by Simon Reeve
An elderly man in a suit sitting alone a few rows ahead crossed himself. I stopped breathing. The whole train seemed to sigh and exhale as we reached solid tracks.
At a remote stop called Lopé we left the train and clambered into four-wheel drives for a journey into the rainforest. Roads were terrible, and time and again we had to push and winch the vehicles out of muddy holes.
Eventually we found a place to camp deep in the forest. As darkness fell, it was spell-binding. Light from the moon or stars could not penetrate the canopy, and the forest was pitch-black and filled with a cacophony of nocturnal life. I drifted off, snug in a sleeping bag, hearing the eerie wild cry of primates in the distance. The whole area was riddled with Ebola. Apes had been badly affected and Ebola can spread from primates to humans. Over the previous decade a third of the world’s entire gorilla population had succumbed to the awful disease.
When I poked my head out of the tent in the morning the drivers were already up. They looked downcast and embarrassed. Their boss had been on the phone overnight. If we wanted them to take us any further we had to pay an additional chunk of cash, nearly $2,000.
‘What?’ I said. ‘Two thousand dollars, are you kidding?’
The driver shook his head. He held up his mobile phone. ‘The boss,’ he said. ‘It’s what he told us to tell you.’
It was outright blackmail. They took us another hour or so further along the track, but then one of them received a text message ordering them to get the money out of us or turn back. We refused to pay. So they helped us unload our gear and abandoned us, deep in the Lopé forest.
We knew that somewhere ahead was the Mikongo camp, home to a team of researchers, and we set off towards it on foot, each of us carrying a heavy load of kit, clothes and equipment.
Surrounded by tall, dark trees I started to wonder whether we’d be spending a second night on our own in the forest, when researchers from the Mikongo camp appeared, alerted on a radio to our plight, and helped to carry and lead us towards their sanctuary, a scattering of wooden buildings in a sunny clearing.
Researchers at the centre were monitoring the impact of the Ebola virus on the local ape population. They showed us a stack of gorilla and chimpanzee skulls that were victims of the dreaded disease. I picked up a couple for a closer look before the researchers suggested they were best left alone. Washing my hands with disinfectant made me feel safer, but I couldn’t shake a nagging feeling something awful from the forest had implanted itself in my brain.
The team based at Mikongo were also studying lowland gorillas in their natural habitat, and they suggested we could trek into the jungle with their researchers. We plunged into the trees led by wiry local tracker Donald Ndongo and began to explore.
Lowland gorillas can wander several miles a day, so in the dense forest the odds of a sighting are not great. Between June and November more than a thousand mandrills can also congregate in the jungle, thought to be the largest non-human gatherings of primates anywhere in the world. I had dreams of an Attenborough-style encounter with huge primates in the jungle. Unfortunately, it was April and we couldn’t even find droppings.
But tracking in the jungle was endlessly exciting. The entire ecosystem is alien and surprising. Donald was a mine of information on trees that bled red, and plants used for fighting fever, even as he clucked away noisily to alert gorillas to our presence.
‘A surprised gorilla is a frightened gorilla,’ Donald said sagely. ‘And a frightened gorilla is not something you want to stumble across. Far better that we let them know we are coming. Then they can decide if they want to say hello.’
Pushing through the jungle was a challenge, but after a few hours we finally spotted, followed and filmed putty-nosed monkeys. It was an incredible treat. Sam, our cameraman, had been lugging a heavy camera while we took it in turns to carry the tripod. Long shots of our distant cousins flitting through the trees made the entire experience memorable and a joy – even if we sweated buckets in the equatorial heat and all of us were bitten to pieces by ferocious mosquitoes and insects the size of small sparrows.
