by Dom Joly
‘Slow please . . .’
‘I’m a monster-hunter . . .’
‘Ghostbusters?’
I looked out of the window and prayed for the cab ride to end soon. I’d really had it with Japanese taxis.
I didn’t have long in Tokyo before flying out and I was seriously annoyed that I’d been unable to find a monster in the land of Godzilla. I wondered whether Japanese monsters were more subtle than others. The Hibagon had garnered international attention because it seemed to be more of a traditional ‘Western’ type of monster of the Bigfoot variety that we could understand.
Most Japanese monsters are more understated and can probably only really be understood or ‘discovered’ once you understand the Japanese psyche – something I was still a long way away from doing. I did a whistle-stop tour of the capital. I went to visit the weird manga kids in Harajuku who were all dressed up as zombies and scary nurses and freakazoid Goth characters. I found one who spoke English and asked her what she knew about the Hibagon.
‘Hibagon he big hairy gorilla monsta in Hiroshima . . . He cool.’
I asked her whether there were any monsters in Tokyo.
‘Monsta everywhere in Japan. Tree monsta, road monsta, shop monsta . . . Lot of monstas.’ She gesticulated all around us and I nodded, trying to look like I understood.
I left her and her friends posing like the world’s best tourist attraction while screaming at every tourist who tried to take their photo.
I headed for the Imperial Palace and spent ages wandering around the grounds trying to find the palace. It took me about an hour to realize that there isn’t one. Nobody had bothered to mention this in any of the guides.
I ended up in ‘Brand Street’, a huge boulevard bursting with every big-brand store you can think of. The place was packed with rampant shoppers seemingly having a great day out. It was my idea of total hell and I was about to head back to my skyscraping hotel room when I spotted the Ginza Lion. On a whim I wandered in and discovered a complete gem. Slap in the middle of Tokyo, this is an extraordinary Munich-style bierkeller. It was warm and atmospheric and buzzing with people: a Gothic retreat from the Metropolis. It was teatime and the place was full of gossipy tables of Japanese ladies. Instead of tea, however, everyone was brandishing pints of beer. The Japanese customers were all impeccably turned out, the men in suits or tweed and the women looking smart and hip. It wasn’t traditional dress but, as with much else, they had copied Western style but done it properly.
In the centre of the hall were a couple of tables of Westerners bedecked in sweat tops, hoodies and scruffy T-shirts. Had we moved on as a culture or had we lost something? I thought back to the cabbies in uniform, the smiling train conductors bowing to the carriage. I thought we’d lost something.
I sank my two-and-a-half-pint Sapporo with ease and ordered another one. I felt a lovely warm feeling come over me. Near the middle of the room I spotted a white-faced lady of about seventy. She was beautifully done up and in full traditional kimono garb. She had a healthy-looking glass of beer in front of her and was trying to eat beef and potato croquettes with chopsticks, a tricky task that she was accomplishing with much grace.
The following morning, and I was on the plane sitting on the runway at Narita airport nursing a rather splendid hangover. The stewardess was one of the same ones who’d been on the flight out.
‘Did you have a nice time in Japan?’ she asked.
‘Yes, I did,’ I replied.
‘Business or pleasure?’
‘A bit of both . . . I’m a monster-hunter.’
She gave me that look that people give to mental people who stagger up to them in the street, then moved on a little too fast to the next passenger. I looked out of the window and wondered whether she was right. Maybe I was a nutter and this was all a supremely pointless exercise? Then I remembered my Ogopogo spotting, the Super 8 footage of Bigfoot, the black-and-white photos of Nessie, the Yeti footprints in the Himalayan snow. Who knows what is right and what is wrong? I was on a great adventure and I was as likely to find something as anybody else. I took Robert Frost’s words for encouragement:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
I was off to the Congo next and that was definitely a road less travelled. As we taxied off the ground crew were all lined up and waving goodbye to our plane. In Heathrow they’d be watching porn on the laptop they’d nicked from your luggage.
Mokèlé-mbèmbé
‘”But what if the monsters come?’
