Yeah, it was. Weren’t you the one who pooed on the camp toilet seat and didn’t clean it up?’

‘That wasn’t me. That was the stupid Playboy Bunny throwing false accusations about.’

It turned out my neighbour on board was also on an adventure. He was an ex-army officer who now worked on pirate patrol. He spent eight weeks on, eight weeks off cargo vessels defending them against Somali pirate attacks.

We landed in Nairobi and as I got off the plane I felt the clammy wall of African heat. I made my way to my gate. The flight was going to Brazzaville and Kinshasa. It seemed that good and bad Congo shared a flight. There was a vast amount of people in the departure gate and they were a tough-looking bunch. There were three Westerners, a couple of Arabs, a handful of Chinese and the rest were Africans. It looked like the sort of plane that James Bond might hop on to and look around suspiciously.

Next to me sat an enormous Congolese man with a very annoying mobile-phone problem. Every two or three minutes his infernal ringtone would go off. It was a rather creepy voice whispering very loudly, ‘Boss, you have received a text message.’ To my right, a man was reading a local Nairobi newspaper -‘Moustachioed woman robs neighbourhood!!’ screamed the rather wonderful headline.

The plane was an hour late and the general consensus seemed to be that this was rather better than usual. I went for a wander to get a cup of coffee. At the bar sat a Sloaney English girl yacking away on her iPhone.

‘Yah, no, I’m in Kenya, on my way to Rwanda . . . I know . . . Totally weird . . . Absolutely . . . Yah . . . I’m meeting Milo . . .’

After an hour the packed room was explained: there were three delayed flights waiting – one for Zanzibar, one for Kigali and mine. I was secretly pleased that my lot looked decidedly rougher than the other two. The three Westerners were on other flights so I was the only non-African on mine apart from a lone Chinese man who looked decidedly shifty .

On the plane a surly African youth wearing the international costume of hip-hop twat was slouched in my seat. I explained the situation but Chocolate Ice just stared at me through dull, sullen eyes and didn’t move. Fortunately he was only about fifteen so I was able to be slightly more assertive than I might have been with an adult. He moved to the middle seat and I sat down only to find myself in another elbow war. Fortunately, there was quite lot of turbulence and mini-gangsta almost shat his overly baggy pants. To show how unconcerned I was I fell asleep on the window. I woke up just as we were coming in to land in Brazzaville. Through my dribble I could see rows and rows of houses with rusty corrugated-iron roofs. An eerie, misty cloud hung over the city.

Once on the ground I walked through surprisingly clean corridors, with every Congolese I met welcoming me to Brazzaville. It all seemed very friendly and organized. Maybe I’d got the wrong end of the stick?

I handed over my passport and vaccination forms to an official staring at me in exactly the same way as the sullen youth had on the plane. He spoke to me in heavily accented French. This was to be the same throughout my journey in the Congo. Fortunately, having grown up in the Lebanon, I’m bilingual. (I have therefore translated all conversations into English for the purposes of this book.)

I gave the official my passport and he flicked through it rather contemptuously. He got to the page that had my visa.

‘Where is your letter of invitation?’ He looked at me accusingly as though I was hiding it in my pants.

Anyone applying for a visa to the Congo needs a letter of invitation from someone based in the country to support their application. I told Grumpy that mine was with the Congolese Embassy in London, as they’d needed me to send it to them so that they could issue the visa.

I repeated that I had sent it to the Congolese Embassy in London and that that was how I’d got the visa that he could see in my passport. No letter, no visa.

This was all starting to get a bit Catch 22. I repeated, slowly, that the letter was with the Congolese Embassy in London and added that I must have had one or I wouldn’t have been issued the visa . . .

‘But you do not have a letter of invitation. You need a letter of invitation.’

We stared at each other in silence for a while, neither of us backing down. Eventually I told him that someone outside was meeting me. Could I leave my passport with him, go and find the man who was meeting me and hopefully he could sort everything out? To my surprise Grumpy accepted this idea. I wandered past the luggage hall and several armed soldiers and into the morass of humanity waiting for passengers to come through. I looked around. I was supposed to meet a Cameroonian called Jean-Pierre. He’d come highly recommended and had travelled all over the Congo, although he’d never been to the area that we were off to. I scanned the crowd but there was nobody showing any interest. I tried to go back in to talk to Grumpy but an armed soldier placed his AK47 in front of me and shook his head.

I explained that I had just come out and needed to go back in to get my passport but he was not interested.

I was buggered. I was just wondering how I could deal with a trip to the Congo with no passport when a smiley face burst through the crowd.

‘Monsieur Dom?’ It was Jean-Pierre. I was saved. Jean-Pierre had a word with someone he knew and we both wandered back towards Grumpy un-hassled.

I introduced Grumpy to Jean-Pierre and told him that this was the man who had written my original letter of invitation. Grumpy looked at Jean-Pierre.

Jean-Pierre started the same complicated set of explanations that I had attempted. He handed his passport over to Grumpy and explained our mission here. Grumpy looked at Jean-Pierre’s Cameroonian passport.

This conversation went on for roughly half an hour. I believe money exchanged hands, though I never actually saw it happen – but, whatever, we were finally through and Jean-Pierre took me to the luggage hall.

‘I don’t have any more; it’s on my back.’ Jean-Pierre peered at my small, grey rucksack and then back at me with the look of a man who could not decide whether I was an idiot or an exceptionally talented packer.

We hopped into a cab and headed downtown to Mikhael’s Hotel. I was dog-tired. During the Second World War, with his country under German occupation, General de Gaulle briefly made Brazzaville the capital of Free France. As we drove through it now the streets were awash with activity. Every time the car stopped people would shove useless things through the window, trying to make us purchase them. Fake-silver photo frames seemed to be a big favourite.

Jean-Pierre was very excited about our adventure. He told me that he had always wanted an excuse to travel to the part of the Congo we were going to and had been thrilled when my request came through. He warned me that we might not see the monster – ‘but there are plenty of pythons and crocodiles’.

We drove on past a couple of markets, our little green taxi doing well negotiating the chaotic traffic. Suddenly we rounded a corner and there it was, the River Congo. It’s enormous, far bigger than I’d expected. The water was dark and grey and I could see Kinshasa, capital of bad Congo, on the opposite bank, what looked like about half a mile away. Apparently this is the only place in the world where two capital cities are within sight of each other across a river (Buenos Aires and Montevideo on the Plate estuary are much, much further apart).

I gazed at this extraordinary expanse of muddy water that has both fascinated and thwarted so many explorers for so long. The Congo is a bit like Everest, one of those things that featured in so many stories of derring-do I remember reading as a schoolboy.

Kinshasa is huge, with a population of twelve million, whereas little Brazzaville is home to barely a million.

‘It is crazy expensive here,’ said Jean-Pierre as we arrived at the hotel that turned out to be run, like most of Brazzaville, by a Lebanese merchant class.

I tried to get some sleep but couldn’t so I had a shower and then went to find the restaurant. I ordered the plat du jour – a uniquely Congolese dish (not) – Couscous Royale. It was delicious and I sat back contentedly and tried to eavesdrop on a tableful of five women whom I guessed to be Brazilian. The room was packed with Brazzaville’s ‘ladies who lunch’. They not only lunched but also smoked like it was going out of fashion and constantly showed each other videos on their laptops with the music turned up to the max.

There were still Christmas decorations hung up around the place despite it being late January. Christmas in the Congo: who’d have thunk it?

A man in an orange suit brighter than the sun, subtly offset with a fluorescent-blue shirt, wandered around the room permanently on his mobile. He was Belgian and was talking to someone on his phone about the fact that he was off to Moscow the following day for three days.

I ordered an Um Bongo to try to fit in. The waiter looked desperate to please but eventually returned to ask me to repeat my order.

He disappeared again but returned quickly, shaking his head in a disconsolate manner. He admitted that they had no such drink.

‘I understand that you don’t have any Um Bongo on the premises. Perhaps you have run out due to the high consumption rate? When will you be restocked?’

The waiter looked mortified to have to admit that he had never heard of Um Bongo.

‘Are you a Congolese?’ I asked him. He confirmed that he was born and bred in Brazzaville. And you have never heard of the soft drink Um Bongo?’

The waiter shook his head and slunk away. I was dumbfounded. All those years when I’d been taken in by the Um Bongo TV adverts with the catchy song: ‘Um Bongo, Um Bongo, they drink it in the Congo . . .’ It was all lies. The company responsible for the drink – the sinister-sounding Gerber’s Juice Company Ltd (known as Libby’s, to make them sound friendly) had been lying to us all. Nobody drunk Um Bongo in the Congo. Nobody had even heard of Um Bongo in the bloody Congo. I smelt a lawsuit and ordered a beer instead.

I got an Ngok beer that had a very familiar crocodile on the label. Later, I asked Jean-Pierre what type of crocodile it was and he told me it was called a Lacoste. You couldn’t make it up.

I sat on the terrace by the pool. For about the first time ever I was by a pool where swimmers weren’t treated like retards. There were no signs anywhere telling you there was no lifeguard around. Nobody was telling you that you couldn’t heavy pet should you fancy it. There was not even an indication of depth or the almost compulsory ‘No Diving’ sign that seems to be on every public pool in the world. Not here. The Congo is a place that relies on you to make your own decisions. It’s somewhere that allows you to be a grown-up. It was hot – very hot – and the water looked inviting. I stripped off to my swimming trunks and dived into the cooling water. I hit my hands on the bottom of the pool so hard that it partially dislocated my right wrist. The pool was only three feet deep. It appeared that I had stupidly dived into the shallow end. I swam to the other end only to find, to my astonishment, that it was about a foot and a half deep. Had I dived in there (and it had been 50:50) I would have broken my neck for sure.

Three young and coquettishly beautiful African girls appeared and started swimming hesitantly. They had clearly been there before as they eased themselves in feet first. The only other people by the pool, an elderly Belgian couple, looked on rather disapprovingly. They were clearly locals and I couldn’t help thinking that things must have certainly changed since the days when this area was the ‘European district’ and Africans swimming in their pools would have been punishable with the dreaded chicotte, a nasty leather whip.

Jean-Pierre came round and suggested a little tour of the capital. We grabbed a taxi and rented him for two hours. We drove slowly through Poto-Poto, the old ‘native area’ and now a bustling market full of life. Then Jean-Pierre showed me the Basilique – an extraordinarily modern church built by the French in 1943. The green malachite roof can be seen from most of the city and is a very useful landmark. We popped inside. I’m not a churchy person but this is a remarkable building: one vast, vaulted space with not a single column for support. Two Congolese choristers were practising and their haunting voices echoed beautifully around the space. It was an unexpected moment of serene calm in this most un-calm of countries.

Next we visited the artisans’ market. I was after Tintin stuff for a souvenir but was unsure whether there would be any. Tintin in the Congo is now widely acknowledged as a very racist tome full of negative stereotyping, where every Congolese is represented in an overly caricatured manner as either evil or very dim and almost childlike, needing the wise assistance of their Belgian colonial overlords (not to mention that, in the spirit of the era, Tintin blasted away at about 200 animals, including a rhino he drilled a hole into then blew up with dynamite).