Gabon clearly offers both more and less than a standard safari. More, in the sense that, after trekking and sweating through the rainforest, there is the chance of genuine and spontaneous wildlife discoveries. Compare that with a traditional safari in South or East Africa, where you can find yourself watching a bored cheetah on the open savannah while sitting in a jeep with honeymooners from Texas and Bavaria. And Gabon offers less, in that much of the country is thick green jungle, and you might only catch a rear-end glimpse of a mandrill or a gorilla as it heads in the wrong direction. In the rainforest there are no guarantees of a wildlife encounter.
Donald, whose father was a proud hunter (‘never a poacher’, he added quickly), explained how life was changing since the President decided to target wealthy tourists. Villagers who live in and around national parks had suddenly been banned from hunting in the forests.
‘It’s been a big shock for them,’ he said. ‘We try to explain that it’s for the benefit of the country, but they need to eat, so they need to see the benefits of tourism quickly.’
Donald took us to the village of Makoghé, on the outskirts of the forest, where Jean Jacques, the energetic headman, had been struggling to hold his community together since the hunting ban. Overnight traditional hunting grounds had been taken away and an entire way of life had gone. Jean Jacques told me that as an alternative income for the community he had started organising traditional dances for paying foreigners.
Men from the village started drumming and some of the women started singing and dancing while a small group of visitors watched politely and snapped away with their cameras. It was clearly all very new to the villagers. More than once I saw a lady nudging another and reminding her to lead the next move. But this was their new economy. One young man used a clenched fist as a microphone to announce the dancers while others passed among us collecting payment.
I had a moment with the chief and he asked me to make sure people in the outside world knew they were welcome in Makoghé.
‘Tourism is all we have now,’ he said.
His message was clear: if you want us to stop hunting the wildlife, someone needs to provide us with an alternative means of putting food on the table.
Wildlife across Africa must be protected. But what about the humans? The Lopé forest is a lush wilderness, but it is also a home to thousands of Gabonese living in villages scattered around and in the middle of the new national park area. With a bit of guidance and training, the villagers of Makoghé and other small communities nearby could be helped to make money from guiding, hosting and feeding tourists. But often conservationists, even the most well-meaning, think that villagers, with their livestock and human diseases, should be forced to move so that national parks can be protected as natural wilderness.
‘Now that hunting is forbidden we have animals hunting our cattle and eating our crops,’ said Jean Jacques. ‘And if we do anything about it we get into trouble.’
I have heard this story in several forms on my travels. Across sub-Saharan Africa, populations are expanding but natural resources are scarce, so humans and animals compete for land, food and water. Villagers find themselves on land that governments or conservation groups want to earmark for animals and exploit for tourist dollars.
Everyone knows that evil corporations push native peoples off their lands for oil or timber. But across the world, some conservation groups have occasionally done much the same, wrecking lives and cultures to create national parks. Bernhard Grzimek, who helped create the Serengeti National Park, and Joy Adamson of Born Free fame were both accused of expelling locals from land they wanted for animals.
National parks should be a powerful protection for Gabon’s wildlife, but I wondered what would become of Jean Jacques and Makoghé.
We left the community and headed back to the station. Our journey further east was blocked by the Ebola outbreak in Congo-Brazzaville, and our incoming train
back towards Libreville was late. A herd of drunken elephants had wandered in front of the train deep in the Gabonese jungle. Four of the elephants had been killed, and the engine and two carriages had been derailed. The line was completely blocked.
The stationmaster sweated profusely as he explained the problem to our small group waiting on the Lopé station platform.
‘It’s the iboga fruit they keep eating,’ he grumbled, apparently annoyed at the herd’s failure to obey railway regulations. ‘They get intoxicated and stagger around on our lines.’
It was another day before the line was cleared and we arrived back in the capital, Libreville. By the time I made it to bed that night my muscles were aching. I dreamt of sickly gorillas. Then woke in the early hours to my very own medical nightmare.
After Sophie, Sam and Linel had half-carried me back to my room they had a hurried chat. We had all been on remote medical courses and were travelling with a trauma kit for injuries and packs of pills for dealing with pain, fevers and infections. We had our common sense but none of us were paramedics and this was clearly something serious. Sophie rang London for advice and help. An expert was lined up on the phone.