“Fancy.” Kit looked away from the drama to stare at her sister, surprised. “We are the monsters.”’
Dia Reeves, Slice of Cherry
I sat on the rotating stool at the seafood bar in Terminal Four and tried to ignore the Russian couple sucking face right next to me.
I was heading to Brazzaville, capital of the Republic of Congo, by way of Nairobi. Stacey had been freaked out by the Congo. I’d tried to explain that I was going to the ‘good’ Congo as opposed to the ‘bad’ Congo. ‘Good’ Congo being the old French colony, the Republic of Congo. Yes, it had just had a civil war, but it was OK at the moment. ‘Bad’ Congo is the Democratic Republic of Congo, the old Belgian Congo. Experience has taught me that any country calling itself ‘democratic’ is always anything but (see East Germany and North Korea). The good and bad Congos face each other over the mighty river of the same name.
To make things worse there had been a Code Red terrorist alert in Nairobi on the eve of my departure. I had absolutely no idea what a Code Red was or what I should do about it. I’d tried to mouth some platitudes about this making the airport even safer but she was already in a tizz about the whole trip.
‘You’re going off on your own into the middle of bloody nowhere to look for a dinosaur? For fuck’s sake, Dom, you’ve got responsibilities . . .’
She was right, of course: it was unnecessary. But then again, if you play by those rules then everything is unnecessary – and she had to remember that I was one of the world’s foremost monster-hunters and knew no fear . . .
The more I looked into the Mokèlé-mbèmbé, the ‘Blocker of Rivers’, the more intrigued I became. In the vast swampy borderlands between Cameroon and the Congo is said to exist an aquatic creature that looks very much like a dinosaur. There have been reports of sightings going back to the very first Western explorers and local tribes have stories that go a lot further back in time. If there’s something undiscovered in the world, this is the sort of place where it might reside. The area is almost inaccessible and very few Westerners have ever been there – the combination of war and remoteness has kept most people away. This was going to be a proper, middle-of-nowhere adventure: just a guide, porters and me heading off into the heart of darkness.
My two destinations were the village of Boha and then Lake Tele, where the creature is supposed to live. Information was scarce but it seemed to be a two-day walk after an EU-blacklisted flight, a seven-hour car ride and an indeterminate boat journey. This was it. I was an adventurer, an intrepid explorer . . .
‘Excuse me . . .’ A sixteen-year-old blonde girl interrupted my reveries. ‘Were you on I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here!?’ She looked at me enquiringly having clearly been egged on by her pre-shaving companions in the queue for the plane to Nairobi . . .
‘No . . . It wasn’t me,’ I muttered.
‘Yeah, it was. Weren’t you the one who pooed on the camp toilet seat and didn’t clean it up?’
‘That wasn’t me. That was the stupid Playboy Bunny throwing false accusations about.’
‘So it is you! What’s your name? You were a comedian, weren’t you?’
I started to almost run for the plane.
It turned out my neighbour on board was also on an adventure. He was an ex-army officer who now worked on pirate patrol. He spent eight weeks on, eight weeks off cargo vessels defending them against Somali
pirate attacks.
We landed in Nairobi and as I got off the plane I felt the clammy wall of African heat. I made my way to my gate. The flight was going to Brazzaville and Kinshasa. It seemed that good and bad Congo shared a flight. There was a vast amount of people in the departure gate and they were a tough-looking bunch. There were three Westerners, a couple of Arabs, a handful of Chinese and the rest were Africans. It looked like the sort of plane that James Bond might hop on to and look around suspiciously.
Next to me sat an enormous Congolese man with a very annoying mobile-phone problem. Every two or three minutes his infernal ringtone would go off. It was a rather creepy voice whispering very loudly, ‘Boss, you have received a text message.’ To my right, a man was reading a local Nairobi newspaper -‘Moustachioed woman robs neighbourhood!!’ screamed the rather wonderful headline.
The plane was an hour late and the general consensus seemed to be that this was rather better than usual. I went for a wander to get a cup of coffee. At the bar sat a Sloaney English girl yacking away on her iPhone.
