Wave Goodbye: Congo expedition paddlers face monstrous swells on the river for five days. Photo: Skip Brown.
We had been in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) for less than two hours, most of that time spent in the hot, crowded, chaotic crush of airport baggage claim. We hauled our kayaks and gear out into a pitch-black Kinshasa night and drove through a hazy gloom on a dusty road crowded with cars. Pedestrians dashed in and out of traffic with abandon. The only illumination other than our headlights came from hundreds of storefront oil lamps flickering through the dust.
Suddenly, a mini-van slammed into a man crossing the road up ahead. A street vendor of some kind, his body was suddenly propelled into the smoky air, his tray of gum and trinkets briefly weightless before he crumpled to the roadside. The van never slowed and disappeared into the darkness. As we passed, it appeared that the guy was dead. Our driver motored on, explaining that we would likely end up in trouble if we stopped to help, probably get blamed for the accident and anyhow, what would we do? Where would we take him?
“Welcome to the Congo,” someone said.
Visiting this central African country is not for the faint of heart. The worst of colonialism followed by decades of despotic rule has left one of Africa’s largest and potentially richest countries a third-world basket case. Eighty million people live in an area half the size of the U.S. with fewer paved roads than D.C. Through this heart of darkness for nearly three thousand miles runs the Congo River, the second largest river in the world. Only the Amazon carries more water but the Congo has something the Amazon doesn’t – whitewater. Big whitewater.
The Congo runs the length of the DRC twice, draining millions of square miles. Straddling both sides of the equator, it’s always raining somewhere in the Congo drainage, thus providing a fairly constant flow of between 1.5 and 3 million cubic feet per second.
Just downstream of Kinshasa, and within view of the city’s crumbling skyline, the Congo begins a steep drop to the sea. It’s here that an 85-mile long canyon of pool drop whitewater known as the “String of Pearls” begins. The massive volume, combined with modest drop and incredible depths creates a hydrodynamic cauldron that has stymied explorers for centuries. In 1877, explorer Henry Stanley became the first person to travel the length of the Congo. Ultimately it took him 40 days and the loss of some of his party to get through the canyon below Kinshasa, portaging most of the way. His diaries describe the massive wave trains and his 70-foot canoes pointing to the sky as they spun in giant whirlpools.
A century later, a team of French adventurers tried to run the String of Pearls. Film footage shows their rafts heading off into insane whitewater. They disappeared and were never seen again. No bodies were ever found, only a bullet-ridden raft.
The daunting whitewater hasn’t only stymied adventurers. Scientists too have been kept at bay by the river’s ferocity and the DRC’s troubled past. For years it has been a difficult and dangerous place to work and the river is just recently yielding some of her secrets. The large volume, great depths and strong currents have created a habitat for unique evolution of a variety of fish and other species. Ichthyologists and hydrologists are using sophisticated equipment to map current velocities at various river depths. But they can only guess at what lies below the surface of the String of Pearls. In fact, it could be the most interesting, least studied large section of river in the world. One of the purposes of our journey was to make depth readings and hopefully prove that the Congo is the deepest river in the world.
At the invitation of National Geographic Television, our team of pro kayakers was attempting a first successful descent of the String of Pearls. We were trying to run all of the rapids, take water samples at major tributaries and depth soundings, and film and photograph it all.
On the eve of our journey, my mind reeled with concern over the potential dangers we might face. The DRC is an intense and paranoid place, and there are lots of people with guns. Any Army or police officer with a gun can stop you, and they usually try to shake you down with impunity. Taking photographs anywhere is an invitation for trouble.
Then there’s the river: giant whitewater rapids with spine-crushing waves, huge whirlpools, shark-sized fish with shark-sized teeth, crocodiles, and hippos. Ichthyologist Melanie Stiassni said the only thing we need to worry about is the whitewater. Turned out she was wrong.
We were a very experienced crew led by Trip Jennings and a team of paddlers who had notched firstdescents all over the world. The six of us were paddling high-volume creek boats needed to stay on the surface and carry all our stuff. We were loaded with gear for at least five days of self-support, plus an assortment of video and photo equipment, satellite phones, scientific instruments and batteries. Trip’s boat had been tricked out by National Geographic Society engineers with a hull-mounted sonar device that was linked to a deck mounted GPS dome. His boat was so heavy I could barely lift it.
But none of us had put on a whitewater run at 1.3 million cubic feet per second before, a level where the normal laws of hydrodynamics go out the window. And this stretch of river contained the largest whitewater rapids on the planet, along with waves as large as hurricane swells, house-sized holes, massive boils and eddy lines, and boat-sucking whirlpools.
