“It gave me the notion of an exotic Immensity ruled by an august Benevolence. It made me tingle with enthusiasm.”

— Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

My destination was the Democratic Republic of the Congo, formerly Zaire. It’s Africa’s third largest nation, and located in the geographic heart of the continent. The country has a coastline of only 27 kilometers at the outlet of the Congo River, which flows into the Atlantic. It straddles the Equator and has widely differing features, including mountain ranges in the north and west, a vast central plain over which the Congo River flows and volcanoes and lakes. The river has given rise to extensive tropical rainforests on its western border with its neighbor the Republic of Congo, a coincidence of name that has caused no little amount of confusion.

As many as two million people are estimated to have died in the country, mostly from malnutrition and disease, since war broke out about fifteen years before my arrival. Two million people! After a rebellion in 1997, rebels backed by Burundi, Rwanda and Uganda, three countries bordering the Congo from the east, tried to topple the new government, and the various sides have been fighting since.

Congo is also the country most closely associated with the dreaded Ebola virus. Most cases of the virus to date have been monitored on the border of Gabon and Congo, several hundred miles west of my destination. The severe, often fatal disease is transmitted by direct contact with an infected person or their bodily fluids. The virus is not transmitted through casual contact, is only contagious during its active phase and is not spread during the incubation or convalescence period. I, of course, made a big point of researching all this beforehand.

At least one airport in the country was closed a month or two before my visit in a most dramatic way. Lava from an erupting volcano in east Congo, on the border with Rwanda, overran the airport in mid-January and burned half of the nearby city of Goma. Dozens of people were killed, and the city of half a million people had to be evacuated. Fourteen villages in the path of the lava were incinerated. A two-meter high surge of molten lava advanced from a nearby volcano, destroying everything in its path. I saw pictures of the approaching lava from ground level, and it was chilling—a line of fiery red and black destruction that subsumed everything in front of it. The volcano, Nyiragongo, is one of eight on the borders of Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda. The region is dense with tropical forests and home to rare mountain gorillas that inhabit the slopes of the dormant volcanoes.

Despite turmoil in the country, the Ministry of the Interior had granted permission to fly into the city of Mbandaka (pronounced em-bahn-DAH’-ka), right on the equator, and on the shore of the massive Congo River. Mbandaka, formerly Coquilhatville, is a busy river port city of some 200,000 people and capital of the Équateur province. It’s situated at the junction of two rivers, the Congo and Ruki. While the area had apparently seen violence in years past, it was reportedly calm—on the opposite side of the country from the worst rebel violence.

The fact I was entering a conflict zone was hammered home when calling ahead to the airport to ensure the Starship’s JET-A/A1 fuel would be available.

“You’re aware the airport is under military control?” inquired a nice-sounding young man with a thick French accent.

“Uh, no, I wasn’t.”

“Not to worry,” he cooed. “Just follow procedures, and everything will be fine. Do not bring any guns. And don’t worry, we’ve got plenty of fuel, bien sur!”

Little was visible from the Tamanrasset airport the afternoon of departure except the austere desert, low mountains, towering scattered clouds and a brilliant blue sky.

Taxiing out to the runway, I made a terrible mistake: I botched the instructions from ground control and actually turned onto and accidentally went a few hundred feet on the active runway itself. The tower politely pointed out my error about the same time I noticed it myself, and ushered me off at the nearest taxiway. I could imagine them howling to themselves. “Look at the stupid Canadian with the expensive plane! My son is a better pilot in his Cessna!” Luckily no other planes were departing or arriving, or the mistake could have been fatal.

Then, another unpleasant surprise. It looked like the run-up area at the start of the runway was solid concrete, but it was only hard-packed sand, and not all that hard-packed at that. I rolled onto it and the large airframe of the Starship lumbered to a halt and stayed that way as the wheels stuck. I gingerly applied power to try to dislodge myself, and the plane seemed to enter a slow-motion jig. I flashed back, my mind reeling from Hotan, where sand damaged the landing gear. But no such misfortune this time. The plane wiggled clear and was lined up on the runway proper.