Hergé was simply of his time but I wondered what the actual Congolese made of it all. I presumed that Tintin had visited the Belgian Congo and not the French one but I was still curious to see what they might have. The moment I entered the little market I was faced with walls of scary tribal masks and figurines. Nestled in between these, however, were what I was after. In the same style as the masks and figurines were depictions of Tintin (almost always tied up) as well as Snowy and Professor Calculus. I spotted a particularly rubbish attempt at the moon rocket that I fell instantly in love with. The best, though, was yet to come. The ultimate Tintin/racist/tourist trophy was a gloriously bad version of the Tintin in the Congo book cover. The name Tintin had been left blank and the guy offered me the opportunity to own this artwork replete with my name on it instead of Tintin. I was hooked and haggled him half-heartedly down to about six quid. The deal done, he shuffled off to get the artist to do my name. I left thrilled with my booty.

Back in the car we went past the old president’s house, the scene of much fighting. Cameras had to be put away as stern-looking soldiers with mirror shades and mean faces tracked us with their machine guns. They were used to trouble here. Here is my attempt at a potted history of the place:

The Republic of Congo used to be the French region of Middle Congo. King Leopold II of Belgium had been desperate for a colony for his little country and, by fooling the great explorer Henry Morton Stanley into helping him, he created a huge private fiefdom in 1877. Instead of this being the philanthropic exercise he had promised the world, however, Leopold turned the whole area into a horrific slaughterhouse. Estimates go up to ten million Congolese killed as they were forced to produce first ivory and then rubber for the coffers of the big-nosed Belgian king.

The reason that France got this part of the Congo was that the Italian-born French explorer Brazza claimed the northern bank of the Congo for his country from right under the nose of Stanley.

The Republic of Congo became the present-day country upon independence from France in 1960. There was a coup in 1968 and the country turned into a fully fledged Marxist experiment closely allied to the Soviet Union. The current leader, Denis Sassou Nguesso, took power in another coup in 1979. The country was oil rich, with the largest oilfields in Africa lying off her coast, and predatory foreign com panies were quick to exploit this.

Under heavy pressure Nguesso finally introduced multiparty politics in 1990 and was subsequently defeated in the 1992 elections by Pascal Lissouba.

In 1997 things really came to a head when Lissouba’s men (the Ninjas) engaged Nguesso’s private militia (the Cobras). Lissouba accused Nguesso of trying to stage a coup. A devastating four-month civil war ensued, which tore Brazzaville apart. Finally with the help of socialist Angolan troops, Lissouba was unseated and Nguesso reinstated. He has been in power ever since. Confused? Welcome to the ‘good’ Congo.

The local theories are that everything was about oil. Lissouba had done a deal with the American company Occidental Petroleum and the French oil companies that Nguesso was in bed with weren’t happy about this.

Back on our tour of the city and we’d reached the banks of the Congo, where thin dugout canoes (pirogues) supported precariously balanced fishermen. Little unofficial ferries constantly crossed the river to and from Kinshasa. This was the city where, in 1974, Muhammad Ali fought George Foreman in the Rumble in the Jungle.

‘Ali, boumbaye! Ali, boumbaye!’ the little kids had chanted over and over while they ran next to Ali as he jogged along the banks of the Congo. In English: Ali, kill him!’ They probably meant it literally.

Jean-Pierre got the car to stop at the edge of the city and we wandered down to the riverbank and on to a plastic-bag-strewn beach.

‘Plastique – c’est le nouveau SIDA [AIDS] d’Afrique,’ said Jean-Pierre sadly looking around us. We’d come there to see the rapids that turn this mighty river – beaten in tonnage of water only by the Amazon – into raging, angry foam. Most of the river is on an inland plateau but upon reaching Brazzaville it drops 1,000 feet to sea level in the space of about 200 miles. The water is forced through narrow canyons and more than thirty-two different ‘cataracts’ until it finally reaches the ocean, where its sheer force has carved out an enormous trench in the sea floor.

It was this final stretch of water that prevented early explorers from sailing up the river. The mouth of the Congo was discovered in 1482 but it was only in the middle of the nineteenth century that Stanley managed to navigate the whole length of the river, crossing the continent from East to West.

There are some islands just below the first rapids. One of them is called Devil’s Island. My cab driver told me that couples used to take pirogues out there to make love. Unfortunately peeping toms started to do the same, to pry on the passionate couples. To counter this, pirogue pilots now only take couples out to the islands. These days if you want to be a peeping tom in Brazzaville you need to get organized and pair up with someone who shares your interest.

Beyond Devil’s Island, across the river, is the Democratic Republic of Congo. We could just make out some figures on the other side.

‘You would be stripped naked in two minutes over there,’ laughed the cabbie.

‘Two minutes? That’s in the good areas . . .’ laughed Jean-Pierre, a little too hard for my liking.

We drove back into town and changed some money, as this was probably the last place where we could do so. We were also taking food, drink . . . everything with us as we had no idea what was available where we were going. I started thinking about the fact that Jean-Pierre had never actually been to where we were going. This did seem to me to be a basic flaw in his role as a guide. He seemed pretty relaxed about the whole thing so I rolled with it. After all, as the guy who’d recommended him to me back in the UK had said: ‘Listen, he has a satellite phone and with that you can get help wherever you are if it all goes tits-up.’

I asked Jean-Pierre how long the battery on his sat phone lasted and how he powered it up in the middle of nowhere.

He smiled ruefully. ‘I have no sat phone any more – the humidity steams up the screen and I break three in three years – so now I just pray to God that all goes well.’

This was not the most comforting news to an awkward atheist but I tried to remember how I ‘rolled’ and attempted to laugh in what I took to be an overly manly fashion. In reality I felt a bit sick.

I’d been rather hoping that a shopping list for a monster-hunting trip into the African heartland might include:

A gun

A bigger gun

A big net of some sort

Machetes

A helicopter

A really stupidly big gun just to be sure

Sadly none of these seemed to be on JP’s list. It was more like water, corned beef and rice: slightly less glamorous.

We popped into a supermarket, the biggest in Brazzaville, to do our shopping. It was a Casino, like the ones in France. Well, sort of like the ones in France – if the ones in France had gone back to 1820. Just to be a 100 per cent certain, I scoured the shelves for any sign of Um Bongo but there was none. Jean-Pierre asked me what I was looking for but I was too embarrassed to explain.

‘There is not much call for it here,’ laughed Jean-Pierre, pointing at his jet-black skin. ‘Is too late . . .’

We walked through town trying to avoid being run over by the relentless stream of green and white taxis. I noticed a couple of signs on the walls: ‘Il est interdit d’uriner ici.’ I wondered whether there were pee police to enforce this rule.

Finally we got to a tiny chemist. I asked the chemist for sunblock and he appeared to be totally bemused. He looked around slightly randomly before pulling something off a shelf. It was a cream used to prevent brown blotches appearing on the skin. I looked around myself and finally found a cream that was to protect babies from the sun. I bought it and the chemist looked at me as though serving a paedophile.

I was now as ready as I could ever be. My only other problem was power. I’d bought a little folding solar panel with a USB outlet but it turned out not to be supported by either my iPhone or iPad. I’d also bought two USB-powered batteries that could recharge my iPhone. I plugged them into my laptop and charged them up as much as possible.

I headed for the hotel restaurant, where I joined a group of tables full of rather depressed-looking white men drinking beer way too early in the day. We all sat drinking Ngok beer and smoking cigarettes, each one of us quietly wondering what strange twist of fate had brought us here.

We had our last supper in Brazzaville on a terrace overlooking Kinshasa at Mami Water, a French-themed restaurant in a kind of marina.

‘It’s for the Brazzaville jet set,’ said JP, pointing to various speedboats and jet skis lying around. We ate pizza served by a very grumpy waitress who brought a whole new meaning to the phrase ‘couldn’t give a shit’. Out on the river fishermen floated by in their pirogues as the lights of Kinshasa twinkled gently over the water.

JP told me about sitting where we were five years ago and watching tracer bullets arc over the river from fighting in Kinshasa. It made me think of Beirut.

We started talking about the trip and for the first time I realized that I was quite scared. The Congo is a creepy enough place, even in the capital. I had no sense of intuition in how to judge whether something was safe or not. I couldn’t read people’s faces as I could in more familiar surroundings. At first glance everybody looked rather intimidating and unfriendly. Also where we were going there are enough scientifically validated ‘monsters’ without worrying about a Mokèlé-mbèmbé: leopards, crocodiles, pythons, chimps, hippos, elephants, wild dogs, green mambas, black mambas, scorpions . . .

JP started talking about wading through waist-high swamps and all the things that could slip into various orifices but he ended on a positive note: there were no lions in the area.

Jean-Pierre was a most relaxed individual – a little too relaxed for my liking, but I didn’t want to judge until we saw what happened up north. He went through our plan. We would fly to Impfondo and meet members of the WCS (the Wildlife Conservation Society), who had a base somewhere near the river we needed to go down. We would then find a boat and head off towards the village of Boha, whose inhabitants ‘own’ Lake Tele – the lake where the Mokèlé-mbèmbé is supposed to live. In the village we’d have to negotiate access, then get porters, a guide and then hike for two days to the lake. That was the plan. I was on a self-imposed tight timetable. I had exactly a week up north and had to be back to Impfondo in time to catch the weekly flight back to Brazzaville. This I needed to do because I had to be back in London for the most crucial meeting of my TV life. ITV would decide whether to go ahead with my new TV series or not. If they did, it was Saturday-night prime-time for me. If they didn’t . . . Well, maybe I could apply for a job reading the news on Congolese TV? I was pretty sure that this was not the normal type of problem that international monster-hunters faced. They were probably more worried about having contracted some hideous disease or smuggling unusual skulls across borders.

JP and I shook hands outside the hotel and agreed to meet the following morning at seven. As I walked into the building I spotted a pack of wild dogs taking it in turns to pee into the hotel’s main air-con vent . . . Which was nice.

The following morning, on the way to Maya-Maya, the airport from which our EU-blacklisted plane was to depart, the cab took us down a long wooded avenue bordered by desolate concrete buildings.

‘This used to be the zoo but they shot all the animals and ate them during the civil war,’ said JP ruefully.

The Chinese were building an extension at the airport but for the moment it looked like total chaos, despite JP assuring me that it was ‘the best airport in Central Africa’.

Nevertheless, if you are of a nervous disposition then the domestic-departures area of Maya-Maya Airport is most definitely not for you. It was like a huge mosh-pit. People queue-barged from so many sides that the queue itself became non-existent. A lone Lebanese man who seemed to be nominally in charge hurled abuse at every passenger, flatly refusing their demands to have everything from huge fridges to flat-screen televisions, all wrapped in brown cardboard, allowed on board. One man ignored the Lebanese man and simply tried to hurl his cardboard box through the flap at the end of the conveyor belt. The Lebanese man did not hesitate: he punched the offender hard in the face and the guy went down like a sack of potatoes. The Lebanese man looked around triumphantly, as though daring anyone else to try something. The tide was stemmed for a minute or so but the battle was soon back on as the unconscious man was dragged away by a relative. To my great surprise we appeared to be flying ‘Canadian Air’. I was pretty certain that Canada had very little to do with this outfit but what could I do?

