This episode details the epic river journey we undertook from Bumba to Kisangani on the Congo River. We travelled on a past-Rhine River steamer with attached barges absolutely overflowing with a mass of people for a journey of a life time. It was an incredible sight when we first saw the barge. The steamer and the three barges was packed with people on the inside, people on the roofs and people in the canoes attached to the sides. Our three day voyage became a 7-day adventure as barges kept becoming detached in the night and had to be recovered. From our first-class cabin, where water came from a bucket, we stepped outside to see trussed up crocodiles, to running out of food, being locked in a cage to dance to lively Congolese rumba music, to watching the pirogues (canoes) coming from everywhere to sell their wares and buy necessities while dodging the officers checking tickets. It was basically a floating market thumping with music, and the hum of the steamer engines being drowned out by people's conversations as they went about their daily lives on the boat.  My lesson I got out of this adventure was how grateful we should be at everything we take for granted. We were in first class but there was no running water, the bath was stained and the beds were mediocre. You could not even compare this to first class in the western world. But we had it better than third class sleeping on the barge roofs or alongside market stalls. Seeing the desperation of the people when they came via canoe to hop on the boat and were stopped by the boat officials made me realise how the trading on the boat was their only mechanisms to sell and buy their wares until the next boat came through, so it was a matter of survival to get on the boat. We just have to go down to the shop or we can get anything delivered. It really is another world.  The reality of the consequences of bushmeat was a hard lesson especially with the treatment and disappearance of the baby chimp. Stopping the trade was beyond my own capability and I knew I could not encourage it.  --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/justine-murray0/message