‘Yah, no, I’m in Kenya, on my way to Rwanda . . . I know . . . Totally weird . . . Absolutely . . . Yah . . . I’m meeting Milo . . .’
After an hour the packed room was explained: there were three delayed flights waiting – one for Zanzibar, one for Kigali and mine. I was secretly pleased that my lot looked decidedly rougher than the other two. The three Westerners were on other flights so I was the only non-African on mine apart from a lone Chinese man who looked decidedly shifty .
On the plane a surly African youth wearing the international costume of hip-hop twat was slouched in my seat. I explained the situation but Chocolate Ice just stared at me through dull, sullen eyes and didn’t move. Fortunately he was only about fifteen so I was able to be slightly more assertive than I might have been with an adult. He moved to the middle seat and I sat down only to find myself in another elbow war. Fortunately, there was quite lot of turbulence and mini-gangsta almost shat his overly baggy pants. To show how unconcerned I was I fell asleep on the window. I woke up just as we were coming in to land in Brazzaville. Through my dribble I could see rows and rows of houses with rusty corrugated-iron roofs. An eerie, misty cloud hung over the city.
Once on the ground I walked through surprisingly clean corridors, with every Congolese I met welcoming me to Brazzaville. It all seemed very friendly and organized. Maybe I’d got the wrong end of the stick?
Then I got to passport control.
I handed over my passport and vaccination forms to an official staring at me in exactly the same way as the sullen youth had on the plane. He spoke to me in heavily accented French. This was to be the same throughout my journey in the Congo. Fortunately, having grown up in the Lebanon, I’m bilingual. (I have therefore translated all conversations into English for the purposes of this book.)
I gave the official my passport and he flicked through it rather contemptuously. He got to the page that had my visa.
‘Where is your letter of invitation?’ He looked at me accusingly as though I was hiding it in my pants.
Anyone applying for a visa to the Congo needs a letter of invitation from someone based in the country to support their application. I told Grumpy that mine was with the Congolese Embassy in London, as they’d needed me to send it to them so that they could issue the visa.
‘So why don’t you have it?’ asked Grumpy.
I repeated that I had sent it to the Congolese Embassy in London and that that was how I’d got the visa that he could see in my passport. No letter, no visa.
‘So can I see the letter?’ Grumpy looked me straight in the eyes.
This was all starting to get a bit Catch 22. I repeated, slowly, that the letter was with the Congolese Embassy in London and added that I must have had one or I wouldn’t have been issued the visa . . .
‘But you do not have a letter of invitation. You need a letter of invitation.’
We stared at each other in silence for a while, neither of us backing down. Eventually I told him that someone outside was meeting me. Could I leave my passport with him, go and find the man who was meeting me and hopefully he could sort everything out? To my surprise Grumpy accepted this idea. I wandered past the luggage hall and several armed soldiers and into the morass of humanity waiting for passengers to come through. I looked around. I was supposed to meet a Cameroonian called Jean-Pierre. He’d come highly recommended and had travelled all over the Congo, although he’d never been to the area that we were off to. I scanned the crowd but there was nobody showing any interest. I tried to go back in to talk to Grumpy but an armed soldier placed his AK47 in front of me and shook his head.
‘Nobody goes in: this is the exit.’
I explained that I had just come out and needed to go back in to get my passport but he was not interested.
‘Nobody goes in through here.’
I was buggered. I was just wondering how I could deal with a trip to the Congo with no passport when a smiley face burst through the crowd.
‘Monsieur Dom?’ It was Jean-Pierre. I was saved. Jean-Pierre had a word with someone he knew and we both wandered back towards Grumpy un-hassled.
I introduced Grumpy to Jean-Pierre and told him that this was the man who had written my original letter of invitation. Grumpy looked at Jean-Pierre.
‘Show me the letter . . .’
I groaned. We were back at square one.
Jean-Pierre started the same complicated set of explanations that I had attempted. He handed his passport over to Grumpy and explained our mission here. Grumpy looked at Jean-Pierre’s Cameroonian passport.
‘You are from Cameroon. You are not from the Congo.’
