Blood River: The Terrifying Journey through the World's Most Dangerous Country

I'd seen this book in airport bookshops throughout my travels for years, and it always sounded compelling enough that I knew I'd read it someday. Once I started, I could hardly put it down.From the first page, it made me recall my own trip in the safer countries of southern Africa just a couple years ago, setting up and taking down my own tent repeatedly while moving about amidst a group of intrepid campers riding a commercial truck outfitted with a bare passenger cabin: the dusty, gravel roads all over, with only a few city streets being paved; sleeping under mosquito nets; carrying all belongings in but a single carry-on bag; pre-dawn chills that gave way to unrelenting tropical heat like I've never felt in my life.From his opening paragraphs, I could envision my own African experiences of enthusiasm and disappointments that he would face on such an unbelievable journey overland from Lake Tanganyika to the Congo River: that part of the trip alone consumes the entire first half of the whole book! Unlike my own African adventure, he must navigate through the territory of marauding rebel militias, going by motorbike through rainforests that consumed the train tracks his own mother uneventfully rode through the Congo when it was still a Belgian colony.Butcher devotes a great deal of his narrative to assessing the failed state of what his subtitle calls 'the World's Most Dangerous Country'--which it certainly is among! He rhetorically observes that there are surely few places in the world that are less advanced today than they were a half-century before, but that is the unfortunate case with the Congo.Where once it had cities connected by trains and highways, and steamboat traffic plied the Congo River, the incessant civil strife and looting of its public resources by its long-time, post-independence dictator and his cronies has meant that no such roads, railways, or river boats exist anymore; it hardly has a functioning postal service or landline telecommunications.He poignantly observes ruin after ruin, of buildings, river boats, and train cars, in settlements throughout his journey, noting for example the once-chic hotel that had hosted Katherine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart while filming 'African Queen'--today nearly completely consumed by the forest.Such is the fate of a country as vast as all of western Europe, a motley aggregation of numerous tribes united only by the vast river drainage of land from which the Belgian King Leopold II and his country as a colony thereafter exploited in resource extraction, to the deaths of manifold millions of people--not an exaggeration: as Butcher notes, this genocide predated that of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust, and was the original impetus for human rights organizations to come into existence.Unfortunately, the harrowing past still lives: at its writing, roughly a thousand Congolese die every single day as a corrupt system still siphons away the bountiful natural resources (once ivory and rubber, now diamonds and cobalt) to external sources, with no investments in infrastructure or the human capital of the Congo itself.Only the UN, international aid organizations, and religious orders give any semblance of humanity to people so racked by intractable violence in their cities, such that those very entities--the sources of all his means of transport in his journey--must all travel about by air, which makes his moves overland through such hostile territory such a challenge of incredible proportions.But as he learns and repeats as a mantra: cities are bad for their lack of safety, but open forests offer some cover of protection. Even the fauna of the wilderness aren't as big a threat: he reveals that because so many people have been driven out of unsafe settlements by armed gangs, there is nary a bird nor monkey to be heard in the rainforests, and he writes of only one massive crocodile and no hippos while on the river. All have been decimated to give protein sources to starving jungle-dwellers otherwise reliant only on nutrition-lacking cassava, which they may not have the time luxury to grow and prepare because instability keeps them on the move.What he was able to do was nothing less than astonishing, a true frontier-blazing effort enabled by the kindness of strangers along the way with sparse preparations. Most of his trip was sheer, random luck at being able to avoid the violent pitfalls that would render it nearly impossible. Along the way, he does dodge rebels and succumbs to jungle sickness, all while playing the ongoing game of bribing urban bureaucrats to keep him on the move.It's not a journey any reader could undertake, as eerily primitive as that of Henry Stanley, whose 19th century river voyage he re-creates, so living through the vicarious telling of his twists and turns makes for a rollicking read, especially to anyone who is beguiled and enchanted by Africa, the Mother Continent of humanity itself, an ethereal beckoning which obsesses and haunts Butcher to undertake his saga on its Blood River.

