DR Congo
Holidays and Tours

Few places on earth can be so inaccessible and yet so bursting with human experiences. This is a river of superlatives: 4,700 km in length from its source in Zambia, and the deepest river in the world, boasting an incredible 800 fish species and carving the great continent in half to form a river basin of 4,000,000 square kms. Bantu tribes first arrived here, displacing the indigenous pygmies, leading to the formation of the later Kongo kingdom which covered the entire basin with its capital at Mbanza Kongo lending its name to the river.

The first European, the Portuguese explorer, Diogo Cão, arrived in 1484 and he sailed briefly up to the Livingstone Falls and made contact with the king’s court. Further attempts to navigate the river foundered at these cataracts and so it was from the Upper Congo, or the Lualaka River that the next wave of outsiders sought to link together the pieces of the incomplete African river maps, first setting eyes on these higher reaches in 1796. Arab slavers had also penetrated the continent to this point, establishing the slaving depot of Nyangwe in 1860.

Only a decade later, David Livingstone and then Henry Stanley made attempts to link the Lualaka to either the Nile, Niger or Congo. The latter’s expedition, brutally difficult after encounters with disease, rapids and cannibalistic tribes, left Zanzibar and finally reached Kinshasa 1,001 days later having lost more than half of his 240-strong party to the aforementioned perils. Many of today’s settlements on the Middle Congo owe their origins to his influence. The Congo today is a strange series of contradictions: its waters still flows with incredible force, yet swirl deceptively peacefully on its indigo surface; the middle and upper reaches provide a vital lifeline to subsistence communities who still practise time-honoured customs and trades, yet the modernity of the approach to the river also means that the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s success with hydro-electric power makes it one of only four countries worldwide to run its energy entirely from renewable sources.

Indeed the isolation one feels on the river, so far from the bustle of Kinshasa and its rival twin capital Brazzaville across the river’s border, is seductive. Watching Nile and dwarf crocodiles slip deedily into its depths and gazing at languid forests which ease down almost sheer ochre coloured slopes to tumble into the waters and to see troops of monkeys at Yangambi Biosphere Reserve gently moving through the canopy, one could imagine that the region was entirely unpopulated.

Yet the constantly shifting, kaleidoscopically-coloured river markets and colossal jigsaw puzzles of barge rafts that throb with humanity, the tiny canoes that list wildly, brimful of pigs and goats and the timeless dynamism of the local fish farmers with their wicker traps, perched precariously on the Wagenia Falls all speak of a watercourse which throbs with a vibrancy which will make your expedition one that is replete with incomparable memories.