After all that, liftoff was glorious. Despite the heat and the altitude, the Starship leapt into the air, strong as ever, and started cleaving a path through the massive cumulus all around. It felt good to be back in the air again, energized and confident, feeling like I was supposed to be doing what I was doing. It was a nice change to feel so present and optimistic after my misgivings over Europe. I made great time, with a 327-knot groundspeed. The only wind was a 7-knot breeze from the rear left quarter, not a factor.

The last thing I expected to hear was a Learjet being vectored around Northern Africa, but there it was. There were apparently only the two of us on my controller’s frequency: a Starship and a Learjet over Algeria. No one would have believed me if I’d told them.

The route was to take me over four African countries. Great hazy swaths of cloud greeted me as I crossed south into the airspace of Niger, the first of them. Over time, dry riverbeds and what appeared to be seasonal rivers gave way to pasture, and pasture after a time became cropland as water became more abundant. It got greener over the southern end of Niger.

The winds shifted and picked up speed over Nigeria, even farther south. What had previously been a 7-knot tailwind transitioned abruptly into a more easterly fifty-knot trade wind. The Starship bucked and rotated to a slightly new heading to compensate for being blown off course.

The radio buzzed to life for the first time in an hour. A Cessna flown by a woman pilot with a clear British accent was being routed through the airspace. It was strange to hear—I hadn’t heard anything in some time, and wasn’t expecting to hear a British accent, much less a woman. Although women have flown since 1908, nearly all of them were historically restricted to general aviation, i.e. private planes or support jobs. Today, women make up a growing percentage of airline pilots and have now gained full access to military and commercial cockpits, even U.S. space shuttles.

It started to get green and thick over Nigeria. The temperature still showed -54º C outside, but it’d be getting hotter and hotter down below, closing in on the equator. Over the oblong-shaped country Cameroon, nestled in the curve of the African coastline to the west, the grassland and cropland started giving way to marshes and rainforest. Then it gradually thickened. I’d entered the Congo basin, an area of legend.

The great rainforest basin of the Congo River comprises most of remote Central Africa. The interior was largely unknown to Europeans until late in the 19th century, when its tribal kingdoms were split largely between France and Belgium. Today, French is the region’s lingua franca, reflected in the names of places I’d been flying over, like the bird-shaped Lac de Lagdo not far away.

It was thrilling to see rainforest for the first time, not just because of the novelty, but because it was actually quite dangerous to be flying over such solid, dense green undergrowth. It was not a place to have to make an emergency landing. The ground would be mushy and swampy from there on in, and the forest canopy dense enough to rend the aircraft if it hit the trees. A controlled landing into trees by an aircraft is not necessarily a life-ending event, as trees absorb the energy of a crashing plane and help slow it in a semi-controlled way. If the plane’s cabin stays intact, passengers have a good chance of living through the experience. But even if the Starship were to keep me safe in a crash in the rainforest, the chances of surviving long enough for a rescue party to find me, assuming they could, would be slim. I didn’t want to go down there.

There was plenty of evidence of clear-cut logging. As elsewhere in the developing world—and as suggested by Toumani in Tamarasset—timber represented important export revenue in this part of the world. And clear-cutting is, unfortunately, the cheapest way to log. Swaths of rainforest were indeed being taken down to bare ground. It was an eyesore and travesty to be sure, but I was encouraged by the vast immensity of what remained. Not that the uncontrolled logging of rare tropical woods was to be condoned, but watching incalculable square miles of vibrant, intact rainforest pass under the wings—for hours on end—made me cautiously optimistic that, especially if checked, Africa’s equatorial rainforest may yet live on. It didn’t seem possible that such apparently infinite reserves could be exhausted. But perhaps that’s what was said about whales a hundred years ago. Or fish stocks off eastern Canada.

To kill time, I did exercises. The cabin behind the cockpit was just wide enough to stretch out for pushups.

One hundred and twelve nautical miles out, descent began. The Starship didn’t descend quite fast enough for the controller, however, who must have assumed it was a bigger plane than it was and asked me to expedite.