We put in at the largest wave train any of us had ever seen, within sight of the decaying skyscrapers of downtown Kinshasa. From there we rounded a bend and left civilization behind. It was hard to believe that in the 21st century there could still be a 100-mile stretch of one of the world’s mightiest rivers that had never been successfully run. Picture the Potomac River as it runs through Washington D.C. Now imagine that ten miles upriver is a spot beyond which few people have ever been. It was remarkable, surreal, and terrifying all at once.
The currents were so strong and our loaded boats so slow that we had to be looking way ahead to anticipate our next stroke. As we found the rhythm of the Congo, we discovered a constancy of sorts to most of the rapids. A rapid would begin as a broad, glass-smooth tongue through a garden of holes, then build into a colossal wave train that would devolve into a mess of diagonal waves crashing into each other from every direction, and finally a run out into the pool. Then it would get scary.
Boating on the Congo is like being on a river in continual flood. Much of the time you’re running for your life. Where the rapids pool, whirlpools break out everywhere. Combined with crazy boils and vertical eddy fences, it’s a scary place to be. The whirlpools became our main concern as they would open up underneath, sometimes with little warning. I felt like a player in a giant computer game, trying to navigate my way across a bomb-strewn landscape. There was no true flat water, just a checkerboard of currents and countercurrents and boils with whirlpools spinning about.
Some of these water tornadoes were deep. Often the spinning tip of a kayak was all that was visible from the surface. Trip got taken to the bottom of one whirlpool and kept going down, a 15-second mystery move in his 85-gallon boat. He later said that he briefly considered swimming but knew that would be a very bad idea. On this river, if you swim, you die.
Near the end of the third day, I was crashing through a garden of psycho chop, with large waves coming at me from all directions. To my horror, a whirlpool spun open on my right and I was pretty much thrown in by a breaking wave. Down and around I went, bracing for my life. Toward the bottom of the ice cream cone, I looked up and saw waves breaking over the top of the vortex. That’s a sight I’ll never forget. I hung tight, didn’t flip and eventually the whirlpool petered out and released me.
Off the river was different than expected as well. I had been dreading hot, humid nights crammed three to a tent as soon as the sun set to avoid malarial mosquitoes. Instead we enjoyed comfortable evenings around campfires with nary a bug in sight. We camped on broad sand beaches near small river mouths or waterfalls and it was so pleasant that I often sat on the beach with a headlamp reading long into the night. Our campsites were so lovely in fact that they lured us into a bit of complacency. We saw few people, only a couple of fishermen in their dug-out canoes in the very flattest sections of river. The nearest villages were remote.
By our last morning on the river, we were feeling good. Most of the biggest water was behind us, and we figured we’d be at takeout by late afternoon. We were making breakfast when six armed men rushed out of the forest and into our camp screaming and pointing AK-17s at us. They were three Army soldiers and three ragtag villagers armed with guns and knives. We were made to lie face-down in the sand while they went through our stuff, rifle barrels pointed at the backs of our heads.
They didn’t seem to know what to make of us, our plastic boats and all our gear. Communication was difficult because of our bad French, but it became apparent that this was both a robbery and an arrest. After going through our valuables, they began to herd us off into the jungle. We told each other that we could not let that happen: we could not be separated from our boats and taken away from the river. We were five big strong guys, and even though we were outnumbered andoutgunned, the bad guys were being cautious with us. We figured that maybe we could jump them if the situation got so bad that we had no other choice.
We presented our papers, the official government documents that gave us permission to be on the river, but the lead Army official tossed them away. We again insisted that they read our papers. Finally one of the villagers, the oldest guy in the group and the only one unarmed, picked up our documents and read them aloud in halting French. It turned out that the Army ringleader and his cronies couldn’t read.
Once our docs were read, things eased a bit. They decided that they wouldn’t march us away but would still take a lot of our stuff. Thus proceeded a delicate negotiation of what we’d be willing to part with. Ultimately they got all our cash, watches, iPods, carabiners and the rest of our freeze-dried dinners. I had hidden most of my camera gear, and we refused to give up helmets and PFDs. The standoff lasted maybe two hours, and when we finally settled with our attackers, we wasted no time getting the hell out of there. We had no idea what rapids were around the next corner, but we weren’t taking the time to scout.
We pushed on to takeout later that day, where we met up with our crew and spent another week helping with scientific tasks and shooting for television. Ultimately our data showed that we paddled over a spot 750 feet deep, thus becoming the deepest known spot of any river in the world. I bet there are spots in the Congo even deeper. It felt like it.