Wait! He’s doing what? Ash Dykes: The man traversing the Congo River Basin in an inflatable kayak
By Olivia Stockwell
In the past couple weeks, there has been a frenzy on social media around 35-year-old Ash Dykes from Wales who has announced his plan to trek nearly 700 kilometers down the Sangha River through the Congo River Basin from Nola in the Central African Republic and ending in Mossaka in the Republic of Congo. This trek is the first of his “Project Six” in which he plans to traverse what his official website labels as “six of the most extreme environments on Earth” in twelve months.1 He has yet to announce the other locations for this project. Throughout this intense 12-month endeavor, he plans to live stream his experiences on TikTok, post photos on Instagram, long form videos on YouTube, and produce a documentary series once he has completed all six journeys. Prior to this expedition, Dykes has set “five Guinness World Records – four of them world firsts – across Mongolia, Madagascar, China and the Amazon of Suriname”.2
These will be risky expeditions. In Congo, the Sangha River and its basin are the main drainage system of the Democratic Republic of Congo, which holds the risk of encountering hippos, gorillas, poisonous spiders, venomous snakes, malaria, dengue fever, and parasites that have the potential to cause irreversible blindness.3 Stopping throughout the trip to pitch a tent may prove difficult as the land surrounding the river is often wet and marshlike, in addition to the risks of accidentally pitching a tent in an elephant corridor and being trampled.
Travelling with Dykes is Mebah Markdonald, a Cameroonian travel guide, content creator, and logistics coordinator, as well as a UK-based videographer, Will Pérez. The journey is expected to take over a month with the team traveling between thirty to forty kilometers per day. Dykes has spent several months planning and preparing for the extreme conditions. This planning has involved scouting the route, obtaining visas and permits, prepping a camera kit, and building evacuation plans. He has also been working with Global Rescue, a worldwide medical evacuation and field extraction company, to plan for the worst.4
He started the journey on October 8th after dealing with several setbacks involving missing luggage and visa issues in the Central African Republic. However, as anticipation and attention to Dykes’ trip builds, so do the larger conversations and debates around the ethics of this kind of extreme environmental challenge. As he drops into the river, Dykes enters with an evacuation plan that allows him to leave at any time. The risks here are voluntary for Dykes; he is choosing to put himself in harm’s way, whereas local people in communities along the Sangha River live with the threat of these risks everyday as they use the river as an essential mode of transportation and trade (UNESCO).5 His posts sensationalize danger, adding eerie music and drawing attention and support by highlighting what he refers to as his “missions”, which will test him to the limit and place both him and his team in jeopardy. By representing the Sangha River and the Congo River Basin as an unexplored wilderness, the rainforest and river become backdrops to Dykes’ achievements and completion of the challenge without reference to the political and historical context or the people who live in these regions.