My temperature was rising: 39.7, 39.8, 39.9. The room was warm, I was feverish, but I was also shaking and cold. Linel rang a local doctor and asked him to jump in a taxi. Sam remembered that on our delayed returning train we’d briefly met a young German doctor who was working at the nearby Albert Schweitzer Hospital, one of the best research centres on the continent for tropical diseases. It was a chance encounter that ultimately helped to save my life. Sam could remember the doctor was called Jenny but couldn’t get through to the hospital on the phone. He jumped in a car and sped off to find her.
I was drifting in and out of consciousness, with a temperature that left me just a shade off brain impairment, and I was hallucinating. I thought Mr T from the A-Team was in the room helping to look after me, with his Afro Mohawk and gold jewellery. It took a while for Sophie and Linel to work out what I was talking about while I mumbled incoherently to my childhood hero. Sophie was able to laugh about it. Linel remained baffled until much later when we had a chance to explain. The A-Team weren’t big in Gabon.
Linel’s doctor arrived first. I came round in time to find him examining me. I was terrified. I was still convinced I had contracted Ebola.
‘Where we were planning to go next,’ I mumbled. ‘My brain’s not working. I feel so rough.’
The doctor spent a few minutes checking me over before he was ready to deliver his verdict.
‘What do you think it is?’ I asked.
‘Malaria.’
I’ve never felt such an immediate relief. Malaria. Thank God. Not Ebola. My eyeballs wouldn’t bleed. I wouldn’t haemorrhage internally. Anything was better than Ebola.
Then there was a dawning realisation.
Hang on. Malaria isn’t good.
Sam arrived back at the hotel with Dr Jenny. She gave the same diagnosis. A medic in London ticked off a checklist of symptoms and also confirmed the judgement.
But Jenny offered some practical help. She had brought a packet of Artemether with her, a newish drug derived from Vietnamese sweet wormwood that was not regulated or allowed in the UK, but was showing great promise as a treatment for malaria in Africa and Asia.
‘Look, you will have to check with your people in London whether he can take it, but I think it could really help,’ she told Sophie and Sam. ‘The journey is over, at least for now, but this could save his life.’
Linel’s doctor agreed. The London medic told Sophie the two doctors standing in my room were the best source of advice.
While I had a moment of clarity the team called my partner Anya, at the basement flat where we lived together in North London. They told her what was happening and the drugs Jenny had brought. We talked down the line, or at least I mumbled. I told her Mr T was there looking after me. Anya remained calm. She was cradling the phone and scanning the internet at the same time.
‘I think you should take it,’ she told me. ‘Simon, can you understand? I think you should take the drugs. It won’t be easy. It says here that roughly four hours after you take the pills World War Three will break out in your body.’
Artemether works by persuading malarial parasites to launch their attack before they are fully armed and ready. I had no choice. I took the pills. Six chunky tablets, braced with a cocktail of other drugs and paracetamol to get my temperature down. Four hours later I was doubled up with the most intense sickness I had ever experienced. I had a full-blown malarial assault and my temperature leapt around like the bearing in a pinball machine.
The attack went on for twenty-four hours. I was so weak, I could barely lift my head. I spent the next few days just sleeping before I was able to get out of bed. The sickness was a key turning point in my life. Before I had malaria I felt fit, energetic and just a little bit immortal. I’ve never felt the same since.
Throughout history, malaria has been our greatest enemy. It’s thought that up to half of all the humans who have ever lived have died of malaria. Millions of Africans are still infected each year and thousands of children on the continent die every single day from the disease. The mosquito-borne virus is one of the great curses of the tropics, a disease found almost entirely between the Tropics of Capricorn and Cancer. We might have forgotten about it in the temperate West, but in Africa especially it can still dominate life. I have been in some areas of Africa where the incidence of malaria is more than 200 per cent. How is that possible? People are infected more than once a year. How can you have a fully functioning society when you are permanently dealing with that sort of catastrophe? Malaria is a spectre that haunts the continent. But if malaria still affected Europe, I have no doubt drug companies and governments would be working around the clock to find a way to beat the disease.