The Lebanese man seemed almost shocked at how little luggage we were taking with us and he looked around suspiciously as though smelling a rat. He gave me my boarding pass with some hesitancy and snarled at JP, who gave him one of his beaming smiles.

While waiting at the departure gate I started re-reading the notes I had on the Mokèlé-mbèmbé.

The earliest reference to the creature seemed to be in a book by the nearly appropriately named Abbé Bonaventure in 1776. Bonaventure was an early French missionary in the Congo and wrote about seeing ‘huge footprints, about three feet in circumference’.

In 1909 the famous big-game hunter Carl Hagenbeck wrote in his autobiography, Beasts and Men, about hearing from several independent sources of a creature living in the Congo described as ‘half elephant, half dragon’. Meanwhile the naturalist Joseph Menges told him about an animal that was ‘some kind of dinosaur, akin to the brontosaurus’.

In 1913 German Captain Freiherr von Stein was asked to do a report on German colonies and wrote about what was now Cameroon, just on the other side of the border from where we were headed. He too described reports of a mysterious creature:

The animal is said to be of a brownish-gray color with a smooth skin, its size is approximately that of an elephant; at least that of a hippopotamus. It is said to have a long and very flexible neck and only one tooth but a very long one; some say it is a horn. A few spoke about a long, muscular tail like that of an alligator. Canoes coming near it are said to be doomed; the animal is said to attack the vessels at once and to kill the crews but without eating the bodies. The creature is said to live in the caves that have been washed out by the river in the clay of its shores at sharp bends. It is said to climb the shores even at daytime in search of food; its diet is said to be entirely vegetable. This feature disagrees with a possible explanation as a myth. The preferred plant was shown to me, it is a kind of liana with large white blossoms, with a milky sap and applelike fruits. At the Ssombo River I was shown a path said to have been made by this animal in order to get at its food. The path was fresh and there were plants of the described type nearby. But since there were too many tracks of elephants, hippos, and other large mammals it was impossible to make out a particular spoor with any amount of certainty.

In 1976 herpetologist James Powell went on an expedition during which he showed villagers illustrations of various animals both alive and extinct – the natives suggested that the diplodocus was the nearest match.

In 1979 Reverend Eugene Thomas claimed that the Bangombe tribe near Lake Tele had constructed a large spiked fence in the Tele tributary to keep Mokèlé-mbèmbé away from fishing. One broke through and was killed and the natives ate it and died from food poisoning. This was supposed to have happened in 1959.

In 1988 a Japanese TV crew flew above Lake Tele and filmed a large wake in the water . . .

I read these little nuggets of information over and over again. The truth is that nobody really knows much about the area we were going to and that was exciting enough in itself. It’s a rare thing nowadays to find somewhere in the world that’s still properly off the beaten track. If Canadian Air delivered then we would soon be heading off into just such a place. I had a very dry mouth. This normally happens when I’m nervous; it’s a weird mix of excitement and nerves. I was excited about monster-hunting. I was nervous about the state of the plane, the flight, the landing, the insects, the animals, the heat, the cold, the unknown . . . It’s the unknown that always scares us the most.

JP had been on his phone and announced that he had managed to get through to the WCS office in Impfondo. They knew we were coming and had confirmed that a car of some sort would take us to Epema, where we could get hold of a boat. They also confirmed that it would be possible to borrow two tents. This sounded fairly promising but JP just gave a fatalistic shrug. He’d travelled long enough in Africa to know that nothing was real until it happened.

We boarded the plane through a very narrow tunnel and the organization was clearly provided by the same people who’d dealt with the last helicopter off the roof of the US Embassy in Saigon. It was actual, physical fighting to get on board. At first I was a bit reticent. I was a visitor here and didn’t want to behave badly. This was just taken as a sign of weakness by the other passengers and I was soon being shoved and elbowed to the back. It was sink or swim, so I thrashed and punched my way to the plane door in an almost hysterical manner. A woman was in a big argument with a soldier who was not letting her on board. He had drawn his handgun and was pointing it at the woman’s chest but she seemed a lot less phased by this than I would have been. I was boiling hot and covered in sweat and starting to have a little panic attack. I wanted to tell JP that I didn’t want to go to Lake Tele. I wanted to go back to my hotel in Brazzaville where there was CNN and the comfort of the Internet. Locals said that to go into the ‘forest’ was like going to war: you had to be prepared for anything to happen. I’ve never properly been to war – I’ve been in one but never actively gone towards one. I was really panicking badly and couldn’t breathe. JP was looking at me and smiling and I tried to smile back, to mask my weakness. As ever, the mask worked.

The plane flew over dense, impenetrable forest for what seemed like hours. There was not a house, a hut, no sign of human life beneath us except for just occasionally a wisp of smoke escaping through the trees.

The plane landed in Impfondo, which seemed to suddenly appear out of nowhere beneath us. The landing was heavy and very fast. Both JP and I were sure that we were going to overshoot the runway and braced ourselves dramatically for impact. We survived and got off the plane into what seemed like complete wilderness. We immediately had a cigarette on the tarmac and watched as several passengers attempted to retrieve their luggage out of the cargo hold. One actually climbed into the plane’s belly and was unceremoniously hurled out by a soldier. Another was grabbed and hit hard in the back of the head with a rifle butt. We decided to wait for due process. As we smoked, hundreds of bees swarmed around us forming a thick yellow cloud. I sprayed some Deet on to my arms and legs and wished I was back home.

We tried to enter the luggage hall and had our passports taken away by a man who disappeared into the crowd. There was very little we could do about this and we both hoped that he was some kind of official. We stood by the lone, broken carousel and waited for JP’s luggage. I looked around. The room was packed with both the arrivals from our plane and the departing passengers waiting to get on it. I was the only white man in the building and felt that I was really sticking out. I could feel everyone staring at me and I buried my head in a book.

Finally JP’s bags came through and we chucked everything on a trolley and tried to head out while looking for the man with our passports. The soldier at the gate took one look at me and directed us to a police room in the far corner of the terminal, where four men lounged about in virtual darkness. There’s no electricity in Impfondo in the day and rarely any at night unless you have a generator.

The eldest of the four men stood up and shook my hand. He indicated that I should sit down in a chair opposite him. This I did while he perused my passport, which had suddenly appeared in front of him. He flicked through the pages for a while before looking at my visa.

‘Brazzaville,’ I replied. This being the only flight each week, the question seemed a touch unnecessary.

His eyes suddenly lit up. ‘A tourist? Your visa is a visa ordinaire not a visa touristique.’

I shrugged and told him that I had let the Congolese Embassy in London know what I was doing and this was the visa they had issued me with. The man smiled unpleasantly, as though talking to a thick worm.

‘Monsieur, you have a visa ordinaire but you are here as a tourist – therefore you are here illegally.’ I felt myself about to lose it. I was hot and tired and stressed and I hate bureaucracy more than anything else in the whole world. I started to argue in French and I could feel my voice rising. JP stepped in and started to explain in overly flowery French. He was charm incarnate. He gave me a glance to indicate that I should step away and I did what I was told. It was clear that these officials smelt money and were not going to let go. I sat on a chair just outside the room and watched two men scream at each other nonstop at a counter on the other side of the hall. One was trying to get a piece of luggage away from the other. The whole place was utterly chaotic. Normally I’d enjoy this sort of thing but I was really on edge. This didn’t bode well.

Back in the little room where my passport was, the four officials were now arguing with each other while JP stepped out for a cigarette with me. It was all mind-blowingly pointless and not the best welcome to the Likouala Province. Eventually, after much negotiation, another man arrived, who was – judging by his puffed-up manner and arrogant swagger – a boss of some kind. He turned out to be the regional-tourism official for the local government and he took little time to inform us that we were in big trouble.

My visa allowed me into the Congo but, for me to do any thing touristic, I should have got permission from the Tourism Ministry in Brazzaville. This we hadn’t done, and we were now in the region illegally and could be arrested.

We were marched out of the airport by this new guy whom I shall call ‘King’ as he had that air of self-importance about him.

We were bundled into the back of a pickup truck and driven into town. We stopped at a wooden shack that revealed itself to be the Centre Pour Le Departament De Tourism Du Likouala. I’m guessing that this is probably one of the least busy buildings in Africa.

King marched us into his office, which was like a sauna. An imposing photograph of Nguesso started down at us from the wall. King shouted at his secretary, who was sitting in an anteroom full of books, saying his office was a disgrace and asking why was it so untidy.

He was clearly trying to lay down the law and show that he was an important man. We nodded and looked suitably impressed. He picked up a mobile and rang his boss, the head of the prefecture, because (as he kept repeating to us like some demented mantra): ‘On a un hiérarchie ici, et il faut le respecter.’ We nodded in agreement. With his boss on the line he informed him in puffed-up terms that he had two strangers here with no papers and that they were proposing to go to Lake Tele. He told his boss that the WCS had once again broken their agreement about being purely a scientific organization. They were now organizing tourist trips. He got off the phone and told us that we were to be taken to the prefecture. We nodded and smiled like this was the best news ever but JP looked worried. For about fifteen minutes we were marched through town, down dusty tracks and back alleys. The sun was burning hot and my rucksack was starting to cut into my shoulders.

Eventually we arrived at an unpainted concrete building with a terrace running around a little garden. Off this terrace were dozens of little offices full of official-looking people. We were ushered into the secretariat, a boiling-hot room in which sat three secretaries listening to music on a mobile phone. They were singing along and totally blanking JP and me.

We sat there for about twenty minutes with nobody saying anything to us. Eventually it got too hot and we escaped to the relative cool of the terrace. Half an hour later and King finally came out of an office looking a bit flustered and being a tad more friendly. He had clearly been given the brush-off.

‘My boss is too busy to see you but he says we should go back to my office and we will do the necessary requirements . . .’

This sounded a bit more promising. We walked back down the sweltering dirt streets towards the shack with King’s assistant, Noel. King had got a lift back in a car but we didn’t mind as Noel was much friendlier. We started to talk about beer. Noel, it turned out, was a huge fan of Guinness. I pretended that I also was the world’s biggest Guinness fan and we both made vague sounds of Guinness appreciation. When we got back to the shack King was still not there and Noel took us to the bar next door, where we had locally brewed Guinness and decided that no country with oil could ever be happy.

