The joy of getting lost in the Congo

I’m sending this to you from the rainforest in Congo, surrounded by vast trees and jungle noises in one of the loveliest, remotest places I’ve ever seen. Yesterday, flying at 150 feet above the canopy, I glimpsed in a clearing a family of relaxed gorillas gazing up at me, a visitor from another world.

When I set out as a young reporter in Africa 36 years ago, I drafted my stories on a typewriter. I had to travel to a city to book a reverse-charge call that took hours to come through, then dictate my words to the paper’s copy desk, or type it out on a post office telex machine.

I wrote letters to old girlfriends in England, or to my parents at home in Kenya, where we still had no telephone – my father being so unfamiliar with the device that on the rare occasions he spoke on one he used to say ‘over’ at the end of a sentence.