Ascend the Nile

A delightful, cooling breeze in my face, frequent splashes from the River Nile and racing past thousands of years of history.  At the helm of the little Zap cats, powered by the singing outboard motor, we were racing up the Nile from it’s mouth in the Mediterranean Sea to it’s longest source.   From the mighty deserts of Egypt and Sudan to the lush tropical forests and mountains of Uganda, Tanzania and Rwanda, the little boats were making the world’s longest river journey to the longest source of the Nile in the Nyungwe Forest in Rwanda.   They encountered the Dinka in Southern Sudan (the tallest race on the planet) and the Batwa in Rwanda – the smallest.  The swift little boats traced the course of the Nile upstream as man had been trying to do for thousands of years before us.

Imagine fulfilling a childhood dream over four decades after it was first spawned.   Between September 2005 and March 2006, Neil McGrigor, Garth MacIntyre and Cam McLeay followed the Nile upstream (for the first time ever), travelling over 98% of the legendary river by boat to what has now become known as the ‘Mac Source’ in the Nyungwe Forest in Rwanda.  For the first time ever, the Nile was measured from river level using GPS and the river was found to be over 107 kms longer than previously thought or 6718 kms in length.  Most measurements in the past had consisted of laying a piece of string on a map and measuring that piece of string, but the Ascend the Nile expedition could prove categorically where the river flowed and what it’s length was.

Joanna Lumley brought attention to the ‘Ascend the Nile’ expedition again recently in her series for ITV ‘Joanna Lumley’s Nile’.  She rode in one of the Zap cats with Cam McLeay along a section of the Nile in Uganda, felt the thrill as the boat playfully skipped up the rapids and marveled at the beauty of the Nile in Uganda.  She later traveled with Cam McLeay through Rwanda to the Nyungwe forest where they found the headwaters of the Rukarara river, the Nile’s longest tributary and traced these to the ‘Mac Source’ of the mighty river.

The expedition has also been capture in print by Random House, New Zealand.  Look out for ‘Ascend the Nile’ by Garth MacIntyre, Neil McGrigor and Cam McLeay.

Tagged as: Cam McLeay, expedition