MOSSAKA-OWANDO CANOE

A Congolese cruise that has nothing to do with tourism. If it takes around two days to complete the journey, it's because the double pirogues stop at a large number of villages and fishing camps, here to buy foodstuffs, there to check on relatives or to load a passenger. The pinassiers negotiate, buy and sell at the Owando market. Itinerant river trade. This means not being in a hurry to arrive, and being able to wait two hours on the pirogue for a distant cousin to go into the swamps to fetch three fish. The reward: the pirogue winds its way up the Likouala-Moussaka, then the Kouyou River to Owando: the slowness, the stops at inaccessible fishing camps, the opulent beauty of the wooded shores, the sunsets when the sun seems dilated to explode. We sleep, eat and trade on the pirogue, which is soon loaded with everything produced by the river and the surrounding swamps: dried fish, basins of eels, bushmeat, but also wheelbarrows, sacks of onions and flour, bales of manioc, an inventory impossible to make, a cross-sectional vision of the Congo as it lives from day to day.

Tip: bring a mosquito net to wrap yourself in at nightfall, long clothes and thick, high-cut socks, a little wool as the humidity can make it bitterly cold, provisions and water as supplies are very unpredictable.