I finished Blood River at the weekend and it was a very good read – quite different to other books I’ve been reading of late and those I’ve mentioned here, but very good and well written. It charts the quest of a journalist, Tim Butcher, to retrace the footsteps of Henry Morton Stanley (of “Livingstone I presume?” fame) across the Congo in 2004, a quest most thought would be impossible given major infrastructural difficulties and the threat of attack from rebels. I’m not a history buff to be honest but Butcher’s ability to relate the history of the region kept me engaged, his commentary was insightful and perceptive – particularly in helping me understand more of what he calls ‘sovereignty-stripping’ in the wake of colonialism, and I truly admired his courage and perseverance. His journey definitely brings a whole new meaning to adventure travel. It’s quite a depressing book because it demonstrates just how bad things can get on planet earth and how terrible we humans can be. But it is the characters whom Butcher meets who truly bring this book to life. There are two very poignant moments recounted – one, when a man who helps Butcher as he tries to find passage on a boat down a particular part of the Congo River begs him to take his 4 year old son with him because he is desperate for his son to have a new life, and the other, when whilst travelling by motorbike through rainforest Butcher stumbles upon a railway sleeper completely overgrown by the forest growth. He describes it thus:

"It was a complete reversal of the normal pattern of human development. A place where a railway track had once carried trainloads of goods and people had been reclaimed by virgin forest, where the noisy huffing of steam engines had long since lost our to the jungle’s looking silence…I was travelling through a country with more past than future, a place where the hands of the clock spin not forwards, but backwards."