Right on the border of the Democratic Republic of Congo and the former Zaire, right where it should be, was the Ubangi River and floodplain. I’d arrived on what looked like an unseasonably sunny break day in the middle of the rainy season, so virtually the whole plain was filled with water. The Congo River could be seen in the distance, some 60 NM away. It was thrilling to actually see after reading so much about it.

About a thousand feet over the jungle, the plane broke through a haze that’d settled in and I was struck by how the colors instantly became even more vibrant. Multi-hued birds circled lazily, perched in open trees or fled from the sound of the Starship’s engines. Far from being an open body of water, the river there wove its way around a network of elongated islands. Flying that low was like being force-fed tourism advertisements—I caught teases and glimpses of the rich montage of rainforest life, even in the increasingly busy workload of coming in to land.

Up close like this, the land was clearly unforgiving. It was obvious that even upon surviving a forced landing, it’d be impossible to stay dry with so much water everywhere.

Controllers from Brazzaville center, named after a large Congolese city near the capital of Kinshasa, let me execute a visual approach over the city, and I was struck by the size of the city and its proximity to the airport. The airport wasn’t in the best of shape, but I’d seen worse in the U.S. How far away and unfamiliar the U.S. seemed, over Africa! As expected, Congolese soldiers showed up on landing, but they were more interested in the plane than my papers. I made arrangements to get fueled up and paid little attention, at the time, to the nervous young soldier who took my order. Humidity hung heavy, like a pall, over everything, and the jungle’s same earthy, rotting smell was instantly familiar. It was a huge contrast from the desert only hours ago. It wasn’t overly hot—only about 30º C or so—as it was the rainy season.

Mbandaka is the region’s capital, a formerly sleepy town that had apparently undergone a sort of transformation just before my arrival. For four years, residents endured a horrible war, the front lines of which lay just beyond their city. Fighting, disease and starvation ended their means of livelihood, while closure of the river cut the population off from the outside world. The trials of this war, which involved the armies of six countries and countless local militia, make the current triumph of Mbandaka all the more heroic. Fishing, boatbuilding and pharmaceuticals are now chief industries, and the city is even the site of a few medical and business schools. It’s the biggest commercial and transportation center in the region. In an interesting connection with the United States, Mbandaka was the site of Habitat for Humanity’s first ever project outside the U.S. in 1976.

Mbandaka is first and foremost a port city, and all along the port, in a seamless merging of land and water, dock and boat, was a fascinating cross-section of humankind. Women with broad smiles sat under umbrellas selling vegetables in the rain. Small boys hawked coat hangers and toilet paper. Porters from neighboring barges unloaded huge balls of preprocessed rubber and other exotic products from the great forests of the interior. Ship captains, hustlers, priests, merchants and beggars all intermingled in a vast fervor of activity. A ship’s horn blared, but it was impossible to which one was coming or going, or even how the logistics of an entry or exit would be worked out among the dozens of barges sidled haphazardly against the dock.

The Mbandaka layover was supposed to be just a quick in-and-out, but at the airport the second day, the nervous young soldier in charge of fuel was even more agitated. It seemed there was a problem.

“I’m so sorry, but we’re temporarily out.” He looked culpable, like the situation was his fault, personally. Maybe it was. “We have 100-low-lead , but no more kerosene. They used the last of it for the helicopters two days ago. More is being brought up from Kinshasa, though.”

“How long?”

“Not long. It’s on its way. Less than two weeks.”

“TWO WEEKS?!”

“It’s coming by barge.”

It was a 20-day journey up the river from Kinshasa, capital of the Congo. I was told potential complications included the tropical storms that raged this time of year, strong eddies and currents, hidden sandbars, or possibly even the odd unscheduled rendezvous with bandits or rogue soldiers.

The Starship could technically run on 100LL fuel, but did I really want to risk complications high over one of the most undeveloped areas of the world? Emergency landing options in the jungle weren’t exactly plentiful. No, it was best to treat this as yet another enforced vacation, the same sort of mandatory furlough I’d been getting used to while waiting for papers or permissions.

