Salonga is a place you read about rather than ride to, so let us be honest from the start. It is the largest tropical rainforest national park in Africa, a block of lowland forest in the central basin of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, bigger than Belgium, split into a northern and a southern sector with a corridor of villages between them. UNESCO listed it in 1984, and since 1999 it has also been on the list of sites in danger, because of poaching, conflict and the sheer difficulty of guarding something so large.
There is no road through it. Rivers, mainly the Lokoro, Luilaka and their tributaries, are the real highways, and travel is by pirogue and small boat, with some tracks and old logging roads on the margins. For a motorcycle rider the practical conclusion is that the nearest places that matter, such as Boende, Monkoto and Oshwe, are reached by long, rough, sometimes impassable earth tracks, with fuel carried in drums and mud that can swallow a bike in the wet season. Anyone who attempts this needs local guides, up-to-date security information and a good deal of time.
What the forest holds justifies the effort for specialists. Salonga shelters the bonobo, our closest relative besides the chimpanzee, found only south of the Congo river and known for resolving conflict with affection rather than violence. It also holds forest elephants, the Congo peafowl, which was unknown to Western science until 1936, and a vast number of small and secretive species. The canopy is thick enough that most of the park feels like a green twilight, the air heavy with the smell of wet leaf and fruit, with the loud calls of hornbills and monkeys overhead.
The human history matters as well. People live all around the park and, in the past, within its limits. Conservation here works best where local communities have a stake in it, and some projects have tried to link protection with jobs, schools and clinics. Look at this stop as a window onto a very large place that deserves our attention, not a destination for casual travel.