After a couple of resuscitative pints of the black stuff we returned to the shack to find King looking very miffed at Noel for slacking on authority. We sat back down in his sauna/office and watched as he spent ages filling out two official-looking forms replete with lots of rubber stamping and copies for various in and out trays that nobody would ever read. He’d occasionally look up and ask us a question, like how long we intended to be at Lake Tele. We took educated guesses but we really had no idea whatsoever and he knew it. Eventually he brought up the subject of money. Technically, he said, we should be paying a fine of 100,000 Congolese francs each but – and here he raised himself to his full pomposity – he did not operate that way and so we would only have to pay 50,000 Congolese francs (about €80) simply for the permit that we needed to be tourists. The whole charade was total nonsense but there had been hints of overnighting in a jail and we were both immensely relieved. JP paid the money, we got a receipt and we were allowed to go on our way.

There had been no sign of the WCS people and it was now too late to attempt to take the road to Epema, as it was getting dark. We asked around and found a guesthouse called Le Rosier where we could stay the night. It was fairly clean but had no electricity or water. We threw our stuff on our beds and I lay down for a rest.

JP’s bank card had not worked in Brazzaville but he had got some money wired from Cameroon to the post office, so he headed straight off into town to try to get it. He was back pretty quickly because it turned out that the post office had closed at two in the afternoon. We were on a fairly tight schedule and this delay in Impfondo had already set us back, but JP had a plan. We could get to the WCS in Epema the following morning and set off straight away downriver. We hopped on to the back of two motorbikes ridden by local kids and found a restaurant called Tropicana right on the banks of the Oubangui River, a wide offshoot of the Congo.

As we were finishing up a man turned up at our table. He was Hermes, the driver from WCS, and he’d been looking for us all day. Hermes was with a friend who had actually been to Lake Tele. The friend told us that it was two days’ walk from the village of Boha and that the water en route was not too deep at the moment. He said that it came up to your knees at the worst parts. This still sounded totally horrendous but it was better than what I’d read that we could expect. JP told them that we wanted to leave early the following morning after he had got his money from the post office. Hermes nodded in agreement. It looked like we were back on schedule.

We sat on the grass outside the Tropicana where a makeshift screen had been set up and a very dull French soft-porn film was showing. Our surly waitress was not happy with the choice of film and started shouting at the men watching. Someone changed the channel reluctantly. Suddenly we were watching Southampton vs Tottenham. God how I loathe football . . . But JP loved it. It turned out that he had been a very promising player in his native Cameroon but his father had disapproved and forbade him to play. JP had sneaked away and kept on playing. He eventually played in two international league matches but his father then heard his name on the radio and that was that. I told him that I loved cricket and he asked me who I support: India or South Africa?

We walked slowly back to Le Rosier through the town. It was pitch-black but we could hear sounds of life all around us. Occasionally a motorbike would appear out of the darkness and roar past us. JP and I talked about the Mokèlé-mbèmbé. His personal view was that it was more of a bogeyman-type thing that was used to keep order – i.e., ‘behave or the Mokèlé-mbèmbé will get you’. I looked disappointed at this and he smiled at me.

From somewhere nearby came the sound of a group of girls singing together. It was either a church or maybe a party. It was powerfully beautiful.

Back at Le Rosier I slept fitfully as it was hot and the bed was almost deliberately uncomfortable, but I was well aware that tomorrow this would feel like a Mandarin Oriental. At least there were no mosquitos. The rainy season had finished about two months before but I was still on hyper-alert, having been given a quick run-down of all the things I could catch from those buzzing plague-ridden bastards.

JP woke me up very early the next morning and we headed off through town for breakfast. I marvelled at how rapidly one adapted to places. Only yesterday we were under arrest and being marched through these streets by King and I’d wanted nothing more than to go home. This morning, however, I didn’t want to go anywhere except off on our adventure.

JP and I shared a generous bowl of ndongo (chillies) with our breakfast omelette. He told me that I was the first Westerner he had ever travelled with who could pronounce words like ndongo and Impfondo correctly. I was incredibly chuffed.

After breakfast we sauntered down along the river towards what passed for a commercial district. I tried to walk slowly as it was already very hot. After ten minutes we got to the post office, which also served as the town bank and MoneyGram office. JP had been told that it opened at seven-thirty in the morning and he admitted that before I was awake he had already been and found it closed.

It was now nine-thirty and the place was finally open. We entered to find a lone woman sitting in a darkened room at a dirty wooden desk. JP told her that his assistant in Cameroon had paid in money at her end and he was here to pick it up. We needed the money to pay for boats and porters. No money, no trip. The woman gave JP a form to fill out. He completed it carefully and handed it back to her. She looked at it long and hard. JP was asking for 750,000 Congolese francs (about €1,100). After a long silence she looked up.

JP was annoyed by this and it showed. ‘You are a bank. How can the moneyman not be here? This is your business!’

‘Two, maybe three hours,’ she replied in a frustratingly noncommittal fashion.

JP turned on the charm and told her that we were on a very tight schedule as we had to get to Epema in time to catch a boat to Boha before sunset. She looked spectacularly uninterested.

We went and got a coffee and kicked our heels for an hour and a half. Then, unable to wait any longer, we went back. To our delight there was now a man in a passably smart shirt and trousers sitting next to the woman. JP asked him if he was the moneyman. He nodded gravely and confirmed that he was indeed.

JP produced the form that he’d filled in earlier and gave it to Moneyman. Moneyman looked long and hard at the form – far longer and harder than the woman had done before. Again there was total silence. Finally, after what seemed like about five minutes, Moneyman looked up at us.

JP looked shattered. ‘No money? But . . . You are a bank . . . How can you have no money?’

Moneyman shrugged his shoulders. ‘Yes, we are a bank with no money. We had to pay the Americans yesterday. They have very big salary so we have no money.’

We asked him what Americans he was talking about. He told us that there was a UNHCR (UN Refugee Agency) camp just outside of town. We hadn’t seen any foreigners and were completely unaware of their existence. JP reiterated to Moneyman just how important it was that we got some money. We had only limited time to get to the lake because . . . Moneyman shrugged and JP stopped his explanation. It was no use. As we started to leave there was a hint of guilt from Moneyman. He told JP that he could ask around the market and see if he could borrow the money. I looked out of the door at the motley collection of stalls selling little plastic bottles of petrol and assorted bicycle parts and thought this was most unlikely.

Nevertheless, Moneyman said he would ring us if he was successful or if any money came in. We returned to the guesthouse to wait but already it looked like we wouldn’t make Epema that night, let alone Boha. There had been no sign of Hermes and his friend from the WCS. They had been supposed to pick us up at nine but there was no answer from their mobile. Time was clearly a very relative concept in the Congo . . .

As we sat waiting outside our rooms at Le Rosier, I realized that I was secretly quite pleased with the delay. It meant one day less in the swamps, one day less of hardship. This is quite a common sensation for me. Whenever I was driving around looking to do a hidden camera stunt I was always relieved when something went wrong with the set-up and we had to delay things. Once I was actually in the thick of it I loved it, but the pre-tension was unbearable.

Finally JP’s phone rang at around one p.m. It was Moneyman and he had managed to scrape together 350,000 francs. Someone had come in and paid some money over to someone in Brazzaville. It was not enough but JP hoped he could pay WCS by wire transfer and use the cash for porters and negotiations with the village chief. However, the problem was that we still couldn’t get hold of the WCS driver to take us to Epema. It was incredible enough that there was mobile phone reception in Impfondo, but this was all part of the process of ‘municipalization’ that the government had implemented in the last six years in an attempt to ensure that all towns in Congo have at least one tarmac road and better public buildings. At the time of my visit the road from here to Epema had been built only four years previously, with Brazilian money, and was the only tarmacked road in the entire province.

JP went off to get the money from Moneyman before Moneyman lost his money. I started reading King Leopold’s Ghost by Adam Hochschild. Finally at around five p.m., the WCS people arrived at our guesthouse. They seemed entirely unconcerned with being almost a day late. Hermes had brought his boss, a Rwandan and a man called Sylvestre who had been to Lake Tele four times. He told us it would be a two-night camp from Boha, with us arriving at the lake on the third morning. Today was Friday and we had to be back in Impfondo by Thursday morning to get the plane to Brazzaville. This left us with very little time to play with.

We went through the finances of the trip. Sylvestre wanted 5,000 Congolese francs per porter per day. He was going to come with us and his fee was 10,000 Congolese francs a day. He estimated we needed to pay around 100,000 Congolese francs each to the chief and that we would need 80,000 for food and supplies.

We went to the market for the supplies. We needed two bottles of water per person per day, tinned tuna, hamburger buns, pasta, rice, tomato sauce and some Babybel cheese. On our way back from the market we spotted that a large boat had docked in town and we went down to have a look. On deck was a white man: a rotund Frenchman who seemed rather surprised to see us.

The boat turned out to be a bi-national cooperation between the Central African Republic and the Congo. He had been working on it for seven years and knew the rivers very well. They would trawl up and down the river from Bangui to Brazzaville putting in buoys and arrows to show boats where to navigate. The Frenchman told us that it was a never-ending task, as the power of the river shifted the sand constantly.

I asked him if he had ever seen the Mokèlé-mbèmbé. He looked puzzled. He didn’t know what it was. A Congolese crew member sitting on an oil drum and having his head shaved with a rusty-looking razor looked up.

He got very animated and I feared for his scalp. He told us about a place on the river charts where everyone said there was a Mokèlé-mbèmbé. He said that all Congolese avoided this bend because of the beast. Another deckhand spoke up. He claimed that planes didn’t fly over the Lake Tele area because the beast had a magnetic power that dragged them into some sort of aerial whirlpool before crashing them. While I was happy that they knew about my quarry, I hate stories like theirs. These were so ludicrous they made the reality of a Mokèlé-mbèmbé seem unlikely.

The Frenchman laughed and promised us that he’d keep an eye out. It was another four days downstream to Brazzaville from Impfondo.

Bangui to Brazzaville on a boat down the Congo – now that was an adventure. But sadly it would have to be for another time. We said goodbye to the Frenchman and scrambled back up the bank past a mother washing four little naked kids on top of an upturned dugout canoe.

Once back at the guesthouse we were finally ready to go. The Rwandan was driving a big white Toyota Land Cruiser, the vehicle of choice for charities and relief agencies worldwide. We squeezed into the back and set off out of Impfondo along the road that the Brazilians built. Now, I know little of the Brazilians’ road-building capability, but let’s just say that I hoped this wasn’t the jewel in their crown. The road was essentially a series of joined-up potholes with the forest attempting to reclaim the route from all sides. We had to go at a snail’s pace to avoid breaking the Land Cruiser’s suspension.

Sylvestre was sitting opposite me in the back and I asked him if he believed in the Mokèlé-mbèmbé. He said that he hadn’t seen one but he knew of many people who had. This seemed to be a stock answer round here and I hoped that I might get some first-hand experiences from someone in Boha.

It took about two hours to get to Epema and most of that time was spent listening to the government conservateur of the park having a screaming argument with the others about the Bible.

His French was very heavily accented and I couldn’t follow everything but the main thrust seemed to be about vegetarianism and how Daniel, because he was a vegetarian, was not eaten in the den of lions as he didn’t smell of meat. At one juncture they asked me what I thought and I admitted that I had no idea but I had heard that the Mokèlé-mbèmbé was vegetarian. They all nodded and said that, yes, it was a herbivore.