Jean-Pierre nodded in agreement at this statement.
‘If you are from Cameroon you cannot invite someone to the Congo.’
This conversation went on for roughly half an hour. I believe money exchanged hands, though I never actually saw it happen – but, whatever, we were finally through and Jean-Pierre took me to the luggage hall.
‘What does your luggage look like?’ he asked.
‘I don’t have any more; it’s on my back.’ Jean-Pierre peered at my small, grey rucksack and then back at me with the look of a man who could not decide whether I was an idiot or an exceptionally talented packer.
We hopped into a cab and headed downtown to Mikhael’s Hotel. I was dog-tired. During the Second World War, with his country under German occupation, General de Gaulle briefly made Brazzaville the capital of Free France. As we drove through it now the streets were awash with activity. Every time the car stopped people would shove useless things through the window, trying to make us purchase them. Fake-silver photo frames seemed to be a big favourite.
Jean-Pierre was very excited about our adventure. He told me that he had always wanted an excuse to travel to the part of the Congo we were going to and had been thrilled when my request came through. He warned me that we might not see the monster – ‘but there are plenty of pythons and crocodiles’.
We drove on past a couple of markets, our little green taxi doing well negotiating the chaotic traffic. Suddenly we rounded a corner and there it was, the River Congo. It’s enormous, far bigger than I’d expected. The water was dark and grey and I could see Kinshasa, capital of bad Congo, on the opposite bank, what looked like about half a mile away. Apparently this is the only place in the world where two capital cities are within sight of each other across a river (Buenos Aires and Montevideo on the Plate estuary are much, much further apart).
I gazed at this extraordinary expanse of muddy water that has both fascinated and thwarted so many explorers for so long. The Congo is a bit like Everest, one of those things that featured in so many stories of derring-do I remember reading as a schoolboy.
Kinshasa is huge, with a population of twelve million, whereas little Brazzaville is home to barely a million.
‘It is crazy expensive here,’ said Jean-Pierre as we arrived at the hotel that turned out to be run, like mos
t of Brazzaville, by a Lebanese merchant class.
I tried to get some sleep but couldn’t so I had a shower and then went to find the restaurant. I ordered the plat du jour – a uniquely Congolese dish (not) – Couscous Royale. It was delicious and I sat back contentedly and tried to eavesdrop on a tableful of five women whom I guessed to be Brazilian. The room was packed with Brazzaville’s ‘ladies who lunch’. They not only lunched but also smoked like it was going out of fashion and constantly showed each other videos on their laptops with the music turned up to the max.
There were still Christmas decorations hung up around the place despite it being late January. Christmas in the Congo: who’d have thunk it?
A man in an orange suit brighter than the sun, subtly offset with a fluorescent-blue shirt, wandered around the room permanently on his mobile. He was Belgian and was talking to someone on his phone about the fact that he was off to Moscow the following day for three days.
I ordered an Um Bongo to try to fit in. The waiter looked desperate to please but eventually returned to ask me to repeat my order.
‘I’d like an Um Bongo please.’
He disappeared again but returned quickly, shaking his head in a disconsolate manner. He admitted that they had no such drink.
I wasn’t going to let this go.
‘I understand that you don’t have any Um Bongo on the premises. Perhaps you have run out due to the high consumption rate? When will you be restocked?’
The waiter looked mortified to have to admit that he had never heard of Um Bongo.
‘Are you a Congolese?’ I asked him. He confirmed that he was born and bred in Brazzaville. And you have never heard of the soft drink Um Bongo?’
The waiter shook his head and slunk away. I was dumbfounded. All those years when I’d been taken in by the Um Bongo TV adverts with the catchy song: ‘Um Bongo, Um Bongo, they drink it in the Congo . . .’ It was all lies. The company responsible for the drink – the sinister-sounding Gerber’s Juice Company Ltd (known as Libby’s, to make them sound friendly) had been lying to us all. Nobody drunk Um Bongo in the Congo. Nobody had even heard of Um Bongo in the bloody Congo. I smelt a lawsuit and ordered a beer instead.
