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Customer Review
- Reviewed in Canada on April 17, 2012Terrific unique angle on the current crisis in the Congo (or it is just "Congo" now?). The author, Tim Butcher, is a foreign correspondent for a British newspaper--specifically the same newspaper (The Telegraph) that sponsored Stanley famous search for Livingstone in the same region.
He comes up with this crazy and scary plan to traverse Stanley's route from the source of the Congo River to its mouth. What, as hopefully some of you will realize, this area on our planet has seen millions die in conflicts that it would take another book to explain involving mineral wealth, age-old tribal grudges and politics that stretch back to the Belgian Congo era.
His journey (and the cover is terribly deceiving as the author doesn't paddle in a canoe/kayak) involves motorbiking along rough trails (there are really no functioning roads anymore in the heart of Africa), being priouge-d along by boats paddled by Africans, slow steamboats not headed to China and jeeps driven by aid workers.
The journey is really not the interesting part at all as not much exciting or truly dangerous happens to Butcher. Just the jawdropping amazement of how slow and frustrating his journey becomes and the stories he hears along the way from the better than average people affected by the rebel attacks, food and housing shortages and the entire mess in a region that should possibly be one of the wealthiest on the planet if it was run properly.
