"Insecticide Massacreur" - slaughterer - what a great name for an insect spray.

Kinshasa is the second biggest urban area in Africa - 15m people give or take the odd 5m, because no-one really knows, but the airport last night was not nearly as awful as feared (apart from baggage reclaim, which was utter chaos - the porters were literally fighting each other for packages as they came through from the baggage handlers), but there were no bribes involved - or at least none directly involving us. Perhaps the local agents had smoothed the way in ...

Today was the calm before the storm. We crossed the equator in a boat twice - once on the way south to a sanctuary for abandoned chimps on Ngamba Island and once heading back north to Entebbe. Tomorrow, if all goes to plan, we will have breakfast in Uganda, lunch in Kenya and supper in Congo, The downside is that involves three lots of customs and immigration at three airports!

We got here and so did our luggage, so that was a great start. However, bad news awaited us. We planned to cross the DRC border near Bunia, but fighting has broken out there in the last 48 hours. The Front for Patriotic Resistance (FRPI) - which has been dormant for years, decided to pick this moment to kick off again, when units of the Congolese Army were withdrawn to fight against the M23 rebels further south. The FRPI are led by one Colonel Cobra Banaloki a...

One summer in the early 1960's whilst holidaying in the Scottish Borders, my mother decided that we should visit her favourite cousin, Jack Gray. Jack was a GP in Hexham, but I had never met him because he had been in Africa between 1948 and 1961 - as a surgeon in a mission hospital. The hospital was on the banks of the Congo River, at a place called Bolobo - about 250 km north east of Leopoldville (now Kinshasa). Almost 50 years later I met Jack for the secon...