by Dom Joly
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.
‘Where have you come from?’ he asked.
‘Brazzaville,’ I replied. This being the only flight each week, the question seemed a touch unnecessary.
‘How long have you been there?’ he asked.
‘Two days,’ I replied.
‘And what are you doing here?’
‘I’m going to Lake Tele – I’m a tourist.’
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 repea
ting 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.
‘There is a thin line between reality and mystery in Africa, Dom.’
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.
‘The moneyman is not here. You must come back later.’
JP was annoyed by this and it showed. ‘You are a bank. How can the moneyman not be here? This is your business!’
‘You must come back later.’ The lady was not for turning.
We asked her at what time the moneyman would be there.
‘Two, maybe three hours,’ she replied in a frustratingly noncommittal fash
ion.
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.
‘We have no money,’ said Moneyman matter-of-factly.
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.