‘I hope so,’ I said, mock-nervously, and everyone roared with laughter. Outside the vehicle was total darkness. Occasionally I could spot the glimmer of a fire outside a hut through the thick trees. Every so often the headlights would catch the surprised face of someone walking in the pitch-black along the road. Where were they going? Come to think of it, where were we going?

We rolled into the WCS compound in Epema, where JP and I were given a very basic room with two beds. The sounds of the forest were all round us.

Sylvestre promised that he would wake us at five in the morning and that we’d immediately set off in a boat for Boha. We woke up at seven. Nobody had woken us up and we stumbled out and tried to get things going. Predictably everyone was still asleep and it took another good couple of hours before we were ready to get on the boat. I glanced at my iPhone and was astonished to find that I had reception.

I once did a show for Radio 4 about how extraordinary the mobile-phone boom has been for Africa. It’s allowed fishermen and traders to check where they can get the best price for their goods as well as keeping migrant families in touch with each other. In the days before mobiles this was a major problem and would have made our already tricky trip almost impossible to coordinate. Now, though, men in day-glo orange vests patrolled the streets of every town we’d been in trying to sell people ‘credit’. All the government had needed to do was erect some mobile-phone masts and the money started to roll in. Every African ‘rich’ kid wanted to get in on this boom business.

I’m getting on the boat and heading off into the unknown – laters xxx

Finally, Sylvestre, JP, the boat driver and I (plus all our supplies) set off down the misty river of Likouala aux Herbes in search of dinosaurs.

The river was bordered on both sides by a swampy savannah and you could see the high-water marks from the rainy season. Kingfishers swooped and dived all around us. On the banks perched large herons and the occasional vulture. Beneath us were crocodiles, hippos and possibly a Mokèlé-mbèmbé or two. I felt very vulnerable in our tiny boat.

Every so often we would pass fishermen standing tall on their long, thin dugout canoes, the rim just inches above the water level. As seems to be the international boat convention, everyone waved at each other frantically. Admittedly this was a friendly thing to do but why does this just happen in boats? Why don’t we all wave at each other every time we see someone in another car? I made a mental note to start doing this when I got back home.

The sun rose higher in the sky as we ploughed on down the river at a steady but unexciting pace. The river was still and trees were reflected in the water as though in fantastical mirrors. After a time my eyes started playing tricks on me and tree stumps became men and logs metamorphosed into giant crocodiles. The herons all sat ramrod-straight on dead branches, seemingly contemplating life as they knew it. They appeared Zen-like in comparison to the hyperactive kingfishers, swooping up and down looking for the slightest hint of a fish. I felt incredibly peaceful: to travel is better than to arrive – and I was slightly dreading the arrival. It was the calm before the storm.

Our boatman waved at a man sitting on a log by the riverside. The man beckoned us over and we turned sharply towards the shore and beached the boat. The man lived in a tiny hut with his wife and two little kids. He would catch fish and then smoke them on a wooden trestle table that hung over a slow-burning fire. Every month he would make the trip to Epema in his pirogue to sell the smoked blackened fish. We bought 2,000 Congolese francs’ worth, which JP chucked into the front of the boat where their blackened, dead eyes stared balefully at me as we proceeded on down the river.

An hour or so later we rounded another corner and came across two men in their pirogues. One, who bore an extraordinary resemblance to Snoop Dogg, was holding an antique rifle and had a large dead python wrapped round it. The other, whom I shall call Bulldog, was a more physically intimidating-looking man and held a long, nasty-looking spear.

‘We are in luck,’ said Sylvestre quietly. ‘These are the very men we need to talk to . . .’

It turned out that Snoop Dogg, who looked very young for the role, was the village chief, whereas Bulldog was a tribal elder (although not that elderly).

Snoop Dogg seemed to be in a good mood on account of his python kill, whereas Bulldog was friendly enough but a little distant. Aware of the constraints of time, we offered to tow them back to the village. They agreed and each sat in their dugouts holding on to the sides of our boat as we became a kind of DIY catamaran.

After ten minutes we turned right off the main river and down a side tributary. To our left we began to see the village half-hidden in the trees. Our arrival sparked much interest and most of the village rushed down to the river to watch us disembark. We climbed a steep mudbank and entered the village right by the chief’s hut. He went inside and produced a couple of low, home-made chairs that he beckoned us to sit in. The chief, it quickly became apparent, was also the government’s man in the village. He told us that he was responsible for any white man in his area and he wanted to be sure we had no ulterior motive for visiting the lake. He seemed quite smart, rather charismatic and young – maybe thirty? We told him why we were there and that we were on a very tight timeframe and needed to leave as soon as possible on that day to have a chance of reaching the lake and returning on time. He nodded and said it was possible to organize porters and do the trip, but that he needed his ‘chief’s fee’ for this to happen. We discussed the fee and it was within our budget so we handed the money over and we shook hands. This had really been too easy. It looked like the travel gods were on our side. The chief stood up and said that he’d start thinking about who would go with us. While he did this, he said, we should go and greet the village elders and get their blessing for the trip. This was all going swimmingly and we set off through some quite thick forest to where the elders were assembling.

On the way I asked Sylvestre about Boha and how it was that the people here looked after Lake Tele since they were so far away from it. He said that the tribe used to live around the lake but they, like everyone else, were forced to move to the riverside so that the colonial authorities could keep an eye on them. So the tribe had moved to Boha but they were still custodians of Lake Tele and anybody going to the lake had to go through them.

Sylvestre pushed his way through a thick bush and we found ourselves in another little village. It was all part of Boha but this area had definitely been built with a view to keeping a distance from the rest. This was where the elders lived and we could see a couple of their wives pounding manioc, their staple food, in the doorways of their huts. We rounded a corner and walked into a central area that was clearly used for meetings as there were two long low benches on each side. It was indicated to us that we should sit on one of these benches, and this we did. I looked around us. Directly opposite us were the elders. There were about five of them, including Bulldog, and they were all holding the rather nasty-looking spears we’d seen earlier. A couple also had machetes hanging by their waists. In the middle of them was a man who seemed to be a lot older than the elders. He looked fairly ravaged by life. His eyes were bloodshot and slightly crazed-looking. He wore a tattered old combat jacket that was open to the waist. He stared at us with a look that didn’t immediately scream ‘Welcome to the jungle.’

To our left sat about fifty men from the village all settling down as though about to watch a good match . . . Which they probably were.

JP, though normally pretty cool about things, was visibly quite unsettled by the amount of weapons on show.

‘Will this take long?’ I whispered to him. We needed to get cracking as soon as possible if we wanted to get any distance towards the lake before we had to camp.

A young, very tall man stood up. He was holding a wicker brush and another long spear. Sylvestre explained that he was the porte-parole. He would stand in between the elders and us and relay any messages. We were not to speak to the elders directly. Everything had to be directed through Porte-Parole. I couldn’t believe this system at first but actually it wasn’t that dissimilar to MPs directing their remarks to the Speaker in the House of Commons. Supposedly it helped to avoid full-on arguments.

Proceedings started with Sylvestre, speaking through Porte-Parole, greeting the elders and telling them that we had come a long way to go and see the lake and wanted their blessing for the trip.

Porte-Parole relayed this to the elders, who all nodded and grunted in what looked like a fairly amenable manner.

Then the crazed-looking man in the combat jacket, whom I shall call Crazy (because, frankly, he was), started to speak. I say speak; it was more a series of shouts and gesticulations. Porte-Parole listened and, after a little pause, informed us that Crazy was happy that we’d come to see them and that they would give us their blessing if we paid them the sum of 250,000 Congolese francs. This was totally out of the question. Firstly, we had just paid Snoop Dogg for the privilege of making the trip to the lake and we were not about to pay twice. More importantly, we just didn’t have anything near that sort of money.

Sylvestre stood up and thanked the elders for their kind offer but hinted that this was a little more than we had been expecting to pay. Both JP and I hissed at him that it was a lot more than we had expected to pay, since we had already paid. Porte-Parole took this all on board and passed it on to the elders.

The elders went . . . apeshit. Crazy started waving a machete at us in a distinctly unfriendly manner and Bulldog was shouting at the other elders and pointing at us.

I asked Sylvestre what was going on. Why were we negotiating to pay more money that we didn’t have when we’d already paid the chief? Sylvestre explained that Snoop Dogg was chief but he was the government’s man, whereas traditional tribal authority rested with Crazy and the Elders (good band name). They had no interest in what we’d negotiated with Snoop. As far as they were concerned he was an irrelevance. They were the top dogs and we needed to pay them for access. I asked Sylvestre why he had not mentioned this before and he shrugged in that infuriating African way. I could see JP subtly looking at how much money we had left and making a quick calculation of what we could afford. I already knew that it was not much and the clock was still ticking.

JP took the floor and did his flowery-French thing. He dropped the fact that he was a prince back home and said he knew how these things worked and didn’t want to offend. He then went on to explain that we’d had a lot of unexpected problems on the trip and this had left us short of both time and money. He started off on quite a long allegory about a hunter going out into the forest and chopping down trees that were too big and took too long to chop down, and he didn’t have enough provisions so he went home without the trees because it was dangerous in the forest at night. I was just about following this and hoped that Porte-Parole could convey it in full. Porte-Parole did his best but, when the gist became clear that we were not going to pay anything near the amount they wanted, Bulldog exploded. He ignored Porte-Parole and started screaming at JP and me while waving his spear about.

‘If you don’t like the price then go back to where you came from. We have no need for you here. Anyway, the gros bébé will never make it to the lake – he will die on the journey . . .’

It took me a moment to work out that the gros bébé in question was me. It took me a little longer to confirm that he was not threatening to kill me but was sure that the forest would . . .

I looked at JP and he looked at me with a sense of foreboding. We agreed to leave the clearing and discuss what we should do next. Curiously Snoop Dogg had now turned up and insisted on joining our discussions. I was already annoyed with him for taking a payment that gave us nothing, but joining our secret negotiations was a bit much. JP and I talked, and worked out that 50,000 Congolese francs was the best we could do and they would have to take it or leave it. Snoop Dogg nodded at this offer and said they would listen to it. I asked him whether he had at least organized the porters so that, should this sort itself out, we could leave immediately. He looked at me vacantly and I guessed the answer.

We returned to the clearing and I told Porte-Parole what we could offer. Bulldog would now not even look at us and Crazy had gone nuts again. He shouted and screamed for about five minutes until even the other elders looked a little disturbed by whatever it was he was shouting. Porte-Parole looked a little embarrassed and gave us what was clearly an edited version, saying, in effect, that we should get back on our boat and leave, pronto.

