Into the heart of darkness

Four years ago Chloe Baker set out with two friends to cross the Congo River basin. She tells India Sturgis about the gripping journey and the book it produced

There is a parable about a scorpion and a crocodile that is frequently used when trying to describe the incomprehensible savagery of the Congo, and has since been picked up by children’s writers, including Roald Dahl. The story goes that a scorpion asks a crocodile for help crossing a river. The crocodile is nervous, fearing he’ll be stung and they’ll both drown. The scorpion laughs and says that would be ridiculous, he would never commit an act that would amount to suicide. Nevertheless, halfway across the river the scorpion has a sudden urge and stings the crocodile and they both sink like a stone. Just before they do, the scorpion whispers in the crocodile’s ear: “That’s the way it is. This is the Congo. Don’t try to understand.” For Chloe Baker, the story has come to explain and define her torturous and mud, sweat and blood-soaked journey across the country four years ago. With two friends – Army officer Mike Martin and Charlie Hatch-Barnwell, a photographer and manager of a kebab shop – the 31-year-old intensive care doctor and anaesthetist drove a 26-year-old D-reg Land Rover named 9Bob (“because the man who had sold him to us was bent as a nine bob note”) through some of the most inhospitable terrain and dangerous tribal regions in the world. She describes the “accidental” trip – they had originally set off around west Africa as a travelling break in between jobs to improve their French – to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) as a “ridiculous adventure”.

Encounters with kleptocratic officials, biting ants that numbed their limbs and bank clerks who refused to accept money that was not ironed flat meant that the normal rules of travel, as the crocodile found, did not apply.

“You go through the country thinking you are the ones with the problem, or the ones that don’t understand. Everything is topsyturvy. It is almost like one of those Dalíesque dreams,” Baker says, when we meet in the sitting room of the modest flat she shares with a friend in east London.

“We were prepared for the journey, but not for the Congo specifically. You need three times as much of whatever it is that you expect to take anywhere else; three times as much money, spare tyres and spare parts.”

The 2,500-mile journey took them from the western capital Kinshasa to Juba in South Sudan, and they believe they are the first to have driven the full breadth of the country independently in a car. The only direct link they had with home throughout the two-month leg was a satellite tracker to alert Baker’s father to trouble once they found themselves in it, until the battery fizzled out halfway through.

“That was rookie,” concedes Baker, who is a picture of measured resilience, calm and poise. The only memento she has kept of her journey is a machete, used to hack back the jungle so they could drive through particularly thick patches, and two leather-bound diaries.

In many villages, only those old enough to remember life under Belgian rule before the country won independence in 1960 had seen a car before, and the travellers were routinely swamped with attention, with young boys hanging on to their bumpers.

Such was the drama of the trip, they waited until late autumn to tell their story in the book Crossing the Congo: Over Land and Water in a Hard Place. It’s a raw account of AK-47s being pointed at their necks (“My mum thinks I have a death wish”), of being placed under house

Chloe Baker gets advice from local villagers on likely routes