We’re not here for the fang-and-claw dramas of the savannah, but to feel the majesty of the world’s second-largest tropical rainforest.
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I’m on a 12-day Classic Safari Company cruise along the Sangha and Congo rivers aboard Princesse Ngalessa, a modestly luxurious riverboat operated by Brazzaville-based Ducret Expeditions. For the first time, travellers from the outside world can make the journey along the Sangha and the Congo in air-conditioned suites with a well-stocked bar and a daily laundry service.
It’s a different world from the Africa seen from the back of a safari jeep, but there are rewards. There are termite colonies chewing with a crackling sound like rain falling on leaves and hornbills untangling themselves from the forest, rising with great draughts of air from beating wings. Once the branches shake and a troop of long-haired colobus monkeys swings through the canopy like they’re on a zipline.
It’s a relaxing morning, watching the forest drift past, the coming and going of garfish-thin dugout canoes and sometimes a house in a clearing along the bank, with boisterous kids waving and shouting at our floating hotel.By mid-afternoon we reach the village of Tokou, and a welcome from a massed choir of 70 villagers singing, clapping and serenading us as we climb the muddy slope.
The river slowly loses its fragile innocence. The villages grow larger, thatched roofs give way to corrugated iron and marshland and cultivated gardens replace the swollen forest. We’ve left the hunter-gatherer wilderness for farmers’ fields. Then the river broadens, and we leave the 300-metre- wide Sangha for the 10-kilometre span of the Congo River.
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