A day on the trail - Page 1

Paul and Clarissa Augustinus spent six weeks in the Ndoki forest in December of 1995. This is an excerpt from the upcoming book of that journey by Paul Augustinus - due to be published in late 2005.

Halfway through the first day of the new-year, we were already exhausted. Both I, and my wife Clarissa, and two pygmies, had laboriously been hacking our way through the jungle undergrowth for several hours. Although it was nearing midday, we toiled through the soft gloomy twilight of the forest floor. High above us, where the spreading canopies of rainforest giants met, only a few chinks of sky could be seen. The humidity was such that we were as wet as if a bucket had been poured over us. Condensation fogged my glasses continuously and every five minutes I would have to remove and clean them. Voracious insects were a constant distraction and every footstep had to be planned to avoid the ubiquitous streams of biting ants which poured across the forest floor. Then, somewhere in the distance, a forest elephant trumpeted, an evocative reminder to me of where we really were, but also confirmation that we were headed in the right direction.
Sometimes the two pygmies, improbably called Gaston and Daniel, found a game-path that suited our direction of travel. Then, free of the clutching thorns and nettles, we would sail along beneath the canopy towards a bai, our intended destination. These 'bai', the local description for a clearing in the forest, are the favorite haunt of forest animals, therefore the best place possible for sighting them. They were the 'prize' to be searched out and finding one was like being reborn. Ahead, a bright opening would appear, like the mouth of a railway tunnel and then suddenly one would break out from the grasp of a twilight world, to be dazzled by sunlight. Whether they were a few meters wide with only a mud patch in the center, or as large as a kilometer across with streams and swampy grass, they were rare, beautiful, jewels set far apart in the unbroken green monotony of the Congolese rainforest. But sometimes trying to find them seemed as futile as searching for a tiny island in a vast ocean. Similarly, to be lost here would be the same as being lost in a dinghy on the vastness of that same ocean. However, we were blindly confident that our companions knew exactly where they were. This was their territory, their whole world, and seemingly they knew every path. It was conceivable that for the last ten thousand years their ancestors had probably hunted here. By contrast Clarissa and I only knew approximately where we were - namely somewhere in the vast, pristine, rainforest tracts of the northern part of the Congo basin, but close by to a river called the Ndoki. We were as alone as was possible in Africa in the last decade of the second millennium, and yet our situation and experiences was exactly the same as those described by F.G. Merfield in the 1920s...........To page 2 >