I was lucky. As a privileged, foreign TV presenter travelling in Africa I had swift access to qualified help and rare drugs. I was also stupid. I knew I was in a danger zone but had forgotten to take my anti-malaria drugs. It is not a mistake anyone makes twice.
My recovery was slow and in stages. After a few days I was able to lie on some bedding outside in the rough garden of our dodgy hotel. I still felt awful inside, and desperately weak, but I could open my eyes and my brain had started to function.
There was time for reflection, a bit of self-pity and then gratitude. I’d had a good run, I decided. I never thought TV presenting would be much of a career. If it ended then I would have already banked memories to last a lifetime. I had travelled through some of the most remote and beautiful areas of the world. I tried to tot up how many countries I’d visited. It was scores. I lay there in that grotty hotel garden and chuckled away to myself. I was sick and drained of energy. But I was in Gabon. I had been a teenage delinquent who left school without qualifications and went on the dole. I suffered from depression and mental health issues and was a whisker from suicide. But I had overcome my fears and failings, written books, travelled the world and met some of the most inspiring and extraordinary people on the planet.
How on earth had I been so lucky?
CHAPTER TWO
Mystery Tours
I grew up in Acton, West London, the hinterland between the inner city and the suburbs. We lived in a far corner of the otherwise leafy borough of Ealing, but on the edge of gritty Shepherd’s Bush and White City. With my younger brother James, I had a childhood that was small and simple in a modest three-bedroom semi, which our mum and dad bought through years of grafting.
My father Alan was a strong, competitive man who grew up in rural Norfolk as an only child. A champion tennis player in his twenties, he lost a crucial match that would have put him into the Wimbledon championships, and still played tennis hard for the rest of his life. He was young when his father died and his mother had raised him on her own. It can’t have been easy, but he struggled and studied, and eventually made it to college, trained and became a maths teacher at a
tough comprehensive school in North-West London. Dad was one of the last teachers to qualify without a degree, a huge achievement. But the lack of a university education held him back, which riled him as years ticked by and he was passed over for promotions. Dad never earned vast sums, but he was careful with money and took on private students to supplement his income and pay for our home, the only one I ever knew. My mum Cindy still lives there. She survived a similar start in life to my dad. Her father died when she was young, just nine years old, and she was brought up in a single-parent household by my Grandma Lucy. Mum studied domestic science and then worked in restaurants, kitchens and sold sausages in a supermarket around the time she met my dad. It wasn’t the most glamorous of starts, but they look blissfully happy in their wedding photos.
I was born in 1972, and my earliest memory is pain. Extreme pain. At four years old I was sick for a few days and the GP said I had sinusitis. Mum was not convinced. When my condition took a turn for the worse she called the hospital and was put through to a sympathetic specialist.
‘That doesn’t sound like sinusitis,’ said the doctor. ‘That sounds like a serious case of meningitis. Put the phone down, call an ambulance and get him here right now.’
It took a doctor, two nurses and my mum to hold down my wriggling, screaming little body while I was given a lumbar puncture to diagnose and confirm meningitis. It is an excruciating procedure where fluid is extracted through a large needle shoved up your spine. Deep within me I still sense the pain and shudder and squirm at the memory. The deadly meningitis was easy compared to the puncture, and after a few weeks I recovered from that only to have tonsillitis. My tonsils were whipped out quickly, just in time for me to contract pneumonia, and I nearly died all over again. It hadn’t been spotted by the doctors. I’m only here today because Mum knew something was wrong and wouldn’t take no for an answer. I ticked through a few of my nine lives as a tot. I hate to think how many I have left now after years of adventures.
