Mist had turned the river white and blurred the forests that lined its banks as our aluminium dinghy revved against the stream at dawn.
Apart from the coxswain, Jean-Claude, I was the only person onboard for the 60-mile trip up the Sangha river from Bomassa, in the northern Republic of Congo, to Bayanga, in the Central African Republic. Cameroon was on the far bank.
It felt strange, in the age of aircraft and cars, to cross a frontier by riverboat. Yet for centuries the waterways that drain the Congo basin were the arteries of trade and travel that served the heart of Africa, and it was easy to see why.
Pairs of fishermen paddled dug-out canoes along the lazy river. Motorboats that had been carved from vast tree trunks ferried families and cargo between the tiny thatched hamlets that dotted the shores and islands.
The forest was full of foreboding. Dense walls of foliage were broken, only occasionally, by tall, pale trunks like lighthouses. Whole stretches of forest were cloaked in creeper, which made the trees look like ghosts in green bedsheets pawing their way towards the water.
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I knew from an earlier hike that the forest beyond the banks was marbled with swamps and small streams. Travel by land involved wading through waist-deep water.
Passable roads were few and unreliable. Most have been cut by logging companies. Road trips required a chainsaw, in case an ancient hardwood had fallen across the track before the loggers found it. Until recently that timber, which is the region’s main export, would have floated downstream to the sawmills lashed to other trunks in a giant raft, while paddle steamers splashed both ways with people and supplies. Villagers still remember tales of grandparents who were flogged during the colonial period for failing to keep a stack of firewood in case a boat came in, unannounced, in need of fuel.
All that is changing. The paddle steamers are gone. The river has not been dredged for years. Roads are slowly taking over, and we had to carry three tanks of fuel because there was no guarantee that we would be able to buy any en route — sjambok or not.
Grand plans for pan-African highways have foundered, but China, in its fervour for extraction, has built roads into far reaches of the continent. Inevitably, that has unintended consequences. The tarred one-lane highway from Brazzaville to Ouesso has put the forests of the northern frontier in range of the capital’s bushmeat markets. The sound of monkeys is much rarer now, according to people who have lived off the forests for decades. The duikers, or small antelopes, which are an important source of protein, are now hard to find.
The one thing of which there is no shortage is an appetite for bureaucracy. From Bomassa to Bayanga we stopped at four border posts, many miles apart, staffed variously by soldiers, customs and the territorial gendarmerie. Each time, I trudged up to a wooden hut to wade through the formalities, while Jean-Claude ate his lunch of tinned tuna and manioc paste wrapped in a banana leaf.
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It was only when we came back downstream a few days later that I learnt — to the glee of a Congolese policeman — that I had left the Republic of Congo without stamping out officially. Four border posts, he explained, no matter how remote, was one short of a frontier.
“There are many branches of the police,” he said. His post in Kabo, a village built by a logging company, was an hour downstream in the wrong direction from where our journey first started. Logic, he ably showed, was as scarce as wildlife.
For all the romance of a boat ride through the heart of central Africa, it was an abrupt reminder that the real world was never far away.