Without the publication of this fascinating account of one man's arduous journey across a continent and through a forgotten country, the world would be worse off. The author weaves together historical accounts of the few who preceded him: Henry Stanley ("Dr. Livingstone, I presume."), Robert Conrad (Heart of Darkness), Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, and Barbara Kingsolver (The Poisonwood Bible). This makes the book much more than just a travel report but also a bibliography as wide and as deep as the mighty Congo River.

Part history, part travel book, part social commentary, this is a fascinating and often disturbing look at the Congo and the author's observations as he attempts to retrace the journey of explorer Henry Stanley in the late 19th century through the most rugged and hostile terrain imaginable. Fantastically written and full of keen observations, this is a wonderful account of a country that has been brutalized and exploited, one that seems to have been left behind by the modern world.

This was a gripping story of a dangerous journey through almost unbelievably primitive conditions. Much of what he related about his encounters was almost unbelievable to read about in the 21st C. I've traveled to third world and developing world, and have seen the incongruity of people on oxcarts with cell-phones etc. as they progress unevenly--but progress they do! But there is none of that on his journey. No sign of the 21st C, and almost none of the 20th C remaining in the area he traveled through. It broke my heart to realize how the world has ignored and forgotten the suffering DRC people. Mr. Butcher is a very interesting writer, and I appreciated the regional history as well as the story of his own tribulations and perseverance (although at times I thought he was just plain crazy to continue!). I would have given this book a "5 star" but the end of the book just petered out, so the end was a bit of a disappointment. Nonetheless, highly recommended!

An immensely sad, if gripping read. Tim Butcher's quixotic journey, to follow the explorer Stanley's epic voyage down the Congo River from Lake Tanganyika to its outlet two thousand miles away into the Atlantic, is a tale of endurance, ingenuity and scares aplenty, as he makes his way, by motor bike, river canoe and United Nations barge, through a landscape devastated by war, and still menaced by lawless militia and armed desperate people trying to survive. Written in 2004, it's fairly dispiriting to update the story and see that the country is still crippled by wrecked infrastructure, callous exploitation of the vast natural resources - the electronics and renewable energy revolutions making the cobalt, nickel and lithium deposits especially lucrative - and the all pervading violence of post-colonial corruption and strife.Taking place over fifteen years ago, the book chronicles a devastated land (virtually all the animals of the jungle long since hunted and eaten), littered with a largely derelict and abandoned infrastructure of houses, shops, towns and cities, and the broadly functioning country of sixty years ago, wrecked by decades of war, corruption, and basically lack of hope.After a while, I hit on the idea (to lessen the awful depression and pessimism, page after page of this brought on) of firing up Google Maps and searching to check the places and the people, along the author's journey, and what had happened in the intervening years. In a way that made it even worse, as wars are still flaring up, the country has been hit by Ebola, and goodness knows what Covid-19 might do to them. Still, some of the infrastructure, including the railway overgrown in the story, seem to have been restored somewhat, at least as far as one train a week, anyway.

brilliant , I was a mercenary in the same area , brought back memories

Mr. Butcher has penned a modern classic. If you are fond of Africa, intrigued by its politics, awed by its natural beauty and forever wringing your hands at the Big Men who control/influence E.G. DR Congo, this book will surely appeal. You'll meet plenty of decent people along the way, including the author, who, after a few pages, will feel like your best friend, a reliable guide bouncing you through the bush. Bon voyage! PS. My mum found it "too depressing", but don't let that put you off.

I read this book on an excellent recommendation: I’d once heard Michael Palin say it was his favourite travel book, and I can see why. It’s a gripping read and an epic adventure that, all things considered, I’m happier to enjoy vicariously. Even the author describes his Congo River trip as ‘ordeal travel’ but it’s also an informative and often affectionate portrait of a place.

An expose that describes the greed and maladministration that dogs many post Colonial African States as seen by Westerners. Personified by Congo where the humanity in people has all but left. A clear distinction between the haves and have nots is so apparent.A good read , Well researched and documented