Welcome to river country, in the middle of Africa. I settled in for a while.

The Congo River flows fast and wide. While docile in some sections, a series of falls and rapids make it only partly navigable. And though it’s heavily used for travel, the Congo remains relatively unpolluted because there are few industrial centers along its banks. In contrast, the longest river in the world, the Nile, is massively polluted by agricultural irrigation, industrial waste and sewage. One of the strange ironies of the Congo’s relative cleanliness is the fact that political strife and corruption have stunted development in the area for decades, with successive regimes placing little emphasis on building industries which would boost the nations’ economies, and, paradoxically, cause greater pollution of the river.

In the west, the Congo River has long been seen as a romantic symbol of exotic central Africa, the Victorians’ “darkest Africa.” In the 1870s, explorers David Livingstone and Henry Stanley traveled throughout the Congo basin. Shortly thereafter, Joseph Conrad sailed along the Congo and immortalised the river in his novel Heart of Darkness. It was also used by a less sympathetic westerner, Belgian King Leopold II, who looted the region in the late nineteenth century. Tons of rubber, ivory, gold and other treasures were floated down the river and shipped off to Europe in true textbook colonial exploitation, enforced with a brutality that apparently killed millions of the people living along the Congo’s banks.

I got my initial personal first-hand indication that things in Central Africa weren’t quite as bucolic as they seemed while chatting with two teenage boys selling soft drinks, the labels of which weren’t familiar, from a tub of ice. It started becoming clear that passions in the area ran as hot as the equatorial heat, perhaps were even fired by it.

“So, just how safe is it really, here?” I ventured. “Do the rebels give you any trouble?” I sipped from a can with a bright, stylized lemon on the front. Its contents were surprisingly bitter.

“Oh, no. Not here these days.” As in most places, kids’ English proved better than adults. There was only a trace of a French accent in the speech of this two. “Someone threw a grenade outside a church out east a couple of days ago where all the fighting is. A girl and a priest were killed. But nothing really bad has happened round here for a long time.”

“How long is long?”

“Well,” the other one ventured, looking contemptuously at the other, “I was just a kid when they killed the Hutus.”

“The Hutus?”

“Yeah. They got lots of them. Goddamn bastards.”

It took days to piece everything together. A few years earlier, just after Congo President Laurent Kabila took power in a coup, fighters supporting him—most from a tribe known as the Tutsi—apparently stormed into town and killed thousands of ethnic Hutu refugees who’d just walked 750 miles from Rwanda to Mbandaka. Walked! Locals say the killings took place there at the port, in full view of everyone. The Tutsis—tall, angular herdsmen who’d lorded over the shorter, rounder Hutu people for centuries—formed the backbone of Kabila’s fighting force. In exchange for their assistance, the Tutsis were apparently given a free hand to do as they pleased with the refugees.

I stood and looked out over the government-owned port with Henri, a local middle-aged priest who’d actually seen the attack. Of course it looked implausible that such violence could have taken place right there. Clumps of green water hyacinths floated by swiftly in the powerful current. Birds flitted in the blue sky. Commerce transacted in the busy port. This didn’t look like a killing field.

“They were trying to escape on a barge by the river. They were being shot and beaten with sticks as they swam out. Some of the men were armed and found back, but the women and children couldn’t. They killed them all. It took four hours. I saw soldiers smash a toddler’s head into a concrete wall—I saw it with my own eyes! I didn’t sleep for days.”

There was a long pause. Papers didn’t include details like those.

“What’d they do with the bodies?”

“They loaded them into dugout canoes and dumped most of them out in the middle of the river, but buried a lot at some mass graves not far from here, near the termite hills.”

