A winner all the way
HITCHED: CONGO: RIVETING AND FUNNY HITCHIKING ADVENTURE TO DRC
In one episode, Jordan takes down his pants to convince bar patrons he’s not Luke’s mother.
Cousins Luke MacDonald and Jordan Deall decided one day to go in search of a dinosaur in the Congo. Hitched is their story. As TV show pitches go, Hitched is kind of out there. “What we’re thinking is we’re going to hitchhike from Durban to the Democratic Republic of Congo to see if there’s anything behind the legend of Mokele-Mbembe – Africa’s own Jurassic version of Big Foot.”
And yet that’s just what cousins Luke MacDonald and Jordan Deall threw in the direction of the Discovery Channel. The result is Hitched: Congo, a 10-part documentary that follows them over 107 days and 15 000km through 10 countries. While they did spring for the odd bus ride, most of the distance was covered thanks to strangers who offered them lifts.
Naturally, the first question that comes to mind is: what on earth made them want to do this?
“Every time you see a show like this, it’s sensationalised. Young people get the impression that to try this you have to be Bear Grylls,” says Luke. “We wanted to dispel that myth.”
Jordan and Luke probably didn’t really think they’d find Mokele-Mbembe. Rather, the more time one spends in their company, the more one realises that Mokele-Mbembe was just an excuse to hit the road.
Luke and Jordan were bitten by the travel bug after they finished university five years ago. They were with friends having drinks and someone came up with the idea of seeing how far they could hitchhike into Africa on the smallest amount of money.
Jordan says: “I had about eight grand but someone had five. So we decided to go with the least amount and see how far that would get us.”
It turned out that R5 000 was enough to get them from Durban to Cairo. “We even had change left,” smiles Jordan.
“That birthed this thing in us that made us think this was how we’d like to travel.”
They ran into their fair share of trials, some of which were more serious than the language barrier, dehydration and sitting on a road for hours waiting for lifts.
“I got a couple of strains of malaria,” says Luke. “It’s the sort of thing that is dealt with every day in Africa, but with our background and not being used to it we weren’t really sure what to do.”
Jordan adds: “With malaria you’re kind of all right if you catch it in the first couple of days.
“But in our case we got stuck on a sandbank in the Congo for about 10 days, which is when Luke came down with it.
“I lost my bag – it fell off in the water – and I had all the malaria medication. So it was touch and go for a while.”
Then there’s the fact that the destination was the war-wracked DRC. Luke says: “It’s such an everyday thing that there’ll be a shootout in the village and everyone runs for cover. The next day things go back to normal.”
What makes Hitched: Congo so worth the watch is the infectious personalities of these travellers.
They get into some scrapes – at one point they were thrown in jail for a week – but these are intercut with episodes like Jordan taking his trousers down to convince bar patrons he was neither Luke’s mother, nor the cameraman’s wife.