Just as I was about to give in and admit I had to stop, we rounded a bend in the track and came upon a sizeable river. It was one of the thousands of tributaries to the mighty Congo, about a football pitch wide and the colour of milky tea. The water seemed so still that to begin with I couldn’t tell which way it was flowing. Though we’d barely seen anyone as we’d fought our way to this point, there was a man waiting next to the river. He was skeletally thin and leaning on an old bicycle hung with big, heavy-looking plastic containers. Amelia immediately jumped down and started talking to him with Marcel. Apparently he was transporting palm oil. His bike, I noticed, had no pedals: he was using it as a means of lugging his wares. It struck me that if it had taken us all those hours to motorbike here, he must have been pushing his incredibly heavy load down that miserable track for days. Immediately I felt less sorry for myself.

‘He’s waiting for the ferry,’ Amelia explained. ‘Apparently there’s one due today.’

‘Just “today”?’

‘That’s what he says.’

‘What do we do until it gets here?’ I asked.

It was a stupid question and it got the answer it deserved from Marcel. ‘Nous attendons,’ he said, adding the translation himself: ‘We wait.’

A cloud of mosquitoes had already gathered, whining around us, but since we were here on account of me I couldn’t complain, and as it was we didn’t have long to wait. Marcel had just broken out some water for us to drink, and we were passing it round, when the ‘ferry’ drifted into view. I don’t know what I’d been expecting, but not this. The boat was a hollowed out tree trunk. In the distance it looked like the black husk of a seed pod. Up close it was actually pretty big.

‘What do you call that?’ I said to myself as much as anyone.

‘The French name is pirogue, but you can call it a dugout canoe,’ Amelia replied.

‘Right.’

‘Think about it: no seams. It’s all one piece. Properly watertight. This design hasn’t changed for hundreds of years.’