Two men were piloting the ferry, one at the front and one at the back. They swung it into the bank gently and three women climbed out. All of them were carrying plastic drums that looked as heavy as the cycle-pusher’s. One also had a package on her head, wrapped in yellow leaves and tied up with actual vines. She smiled at me as she passed us, and the kindness in her eyes was so like Mum’s I had to look away. Where was my mum now? Was this attempt to track her and Dad down a fool’s errand? I couldn’t allow myself to think that. But here we were, in the middle of nowhere. The landscape around me stretched infinitely in that moment. I fought back a sudden, stabbing hopelessness by manhandling my motorbike to the edge of the river bank.

The dugout was surprisingly deep: the tree it was cut from must have been massive. Even so, I didn’t expect the ferryman to load both our bikes, our packs and the bicycle laden with palm oil into it in one go. But that’s what he did, and with all of us passengers loaded in as well we sat low in the water, the surface less than a handspan from the gunwales.

I stayed very still in the bottom of that canoe. We all did. If the oarsmen had caught a crab and rocked the boat more than a little one way or the other it would have filled with water and sunk instantly. But having presumably made the trip thousands of times, the pilots moved as gently as the river and we were soon safely on the other side.