JP stood up again and laid on some more flowery prose. This was becoming like a weird poetry slam. He laid on the flattery very thick and basically said that we were now in a situation where they either got something or nothing. A couple of the elders seemed to accept this logic but Crazy and Bulldog were now competing with each other to shout at us. Finally JP played his last card. He offered 80,000 Congolese francs and said that this was the final offer: they should either take it or leave it – but, whatever, if we didn’t leave immediately there would be no point in any of this. Porte-Parole spoke and I sort of felt that he pleaded our case a little as Crazy and Bulldog calmed down a little. Porte-Parole told me they were going elsewhere to discuss things. All the elders got up and disappeared into a nearby hut. Porte-Parole stood outside a little awkwardly as a guard.

They spent fifteen minutes in there and then emerged to return to their seats. Crazy stood up and spoke quite pompously for about eight minutes. Porte-Parole listened intently and then turned to us and said, ‘They accept.’ He smiled at me.

It had taken about two hours but we finally had a decision and we were good to go. We looked over at Snoop Dogg and asked him how long it would be before we could get going. Snoop looked at his watch, except he didn’t have one, and then said, ‘Soon, but first we celebrate.’

Porte-Parole had slipped into a hut and was now coming out with about five bottles of something very dirty and visibly home-made.

‘Oh no . . . Jungle gin,’ said JP ‘We are all supposed to drink to the agreement.’ He grimaced.

Now, having done a whole TV series for which I went round the world drinking revolting local alcohol, I do have some form in this area and I doubted anything would be more lethal than the 90-per-cent-proof Samagon that I drank outside St Petersburg. I was wrong.

Snoop poured me some jungle gin and I sipped it. It was quite horrific and I felt dizzy. JP pretended to drink but didn’t swallow anything. The rest of the elders weren’t so reticent and started knocking it back like it was Happy Hour at Hooters. More worryingly, so did the whole village. We tried to leave the circle but this was considered bad form so we had to stay and watch as everyone got blind drunk and started stumbling over spears and fighting and generally behaving like they were at a lock-in at the village pub. After a desperate hour of this, during which we pretended to drink along, we managed to slip away back to the main village to get ready.

We were done in ten minutes and we then stood around outside Snoop’s hut looking hopeful. Our boat driver wanted to know if he could leave, as he wanted to get back to Epema before nightfall. I realized that once he’d gone we would have no way of contacting him until he came back to pick us up in five days’ time. There had been no mobile reception since Epema and I was very wary of letting him go until we knew what was happening. I asked him to wait. He wasn’t happy about this but I had a feeling that things were going to go weird.

I sat down with JP and Sylvestre and tried to make a plan. The big problem seemed to be that nobody was prepared to be specific about how long it took to get to the lake. Some people were saying two days while others were saying three. If it was three days each way, then we wouldn’t have enough time to get back to catch the plane. I needed someone to give us a definite answer so we could make a decision.

Snoop Dogg turned up with three men whom he informed us were our porters. They were all totally drunk and stumbling about. It was becoming very clear that whatever happened nobody was going anywhere today. I needed to know if it was possible to do the trip if we left the following morning but Snoop wouldn’t give me an answer. Finally I’d had enough and sat Sylvestre down in front of me. He’d been to the lake three times and was our best bet.

Up until now he had been hinting strongly that it was possible in two days but we had never really pinned him down about it. He looked shifty and started to talk about how we’d need some manioc for the porters . . .

I ignored him and asked him again: ‘Sylvestre, can we make the lake in two days’ walk? Yes or no?’

Sylvestre’s eyes flickered around in panic looking for a distraction but there was none. He looked at me, and his face dropped.

We were fucked. JP and I both knew that this news, plus the fact that we couldn’t leave today because the whole village was blind drunk, meant we were not going to be able to get to Lake Tele.

JP and I went for a walk around the village to discuss our next move. I told him that I was there to get information about the Mokèlé-mbèmbé. We had to accept that we couldn’t go to the lake but, since there was nobody living around the lake, I could still get some answers from the villagers . . . If they sobered up.

JP looked at me with worried eyes. He knew I was right – that we couldn’t make the lake – but he’d promised to get me there and I could see he felt bad. I told him not to worry: shit happens. The important thing was to see what I could get out of the villagers about the Mokèlé-mbèmbé. JP agreed and we decided that, whatever happened, we would spend the night in the village and take it from there.

We returned to Snoop Dogg’s hut, where a quite drunken crowd had now gathered and were hanging about. JP announced to them that the trip we had spent three hours negotiating was now off. There was an immediate air of great tension and too many machetes and spears suddenly appeared for my liking. Snoop went mental and asked us if we were mad – which was a fair question. JP tried to calm people down by explaining how our series of delays – first with King, then Moneyman, then the WCS, and now the drunken initiation – had left us with no time left to do the journey. He then attempted to explain the concept of Western time to the villagers, who looked absolutely bemused by the whole idea.

‘We wanted to go today, early this morning, not today, this evening. We have no time left to go to the lake and back,’ said JP.

‘Because we have only five days in total for the journey now . . .’ said JP desperately.

JP calmly explained again that we would not be going to the lake but that we wanted to talk to them about the Mokèlé-mbèmbé. Snoop Dogg now realized that we were serious and seemed to sober up quite quickly. JP and I sat down and opened a couple of beers while the Snoop discussed this peculiar new state of affairs with the drunk porters. We watched them all try to make sense out of this group who had suddenly arrived out of the blue one morning, organized porters, spent a spirited three hours negotiating forest access with the tribal elders, paid the money, and then cancelled the whole trip. It was clearly something that they would talk about for years to come but, for now, most of them were still a little ripped to the tits on jungle gin to really think about it.

An hour passed during which we had a bit of lunch from our plentiful supplies. Then a stressed-looking Porte-Parole appeared to inform us that the elders wanted to see us again. We groaned inwardly but trooped over through the forest to their part of the village. As before, the elders were sat around waiting for us. Bulldog, however, was not there – but Crazy was and he was waving an empty bottle of jungle gin. Crazy launched straight into Porte-Parole for about four minutes. Porte-Parole then told us that Crazy was confused by this extraordinary situation and that he was worried that they had taken money and not done the job. This was technically illegal and they feared that the police would come.

This was a lot more rational than I’d anticipated and, through Porte-Parole, we assured Crazy that this would not be the case. We told him we would not complain and that circumstances had just conspired against us to make us run out of time. He could, of course, simply return the money should he so wish . . .

JP launched into some flowery French again. He told Crazy that sometimes travel plans go wrong. Maybe God himself did not want us to make it to the lake and we would have been struck down by giant pythons?

Crazy nodded and confirmed that January and February were the very worst time for pythons.

JP was now on a roll: ‘Maybe one day the elders have gone into the forest to cut down a tree. They cut a little one down and carry on. Then they find a medium-sized tree, cut it down and carry on. Finally they come across a huge tree and start to try to cut it down but it takes ages and they there all night and their food and water run out and they are are in trouble . . .’

Crazy nodded at this story which appeared to be the same one that JP had told earlier. Crazy said that he understood the point – although he personally did not cut down trees, as he was a tribal elder.

The elders then asked for a final promise that there was no problem between us and we assured them that all was fine. They could even keep the money: all we asked was that we could talk to them about the Mokèlé-mbèmbé.

Crazy agreed immediately and told us that the village was at our disposition. He went further: he said that he would personally get a group of elders together at five p.m. and they would tell us everything they knew about the Mokèlé-mbèmbé. He warned me that I would run out of pages in my notebook as he personally had so much to say on the subject. Porte-Parole told him that I had a magic notebook that used electronics and had no limits. Everyone nodded. Porte-Parole slammed his spear into the earth: the meeting was over.

We returned towards the main part of the village where tents were to be set up near Snoop’s hut for us to sleep in that night.

‘I have to talk in pictures here – like with the tree story – it is the way an African speaks and it can be very long-winded.’

We laughed and followed Porte-Parole along the open scrub area that linked the parts of the village. We walked past a cool, shady spot under a tree where they were making palm roofs. Five kids ran out of a house and started shouting ‘Hello’ at us.

‘My kids,’ smiled Porte Parole. ‘Petits Porte-Paroles.’ We all laughed.

Once back at Snoop’s hut we sat down at a table that Snoop had put under the cool shade of the tamarind trees. Snoop was looking concerned again and asked if he could speak to us. We nodded wearily.

He consulted a little child’s maths exercise book in which he had written down our names.

‘Mr Dominic Joly et Mr Jean-Pierre Samon . . . I will not talk for long . . .’ he said, before talking for a very long time. The gist of it was that the village of Boha did not receive many tourists (sixteen in the last thirty years) and he wanted us to help him start a tourist industry there. JP and I nodded enthusiastically while looking at each other and thinking that this was probably not the best time to have this discussion. After a good twenty minutes of non-stop fast French patois it was as though we had been hit with a verbal machine gun.

‘I am not the sort of person to talk for an hour . . .’ he said, looking like he was winding himself up for another round. I told him that I had to talk to villagers about the Mokèlé-mbèmbé and slipped away, leaving poor JP to round two.

I talked to a man in a bright-yellow shirt emblazoned with photographs of the president. I had not seen this man before and he appeared to be the most sober man in the village. His name was Mandzamoyi Marcelin and he said he was the secretary of the village, whatever that might be.

He told me that Lake Tele was originally a little pool that their tribe, the Bakolou, would all hunt and fish around. Then the lake started to grow in size because the Mokèlé-mbèmbé would dig channels to allow themselves in and out. These channels obviously allowed more water into the lake and it got bigger and bigger. The Bakolou were unhappy with the Mokèlé-mbèmbé coming into the lake because they ate all the fish. So, in the time of Marcelin’s great-grandfather, the tribe built nine wooden dams in an attempt to stop the Mokèlé-mbèmbé.

They soon spotted a Mokèlé-mbèmbé trying to come in and it managed to break through eight dams before the tribe managed to spear it to death at the ninth. People dived in and cut bits of the flesh off the huge body. The whole village celebrated the kill by cooking a great feast with the Mokèlé-mbèmbé meat. Unfortunately, everyone who ate the meat died. Marcelin said that it killed more than a hundred people. He said the channels were still visible around the lake.

JP came over as the story was finishing and I filled him in on the rest. I asked him why they wouldn’t have dragged the creature out of the water on to land. He said that this was a very Western attitude. If an elephant was killed in the forest people would come with knives and cut off the flesh to take back home to cook.

Sylvestre suddenly piped up. He had been very quiet since the whole cancellation debacle. He said that on his first trip to Lake Tele he had brought a man from Congolese TV. They had got to the lake and had just made camp when they spotted a huge shape in the middle of the lake. He said the Congolese man had filmed it and the footage was often shown on local TV. I thought this sudden admission to be a little odd, since I’d already asked him if he had seen the Mokèlé-mbèmbé and he’d said no. I wondered whether he was now trying to get back into our good books. (I have since searched for this footage online but have found nothing.)

At around five p.m. Snoop Dogg asked us to sit down at his table. Our boat guy had zoomed off to get some beer. Forty minutes later, he returned with a carton of Congolese red wine made in Pointe-Noire called, rather confusingly, Baron of Madrid. It was the single most revolting thing I have ever drunk – and I’ve had Irn-Bru.

