‘Mzee says that you are wrong; he says that the source of the Nile is not this way’ translated a ranger with the men accompanying us deep into Rwanda’s Nyungwe National Park. He was repeating a claim Mzee had made no less than half a dozen times that day. Mzee is a Twa (forest dweller) and the top of his head is well below the height of my shoulders. He might also be known as a pygmy and was asked to guide us to the source of the Nile deep in the Nyungwe Forest. He crawled on his hands and knees with ease under the labyrinth of vines in the forest then waded thigh deep through the rocky river bed in his bare feet and rolled up trousers. I tried to follow once. Despite our rolls of laminated maps, the latest models of hand-held GPS and our confidence, Mzee had little faith. To his credit he followed our directions, he dropped over cliffs with us, slashed his way through thousands of vines and huddled in the ever present mud from the thunderous storms that engulfed us each day.
By the time, we had reached Nyungwe Forest, we had travelled over 6650 kms of the Nile highlighting the controversy that still surrounds the biggest geographical mystery of our times. Our obsession became to travel to the longest source of the Nile and we weren’t about to be deterred at the final hurdle; albeit a substantial one. Since childhood, I had been fascinated with the Nile, the ancient Egyptians and the mysteries surrounding its sources. I have made something of a career of leading first descents of rivers around the world for the last 25-years but never had I travelled up a river. It was the ancients in Egypt who first conceived of the possibility thousands of years ago but no-one had ever succeeded. Neil’s enthusiasm for the idea, the recently signed peace agreement in South Sudan and Diver McIntyre’s willingness make up our core team meant we had the beginnings of an expedition that exceeded my wildest dreams.
There were moments of doubt. Everything can happen so fast when you are racing at over 40kph against a raging torrent. I lacked the conviction we needed as we neared the top of a huge rapid in the heart of Murchison Falls National Park. One needs to be fully committed but the sheer size and power of this rapid surprised me. The further we made our way rapid, the more I became intimidated to the point where I felt to turn around would almost certainly resulted in a flip. In a split-second decision, I eased off the throttle where I should have accelerated as we leapt over the lip of the top wave before landing on the smooth racing tongue of the rapid. I regretted the decision almost immediately as the river dropped away beneath us. Juma and I were soon airborne alongside our Zap Cat. I could hear the propeller singing in the air above the roar of the rapid and moments later my world went dark and silent. My legs were thrown violently over my head and I somersaulted as the rest of my body plunged into the raging river. My right knee had connected heavily with the solid case as I exited ungraciously from the boat but this pain faded into insignificance in light of our predicament. Only minutes early, we had witnessed a huge crocodile slip into the water downstream and we were now at the mercy of the swollen Nile heading into the territory of one the most dangerous animals on the planet. Ever looked at an evolution chart? Crocs haven’t changed much because they are very, very good at what they do and Nile crocodiles come with the most formidable of reputations.
We survived that incident and dozens of others as challenging but the following day we were attacked by rebels of the LRA (Lords Resistance Army) in the remote Northern part of the park. What had begun as something of a mellow day (compared to the action packed river days that had preceded it) resulted in the death of my friend Steve Willis. He had come selflessly to help us and laid down his life for friend in need and for this I will always be grateful.
While we don’t deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as the eccentric Victorian explorers, what we were able to do was to take up the exploration of the Nile where they left off with the support of Fortnum and Mason. We used outboard motors, GPS and Google Earth to travel over 98% of the rivers length in our small Zap cats. The Ascend the Nile Expedition used a wide collection of maps, some of which were over 150-years old because they contained the most detail but the most revealing where the detailed topographical maps published by the Belgian Government in 1937 which Neil dusted off deep in the map room of Royal Geographic Society in London. In his usual thorough manner, he was able to prove that the ‘Kandt source’ (widely accepted as Rwanda’s source of the Nile) was one of dozens of sources of the Nile in the Nyungwe National Park but it was not the longest. I argue that when climbing Mt. Everest, mountaineers from the world over climb to the highest summit of the mountain not the North Ridge or the South Summit. Using similar logic, we completed world’s longest river journey by following the upper reaches of the Nile to its longest source, not its highest, its largest or it’s most southerly.
Of the 2% of the Nile, we were unable to navigate by boat, we did some of this by air. Neil piloted a FIB (Flying Inflatable Boat) which looks a little like something James Bond might have used in the sixties. A small inflatable was attached to an ultra-light and he was able to fly the deflated zap cats over Murchison Falls, taxi between curious pods of hippos and use the disturbed water between crocodile resting places as a runway. It was an incredible sight to see hippos scatter as the curious looking craft took to the air and then finally crashed the day before Steve Willis was killed. Undeterred, Neil suggested impassable rapids in the Jinja section became the realm of the helicopter. We raced along in our zap cats at 20kmph beneath the helicopter, hooked onto the hanging strop and were lifted from the Nile with our outboards still running.
The GPS (Global Positioning System) we used connects with satellites orbiting the earth allowing one to pinpoint a position anywhere on the globe to within metres. The three GPS we carried (so as to record independent and backup data) also allowed us to track our position by satellite all the way from the Mediterranean Sea (near Rashid) to the upper reaches of the Rukarara River deep in the Nyungwe Forest. The tens of thousands of points we plotted on the in-build maps in the GPS (for some stretches of our journey, we recorded them every 10 metres) can only be recorded by physically being in those locations. It is impossible to fabricate this data in any other way. The data we collected is electronic proof that the Nile is actually 6718 kms long or 107 kms longer than it was generally believed to be. No-one has ever measured the river from the ‘ground’ (or more accurately the water) before and in the past measurements of the mighty river were made by cartographers tracing pieces of string or similar on maps.
From the Belgian maps, we pinpointed the longest source on the GPSs we carried with us and navigated our way through the heart of Africa’s largest montane forest despite the vocal protests of our guides and porters. What Reuters fondly called the ‘Mac Source of the Nile’ is the longest and farthest source of the Nile from the sea. It has been recognised by cartographers well before us but quite simply no-one had been there before. When we finally reached the ‘Mac Source’ Mzee had the biggest smile of all.
Cam McLeay, Co-leader, Ascend the Nile
Founder Adrift Adventure Co.
www.adrift.ug
