I've just finished reading Tim Butcher's book, 'Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart', about his 600 mile journey overland (bar one helicopter journey) across the Congo from Lake Tanganyika to Boma. I couldn't put it down.

Butcher tells the story of his "suicidal" expedition through the Congo, as he follows in the footsteps of Henry Morton ("Dr. Livingstone, I presume?") Stanley, the Victorian journalist / explorer who charted the Congo in 999 days. He ties the narrative of his journey to accounts of the country's compelling and turbulent history.

He is helped across the Congo by UN peacekeepers, aid workers, a pygmy rights advocate, monks, rebel leaders, relics of the Colonial era, a drunk motorbike owner and many more colourful characters. Almost everyone Butcher meets he interviews, resulting in a fascinating patchwork of histories, stories and experiences.

In his own words, his Congo journey was not "adventure travel" but more "ordeal travel". Along the way Butcher encounters stumbling block after stumbling block, finally beating the obstacles corrupt officials, hunger, illness, and political and socio instabilities throw his way.

The journey that took Stanley three years, and cost the lives of hundreds of tribesmen, took Butcher 44 days. Along the way he witnesses the scars of the Congo Wars - burnt out villages, exposed human remains, marauding Mai Mai gunmen - and the regression of a country whose grandparents remember modernity, but whose children have only ever seen its relics. As Butcher puts it, the modern world "had tried, but failed, to establish itself in the Congo".

The Congo may have been a glamorous host to Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn once upon a time, but today it is "the most daunting, backward country on earth"; as Butcher laments, he "touched the heart of Africa and found it broken".

'Blood River' is a gripping and gruesome, passionate and poignant, historical and harrowing account of a country that was once a functioning place, but is now "undeveloping", spiralling backwards to a state very similar to that which Stanley witnessed in the 1870s. The Congo is "a place where the hands of the clock spin not forward, but backwards."

Find out more about 'Blood River' here.

Photo Credit: 'Pirogues on the Congo' by Julien Harneis.