Crazy limped his way over and sat down. He looked angry, but then he always looked angry. He spotted the wine and announced that it was a woman’s drink. He then poured himself a large glass and downed it. Snoop launched into a long introduction as to why Crazy was the man to tell us about the Mokèlé-mbèmbé. Crazy had another large glass of wine and looked out towards the river disinterestedly.

When Snoop finished, Crazy started speaking. He spoke fast with loads of gesticulations and I got quite excited, feeling sure he was telling of some epic encounter with the Mokèlé-mbèmbé. When he eventually drew breath I looked expectantly at Sylvestre for a translation.

It turned out that Crazy was very annoyed that he had invited us to the elder’s area and was then told that he must come to Snoop’s hut.

‘Lui, c’est l’état!’ he screamed in French in case I hadn’t understood his beef.

Crazy announced that he would not say a single word unless we came over to his area. Snoop laughed, obviously quite enjoying Crazy’s discomfort. He said that it would soon be dark and that he did not go over to the elders’ area in the dark because it was via a forest path and he worried about his security at night. Crazy shouted back at Snoop that us being at Snoop’s table was an insult to the elders. Snoop told him to leave if he didn’t like it, but we were his guests. Crazy crossed his arms in an overly dramatic gesture and sat sulking.

Nobody was going to give in. Then a man in another vivid-yellow Nguesso shirt stepped in and, in perfect French, explained that this had become a fight between the state and ‘tradition’.

He looked at me and said: ‘Get in your boat and leave. Your mission has failed and you are causing a fight between the chief and the elder.’

Crazy stood up and hurled abuse at Snoop before storming off with Porte-Parole. We all got up and followed him, including a very reluctant Snoop. Rather than walk the five minutes it took to get to Crazy’s area, we all trooped down to the river-bank – where our boat guy was ordered to take everyone about 300 yards upriver, where we disembarked and walked into Crazy’s clearing. The whole thing was getting ridiculous but we were now at least in the correct place and were going to get some great Mokèlé-mbèmbé stories.

Crazy sat down in his favourite place under a tree and grabbed a spear for effect. He started by admitting that he had never actually made it to Tele himself because of his bad foot (and attitude). He said that we had gone about the search for the Mokèlé-mbèmbé in the wrong way. We had come in a hurry and wanted to leave immediately. The correct way was to come and spend three four nights (the very thought!) in the village and then set off on our trip with their blessing.

At this juncture Snoop interrupted and shouted at Crazy, saying that he was not setting the story up properly. Crazy ignored Snoop and carried on talking.

‘In the old days the Badzama, who lived by the lake, would put their manioc in the water but every day it disappeared and they couldn’t work out why. They accused another tribe . . .’

At this point an elder sitting next to Crazy tapped him on the shoulder and pointed to the sky. It was nearly dark and he reminded Crazy that tradition dictated that they should stop telling stories at this time. This was a full ten minutes after we had finally begun. I started to wonder whether I was the victim of Congolese Candid Camera. You couldn’t make this farce up. The elders disappeared into a hut for some more jungle gin and we were left to troop back through the forest with a nervous Snoop.

I now just wanted to go to bed. I’d had enough of Boha politics. We were told that we could return for more stories the following day but both JP and I were reaching the end of our tether. The boat guy had set up our tents while we had been away. One was badly broken but the other one was OK save for a large hole in the roof. We ate a sullen meal with Snoop. His wife provided some smoked river fish with rice with peanuts. There was also a bowl of the local staple food, cassava. It’s very easy to grow but has little nutritional value. The leaves are edible and known as saka-saka but it’s the tubers on the roots that feed the Congo. First they’re soaked, then cut up and dried until they’re white and brittle and then they’re pounded into flour by the women and made into foo-foo, the bland dumplings on the table in front of us. It is extraordinary how little the Congolese grow for themselves. As we came down the Likouala aux Herbes JP had been marvelling at how perfect the swampy flatlands are for growing rice.

Snoop started ranting again about Crazy but we’d had enough and called it a night. We got into our tents. It had got seriously cold and I had no warm clothes and no cover. I lay on a mat and stared at the stars through the hole in the roof. I could hear something slithering around just on the other side of the canvas. I became convinced that it was a python and stayed rigid in the middle of my mat for about an hour as whatever it was slithered all around the tent. Unable to sleep, I used my head torch to read the part in Redmond O’Hanlon’s book about when he visited Boha. This was a big mistake. There’s a particular passage where O’Hanlon asks his friend where they should pitch their tents. His friend replies that only a crazy man would camp in Boha. He insists that they sleep in a hut with someone guarding the door.

‘I’m not going to be axed through the canvas in the night . . .’ says the friend.

I started to imagine a spear suddenly slamming through the thin canvas into my sides. I wondered what it would feel like. Would it kill me immediately or would I go slowly, groaning, my lifeblood draining away into the sand?

As it so happened, I was neither speared to death nor bitten by snakes in the night but I was woken by the sound of terrible, terrible singing very close to me. It was worse than my mother-in-law on a road trip. (She is a wonderful woman who loves to sing but nature has blessed her with the voice of a tone-deaf hobo. It’s a cruel fate – like adoring animals but finding out that you’re allergic to them.) And, like my mother-in-law, the singer here was not going to stop.

I got up and clambered out of the tent. It was about five in the morning and the sun had just risen. I strolled down to the riverbank where villagers were already setting off for dawn fishing trips on their pirogues. A thin mist hung low over the water. Birds sang lustily and, for a moment, Boha was almost a pleasant place. I climbed up from the riverbank and walked down the dusty main drag. On a whim I turned left near Porte-Parole’s hut and followed a little track. To my astonishment and delight, the first hut I came to had the words ‘Boha – Pilote – Dinosaur’ daubed on the wall in fading white paint. I bumped into Porte-Parole on the way back and asked him about it. He said that the owner of the hut had done it about thirty years ago, when the first interest in the Mokèlé-mbèmbé had surfaced. He’d hoped that there would be a flood of visitors he could guide to the lake.

I returned to the tents to find Crazy and Snoop standing outside Snoop’s hut and having a furious shouting match. It was seemingly never-ending, like being stuck in a nightmare loony council meeting. JP was up and we went for a little walk and decided that things were getting a little out of hand and we should probably beat a retreat back to Epema. Bulldog had turned up again and was looking like thunder at us.

We returned and interrupted Crazy and Snoop to let them know that we were leaving. They immediately stopped fighting and Snoop produced a bottle of jungle gin and announced that, before we left, we must drink to celebrate. If I was honest, it was perhaps not the ideal breakfast drink and it burned my throat quite badly.

As we sat, Bulldog started accusing us of all sorts of things and got quite nasty. JP whispered that we needed to get on the boat and fast. Suddenly there was a commotion beyond Snoop’s hut. A man appeared brandishing a machete. He was bare-chested and had cut himself all over his chest and arms and was approaching us fast and didn’t look friendly. Blood was pouring from his wounds and it looked like a scene from hell. I recognized the man as one of the porters assigned to us the previous day. Had we left yesterday we would be in the middle of the forest with this man going crazy. It didn’t bear thinking about.

He had an insane look in his eyes and they were focused right on me. Fortunately for me, two villagers grabbed him and there was quite a tussle with the man flailing away with his machete. He was eventually subdued and tied to a tree with rope.

We didn’t wait any longer. JP and I headed for the boat with the entire village following us, shouting and screaming at each other and at us. We didn’t hang about. Our boat guy was already in the boat with Sylvestre and JP shouted to him to turn on the engine, which he did. We hopped on and shouted ‘Go!’ to him. He needed no further urging: he’d been looking very uncomfortable throughout our stay. We pushed off and were soon free of the reeds and in deeper water. Back on the shore the crowd had got into a huge argument and were screaming at each other again. The whole thing was more Asterix than Tintin. As we left the reedy channel and joined the main river we all breathed a huge sigh of relief.

On the way upriver towards Epema we stopped at the village of Mohounda to get some more petrol for the boat. Despite the fact that a young thirty-five-year-old man had died of a heart attack in the night, they were very welcoming and petrol was provided and we were soon on our way. As we made our way upriver there were a lot of pirogues on their way down. Many were full and precarious with seven, eight, nine people in them.

They are all going for the funeral in Mohounda,’ said Sylvestre. I asked him how long the ceremony took.

Three days and three nights of dancing and then they bury the body and everyone goes home.’

I was astonished at how quickly the ‘grapevine’ had informed everyone, all the way up to Epema, about the death.

We finally got back to the WCS camp and went to see the Rwandan boss. He said that he’d known that there was a problem when the boat hadn’t come back. He didn’t seem at all surprised. Carefully ignoring his part in our delay, he started slagging off the villagers – saying that if they behaved like this they would lose their rights to control access to the lake and that he would find another way in. He then told us that, six years previously, four Americans went to the village but refused to pay the huge sum they were asking and came back. It was nice of him to tell us all this now.

JP and I didn’t want to be stuck in Epema. It was a total ghost town. Fortunately the director was embarrassed enough to offer to drive us to Impfondo himself. We were very grateful. After a minimal wait (in Congolese terms) of about two hours, while nothing seemed to happen, we were off.

The first part of the road out of Epema was in quite good nick and the director drove like a mentalist.

‘This is the only road in the whole province of Likouala –’ he said, half looking at the road and half at me – ‘twenty-three thousand square miles and only a hundred miles of road . . .’

Up here, of course, the rivers were the real roads and this was what first excited the French and the Belgians: a ready-made artery of infrastructure for them to transport first ivory and then rubber to the coast for transport to the West.

We eventually arrived in Impfondo after a long talk about Pygmy discrimination. They were seen by locals as ‘sous-humain’ and appallingly discriminated against.

We got dropped off at Tropicana and discovered that they had rooms as well as a restaurant. After Boha, it seemed like a five-star resort, and we had a fabulous meal of lamb, potatoes, rice and a lot of ndongo. We passed on the sautéed antelope.

Everyone was much more relaxed and Sylvestre was like a new man. The director asked us our plans. We were uncertain but worried that we might bump into King, who would surely make us pay more money as we did not have a permis to not go to Lake Tele. Everyone laughed. If you can’t laugh, then Congo travel is very much not for you.

Sylvestre told me about a Swiss man who had come to Epema and wanted to see gorillas. They’d stayed in the forest for six days and didn’t see a single one. The Swiss man went totally mental and was blaming Sylvestre and threatening him.

‘I must make remote-controlled gorilla so I can control them,’ laughed Sylvestre.