Why’d they do it? What was their motivation? The Tutsis sought revenge for the Hutu’s orchestration of the slaughter of almost a million of their people in Rwanda in 1994. In just three months, while the rest of the world watched and did nothing, almost a million Tutsis were killed by the Hutu. The killers, armed only with machetes and clubs, did their work five times as fast as the mechanized gas chambers used by the Nazis. Why did the rest of the world not intervene? Just a year earlier, eighteen American soldiers had been killed in Somalia. When America pulled out of Somalia immediately thereafter, Rwanda became the first casualty. According to the former U.N. commander in Rwanda, “the day it started, the U.S. said not only are we not getting involved, we are not going to support anyone else getting involved.” Four years later, then-U.S. President Bill Clinton went to Rwanda to personally apologize to families of the dead and survivors and condemn his own failure. “All over the world there were people like me sitting in offices, day after day, who did not fully appreciate the depth and the speed with which you were being engulfed in this unimaginable terror,” he said.

It was complicated, as were most conflicts in Africa, I would learn. Everyone seemed to have blood on their hands. Everyone.

One had to be careful taking photos in the Congo. It seemed photographing public buildings, military installations, airports and the banks of the Congo River is forbidden. This was politely pointed out to me by a worried woman while I was snapping photos of the river. Offenders had been known to be arrested, held for hours and fined, their film and cameras confiscated. I was advised that, due to the threat of harassment and the lack of signs designating sites prohibited for photography, taking pictures was best done in private homes, and among friends.

I was also surprised to learn local laws required all transactions be made exclusively in Congolese francs. Regulations prohibited the possession of foreign currency, including U.S. dollars, by anyone in the country—apparently in a crackdown on money laundering. U.S. citizens, as well as all other persons traveling to or from the Congo, are technically required to declare all foreign currency in their possession, though the soldiers I’d met at the airport were too smitten with the Starship and never asked. Technically, upon arrival in the DRC, travelers are allowed three business days to deposit their foreign currency in a bank-run Exchange House and convert their money at the official, government-controlled rate. It wasn’t clear, however, whether these facilities actually sold foreign currency back to travelers on departure. I declared and changed a modest amount of money into francs so as to not raise suspicion, but gambled against mentioning the large sums of U.S. dollars in the plane to anyone. Nothing ever came of it.

Time dragged while the precious fuel steamed north from Kinshasa. Whole days were spent confined to quarters by ground-pounding equatorial storms. The hotel’s walls were insubstantial, and did nothing to abate the thunderous applause of the downpours. Whole days were spent reading or writing, venturing outside only for plantain fritters, tuwo, fufu, chicken imoyo, chin-chin or the odd ginger beer.

Internet access was easy to find in Mbandaka. It was available in most large African cities, I was told, yet virtually the whole rest of the continent apparently remained unconnected to land-based phone lines. While there were cellular phone systems in major cities, using a cell handset in public was said to attract unwanted attention, and cell phone users often found themselves targeted for robbery in many places. The electrical grid was also said to be woefully underdeveloped. Few villages had reliable power systems, it seemed. Most people relied on individual diesel or gasoline generators, or simply got by without electricity.

In time, the rusting hulk of the cargo ship with the JET-A1 arrived and was unloaded by heavy equipment and scores of bare-chested laborers. The plane was soon fueled and ready. My original plan had been to head south to Zimbabwe to Victoria Falls, the largest waterfalls in the world (sorry, Niagara) but given the uproar and brewing discontent over the recent elections in Zimbabwe, it seemed more prudent to consider landing in Zambia instead, which also bordered the falls. Arrangements were surprisingly straightforward.

That last evening there was a decidedly gray sky, yet, over time, a spectrum of muted colors formed outside the window. I went to investigate and found that while the majority of the overcast sky above still evoked shades of gun metal, an open band at the horizon had developed and allowed an impossible blend of pale blue and muted yellow to stream through as the sun descended out of sight. The city and jungle were both airbrushed in a thin pastel by this warm wash of light. In that unreal glow, it became apparent how these clouds, which had lingered almost the entire time I’d been in Mbandaka, were indicative of what the rainforest meant to the world. If the rainforest were indeed the lungs of the Earth, these clouds, it almost seemed, were the slow motion breathing of the world.

This was a sample chapter from The Starship Diaries, a book about a round the world trip in a futuristic aircraft called a Beechcraft Starship.

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