Blood River: The Terrifying Journey through the World's Most Dangerous Country

Between Spillover, Dark Star Safari, Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness, and the Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu, I felt I had a well-rounded sense of the dangers that might lurk around the corner of any number of African countries, from the hazards of travel to militants, terrorists, and thugs to your run-of-the-mill, mind-numbingly-terrifying, bleed-from-every-orifice-as-you-lay-dying disease. Not that I expected to encounter any of these scenarios on my own African foray, of course.

In any case, the title of Tim Butcher's travelogue says it all: a terrifying journey through [one of] the world's most dangerous countries. Is Somalia more dangerous than the DRC? Syria? Yemen? It hardly seems to matter. The man spent months traversing the bush, battling bad water, deadly mosquitoes, and the logistics of traveling through a country where nature has reclaimed all but the largest of roads. Everything - everything - is in short supply and everyone lives in near-constant fear of what or who is around the next bend - most of all the feared mai-mai fighters whose ability to vanish into the bush is as troubling as their violence and tactics.

So why, one might ask does Butcher undertake this adventure? Ostensibly, he seeks to retrace the steps of nineteenth century explorer/adventurer H.M. Stanley whose own voyage down the Congo River ultimately led to the country's nearly-century-long experience with the brutality of colonialism, first as King Leopold's personal possession and later as a Belgian colony. More tangibly, it seems that retracing Stanley's route may have been the germ of the idea, but that once seeded, Butcher could not let it go - as an international correspondent who'd covered his fair share of combat zones and front lines, this journey became one more way to test himself and his mettle, mental as well as physical. To which I say, bully for him. It's hard to imagine anyone else mad enough to entertain such a journey (I mean, even Paul Theroux stuck to the overcrowded and rattletrap "taxis" and "buses" in Dark Star Safari), but it makes for a fascinating backdrop for the history and politics that Butcher deftly incorporates.

Four stars.