Sylvestre and the director left to head back to Epema. We headed for our new rooms to chill out. They were much better than those at Le Rosier, which had felt like they were modelled on a prison exercise yard. Our new rooms had a TV, air con and a shower. I was excited. I turned on the air con as it was boiling hot – but there was no electricity. JP went and made enquiries and found out that it would come on between six and nine in the evening. It was four-thirty, so I lay on my bed in a pool of sweat and read a book. At six-forty-eight p.m., the electricity came on. I know this because there was a sudden violent flash and some smoke from two bare wires hanging out of the wall above the bed. I tried the lights and a light bulb turned on but I received a moderate electric shock as penance. I turned on the air con. There were no life signs: it didn’t work. I plugged in the TV very gingerly but that didn’t work either. I went into the bathroom and turned on the shower: a tiny trickle appeared and I stood under it, desperately trying to get wet. After two minutes I had enough water on me to start lathering up and I attempted to get the forest off me. Just as I’d covered myself in soap, the water stopped completely and the electricity went off. I was left stumbling around with foam all over me – this was not good. I managed to find a towel and wipe as much off as possible. I then felt my way to the bed and lay down on it, still soapy and wet. The electricity came back on and another small firework display burst from the wall wires. I was wet and that doesn’t mix well with electricity. I carefully returned to the shower but there was no more water. I gave up and lay back down on the bed. I was foamy and naked but I didn’t care any more.

I continued reading my book. For the next hour or so I could hear quite a commotion on the terrace that ran past my room. There was much laughing and shouts and it felt like there was quite a crowd out there. I ignored it and carried on reading. The man I called Crazy turned out to have been the chief of Boha when Redmond O’Hanlon visited in 1995. There was even a photo of him, bare-chested, clutching his favourite spear and looking quite the young warrior. He looked about forty and fit as a fiddle. There was simply no seeing him as the haggard, rotting old man we had been dealing with. Among its many other properties, it was clear that jungle gin was not good for eternal youth.

At eight-twenty there was a knock on the glass door of my room. Both the door and window of our rooms were mirrored, which was quite disconcerting. I caught a glimpse of myself in the door. I looked like I’d just been to a San Franciscan foam party. I opened the door an inch to find JP looking a bit embarrassed.

‘I think it’s best you close your curtains – you are becoming something of a town exhibit . . .’

I didn’t have the foggiest what he was talking about so I put on some shorts and stepped out on to the balcony. I looked at the window to my room which, in the daytime, had been mirrored and impossible to see in through. Now, however, with the lights on inside, the mirror had turned into a sheet of clear glass – as had my door. Unbeknown to me, for the last hour and a half I had become the equivalent of the women exposing themselves in windows in the Reeperbahn. The show, although catering to quite specialist tastes, had apparently been very popular. I was mortified and when I got dressed and entered the restaurant the whole place was awash with smirks, glances and laughter. I felt violated in a most curious manner. I ate an omelette and some ndongo as quickly as I could before heading off to bed. This time I closed the curtains – not that this mattered now, as the electricity had cut out again for good.

About an hour later I started to feel unwell – very unwell -and I spent the rest of the night sitting on the loo with a head torch while I shed half my bodyweight into the Impfondo sewage system (which I’m guessing meant the river just below the hotel).

The following morning at breakfast I was still feeling delicate and very, very drained. Fortunately I had thought to bring some Dioralytes and these helped a lot. JP said that if we didn’t make a journey it was because God didn’t want us to. I’m not a religious man but I thanked the Lord for not allowing me into the swamp forest with a man so crazy he had to be tied up while I was shitting my insides out over holy ground.

JP was trying to work out how we would get back to Brazzaville. We’d checked the two boats in town the night before, including the one owned by the Frenchman we had met previously. However, both boats were going upstream to Bangui, so this option was a no-no. JP needed to try to get some money from Moneyman as there were rumours of a rogue plane headed for Brazzaville the following day.

We said hello to Moneyman who explained that, sadly, he once again had no money – but that he was fairly confident he’d have some at one p.m. The most common phrase you hear in the Congo is this: ‘Vous savez, avec ça le grand probléme c’est . . .’ and then a reeling out of all the possible problems ahead of you in whatever you’re wishing to do. Actually scratch the word ‘possible’ – the problems will definitely happen . . .

Back in Tropicana I lay on my bed in the infernal midday heat. I would not have liked to be here in the wet season. Then, according to the Rwandan boss, the whole town – a grid of dirt tracks and shacks – becomes a mud bath and almost impenetrable.

At about two-thirty we got good news. JP had got money from Moneyman and thought he’d managed to swap our previous airline tickets for two on a flight to Brazzaville the following day. The man in question said that he would bring the air tickets to us at six that evening. If I was a betting man, I wouldn’t have put a single Congolese franc on this happening.

Come six p.m. we were seated in the Tropicana garden having a beer. Nobody showed up. There was, however, a bit of drama unfolding to keep us entertained. A little man in a shiny suit came in, surrounded by three bodyguards. The man was a caricature of a self-important African oligarch. He was on his mobile and very upset. He was talking so loudly that he made my Trigger Happy TV character look like an amateur. He was complaining to the local police inspector that he had just been beaten up by a crowd in the street. I knew nothing of the affair but my sympathies were almost immediately with the crowd. I tried to get some footage of this buffoon but one of the bodyguards spotted me and charged over to demand why I was filming. I professed total ignorance and claimed I was cleaning my camera. There was a brief stand-off but the guy backed off. Next, a large group of excitable youths entered the garden and surrounded the buffoon. I rather hoped that they were the crowd in question, here to finish him off, but he stood up and gave them a rousing speech at which they all roared their approval. His speech finished, he proceeded to lead the youths out of the garden as though to battle.

Suddenly a new character – a huge, fearsome-looking woman – entered the garden in a voluminous, multi-coloured, all-encompassing dress with a repeat pattern made of the colours of the Congolese flag and the face of the president. The woman squared up to the buffoon, right in his face, and started screaming that, if he wanted to cause problems, he should do so in parliament in Brazzaville – not here, where she had to live.

The waitress whispered to us that the buffoon was a senior member of the ruling party and this woman was his sister. He backed away as she continued her verbal assault. The buffoon was having a bad day. A policeman turned up but appeared to be nervous of both parties. He tried to separate them and they both turned on him. Eventually the whole circus poured out into the street and marched off shouting at each other.

As if on cue a tall, thin Congolese man wearing a Pete Doherty cast-off hat pressed ‘play’ on a PA system that he had been setting up in the garden. A gritty rap song blared out. The hook phrase, endlessly repeated, was, ‘I know you niggazzzz wanna fuckkkkkk meeee . . .’ On the grass three five-year-old kids danced innocently a yard away from the speakers, apparently transfixed by the hypnotic groove of this appalling tune.

JP and I downed another Ngok and prayed that the plane would take us away from all this tomorrow.

The rap stopped and now Phil Collins’s Against All Odds’ polluted the African night. The girls looked disappointed and stopped dancing: some things have no frontiers. We called it a night at ten. There was still no sign of the airline-ticket man, whom I was now convinced was a close relative of Moneyman. Whatever, this was the Congo and tomorrow would be what it would be . . .

My stomach was feeling a little better, possibly because it could find little else other than my vital organs to get rid of. I had weird dreams about being on the shores of Lake Tele watching Motörhead playing ‘Ace of Spades’ on a floating platform before they were attacked by a Mokèlé-mbèmbé and drowned. The subconscious is a curious creature.

I awoke at eight a.m. and watched the fishermen out on the river. Lonely silhouettes on calm waters. JP was in the restaurant and he had still not heard from Ticketman but he was confident that we could get on the flight. The only thing I could be sure of was that you can’t be sure of anything in the Congo. We had a final ndongo-peppered omelette. The only other person in the restaurant was a rather shattered-looking man from Benin. He’d been on our flight up from Brazzaville and was supposed to stay for a week but, like us, was going back today (although, also like us, he had no ticket).

‘It is impossible to do business here – it is like the Stone Age. I have not managed one meeting, one discussion; nobody turns up for anything. It is beyond belief. This country is dead.’ He wandered off looking distraught and quite frazzled.

We said goodbye to the nice waitress at Tropicana, who had never understood why we were there or what we were doing but had delivered the closest to decent service that we’d encountered in this country.

At midday we hopped on to the back of a pickup and roared off to the airport. There it was predictable chaos. JP found Ticketman, who wanted more money for the tickets but gave in when JP went apeshit. We then fought our way through the laughable screening process but were pulled out of the line by the same officials who’d hassled us on our arrival. They were now demanding money for an ‘exit tax’. JP was close to nuclear explosion. The officials said that we could not get an exit stamp without paying. JP pointed out that, as were not leaving the country, we didn’t want an exit stamp.

Everything kicked off big style. JP and I eventually marched out of their room and joined the line again. The officials followed us and were by now really hassling us, but there appeared to be a VIP in front of us and he became interested in what was happening. The officials backed off and we got through the screening.

A soldier checked my passport and thought my Iranian visa was my ID page. He spent ages checking it was in order. In the end he nodded and we were on the tarmac waiting for the plane to land so that we could get the fuck out of Dodge.

The mystery plane eventually landed six hours late and only after it missed the actual airport twice and overshot the runway once. There was another rugby scrum to get on to the plane.

Onboard every other passenger seemed to have a plastic bag full of smoked fish and the smell was absolutely astonishing -like an abattoir in a fish tank. A woman sat down next to us with an open bag and I very nearly passed out and thought I was going to vomit. Fortunately we were by the emergency exit and the stewardess told her to move: women are apparently not considered responsible enough to operate emergency exits. Normally this kind of sexism would appal me but, on this one occasion, I let it slide. It would be no exaggeration to admit that, for the duration of this flight, I became a little more religious. It lasted only an hour but both JP and I were absolutely convinced something else was going to go wrong.

In between thoughts of imminent death I reflected on the problems inherent so far in monster-hunting. I certainly wasn’t dispirited. There was no rulebook for this. I was flying by the seat of my pants and trying, in a series of short trips, to do what some people spent years doing. The main problem seemed to be trying to distinguish between native beliefs and cold, hard facts. The stories of the monsters in the Okanagan and the Congo had come from the indigenous peoples and had been subject to osmosis by settlers or travellers who seemed to have some problem in interpreting what was real and what was spiritual. At least the Hibagon was a relatively new (though short-lived) creature: very rare in Japan, the land of a million ancient monsters. Whatever, I had at least had a sighting -something that many firm believers in these creatures would never have. It was all turning out to be as varied and weird and downright exciting as I’d hoped it would be. It was good to be alive and I couldn’t wait to set off on my next expedition, one of the daddies of the monster world: Bigfoot.

That evening, safely back in Brazzaville, JP and I headed out to the best restaurant in town – a posh riverside place called Terminalia. We both ordered pizza and sat gazing over the mighty Congo at the lights of Kinshasa dancing on the moonlit waters. We were happy and in a slightly euphoric post-adventure mood. We went over some of the ‘highlights’ of the trip and the alcohol flowed freely. The pizza took a while but we were busy chatting and it was only when a terrible tiredness came over us both after an hour or so that we realized that nothing had arrived. The waitress wandered past and I asked her if there was any sign of our pizza.

Another twenty minutes elapsed and finally Jean-Pierre went inside to remonstrate. He came back out half-laughing, half-stressed.

We got up and wandered out through the gates and into the streets of Brazzaville.

‘Do you feel like visiting Kinshasa tomorrow?’ asked JP playfully. I looked at him and he was laughing.