THE chief of the village was wearing cherry-coloured velour carpet on his head. He had a pretty red blouse and a wrap-around red skirt. His Mai-Mai militia carried AK-47s and had matching red scarves. When he demanded mbongo, his money tribute, I paid, but unfortunately started to giggle as he began to sing Frère Jacques. This was my big mistake.

An hour later the boat I was in on the Congo River filled with flying termites. They crawled over every part of your body; you breathed them. There were no insects anywhere else on the river beach or in the village. None of the crew doubted that the chief had sent them. “Could be worse. Could be crocodiles,” said Jose, the night watchman.

I was on a 22-day Go Congo expedition from Kisangani to Kinshasa, 1,760km (1,100 miles) down the immense Congo River, in a country the size of Western Europe, researching a novel. Here the people smile and largely ignore a war that has killed 5.4 million people and has almost, but not quite, stopped.

The 34m boat, the only passenger craft on the river with 20 people sharing a loo and a shower, seemed to have been built by a blind carpenter who specialised in adventure playgrounds. But I loved the way it moved and groaned with the current. Eight of us were fare-payers - two French, five Belgians and one Englishman - camping ashore in the villages at night.

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The country is still a lost world, cut off below Kinshasa by a series of cataracts and rapids and above Kisangani by seven more falls. Poor old Stanley did not discover this land: he passed through and is largely forgotten. As you sail between the innumerable islands, crossing at diagonals to avoid sandbanks, the feeling is that one is trying to get to the other side of a huge lake.

The jungle tumbles in liana-hung green cliffs to the waterside. Time is suspended in a glistening, magical arena. Our shy captain had no clock or compass, just a smoked monkey for company. His sometimes mutinous crew regarded me as part of their dysfunctional African family and made sure I ate my meat and did up my buttons. Chickens and strange fish were brought out to the boat on pirogues paddled by spiked-haired women who opened Primus beer bottles with their perfect teeth.

I began my river journey in Kisangani - home of Joseph Conrad's fictional Mr Kurtz - after a flight from Kinshasa. As we drove in, the light flickered off the wet jungle and laughing children ran after our car. We bargained for the fuel and watched the illegal trade in diamond and coltan - the conductor in mobile phones - carried on by shady men in sunglasses in what was the Hotel Pourquoi Pas, where Bogart and Hepburn stayed when they filmed The African Queen.

The once palm-lined esplanade had been rocketed or bombed, and canoes, barges and log rafts bobbed up against the ruined buildings with whole villages seeking a better life downstream. The place was full of sunshine and primary colours and the scent of wood smoke, palm oil, frangipani, fermented manioc and the river. One moment the market was peaceful, the next it became like a single wild animal, and a man in front of me wanted to chop my arms and legs off with his panga.

A policeman had shouted that I was from the hated UN. A mass grave for 200,000 is witness to how fatal these riots have been. Luckily, the hotel was near and, more than a little shaken, I explained over the tank-proof steel fence that I was “un anglais en vacances” to the now polite astonishment of the mob and that night we were happily out dancing at a bar run by devastatingly beautiful identical twins. Never a dull moment in the Heart of Darkness.

Finally, with fuel bought from the army, we chugged majestically away, to Yangambi, a former cocoa plantation, where only recently the river ran red with blood. There in the jungle I found a 15-year-old's Latin homework, a translation of Emperor Marcus Aurelius. “They should teach them to grow manioc, not Latin,” said Brigitte, a platinum blonde Belgian quad bike champion. I disagreed. It is a miracle Congo can maintain the Baccalauréat in wartime. Or, as the stoic emperor said: “If death grins at you, grin back.”

Our next camp was at Bakondo Rivé, where the Lokele tribe had never seen a white man and the children touched my skin. On an old map in the Royal Geographical Society the missionaries had written VERY WILD PEOPLE. At dawn the next day, with mist rising from the trees, I had hired guides to show me the deep forest. With a nod they were off, walking at what, for them, was an easy four miles an hour.

Soon the jungle closed around and I was surprised how thick the vegetation was, pressing right up to my face; the forest almost totally silent. It has always been like this, one of the guides told me. There was a commotion ahead and a growl ... “Chui,” he said, using the Swahili word for leopard. Somewhere in the gloom was red river hog and even elephant.

Every breath was suffocatingly hot and my shirt was wet through with sweat and the water from the trees. Then we hacked our way out into a stream bed over silver sand patrolled by brilliantly coloured butterflies. “Good for diamonds,” said one of the guides. “And maybe crocodiles.”

You have to be careful with crocodiles. Jose, the night watchman, was adamant that people often metamorphose into crocodiles or hippos. At the village of Balambo a man was keeping a very pretty crocodile, as crocodiles go, with the most marvellous eyelashes. “I lost my wife in war and maybe this is her. I see if she turns back into a human.” He was completely sincere. Generously, he let me hold her by the tail and tickle her nose. She was called Janine. Both his wife and the crocodile.

At another island, Nganda Saisai, we went into toddy palm forest, which was higher than the jungle outside Kisangani and even hotter, being almost on the Equator. The palms had great thorns, and gourds had been tied up in the branches to collect the milky white palm wine: the entire forest was infused with its musky, narcotic scent.

It was here that I found pictures of Bryan Ferry. There is a Bryan Ferry cult in Kinshasa that has spread upriver, some say. But the Eleko tribe claim that Ferry has visited the island on one of the invisible witch doctor airplanes, common in this area of the republic. Certainly, the children could say “Goody, Goody, Bye Bye” in English with perfect Ferry-style diction.

Farther downriver was the ramshackle “city” of Mbandaka, where three of the Belgians in our group once lived and wanted to visit their childhood home, which their father had designed.

Alas, there were several of these identical bungalows and the trees around them had changed. Soon we had the enthusiastic help of two young soldiers, who were convinced that it was the house of the colonel they were guarding. We were checking out his fridge magnets through the window when the angry colonel arrived and the soldiers were taken off to jail. His kitchen, washing-up and all, was deemed a forbidden military zone and an effete secret policeman in an Italian suit and fake Gucci shoes told us that we, as possible rebel spies, were going to prison, too, or worse.

Only after the fierce - and personally risky - arguments of Thérance, our guide, and the incredible Evelyne, the boat's purser, who sang her prayers for half an hour every morning (think Aretha Franklin, not Songs of Praise), did the creature slither off with his bribe.

After a 4.30am start on a last stormy day, the river narrowed between hills and reminded me of the Clyde. The half-sinking rescue launch, on which the grilling, slaughtering, laundry, sewing and crew Bible reading were done, was bashing against the side of the boat and we were taking on water. Our only outboard failed and we landed on a sandbank in Congo Brazzaville for repairs.

Then, too suddenly, after the river widened into Pool Malebo, we were at journey's end; slightly dazed among the vibrant nine millions of Kinshasa, dancing at Herman's in Mantongé and visiting the bonobo sanctuary to see the threatened chimp-like apes, who rather cleverly solve all conflicts with sex.

But all of us were still mentally on the boat. In Congo they say that if you go far enough upriver, you never really come back.

Paul Pickering's The Blue Gate of Babylon (Penguin, £4.99) and other novels are available at www.amazon.co.uk

NEED TO KNOW

Go Congo (www.gocongo.com) offers a similar downriver trip, including hotel accommodation at Kinshasa and Kisangani, meals, transfers, guiding and dealing with officials for about £3,110pp, excluding flights. Trailfinders (0845 0505892, www.trailfinders.com) offers flights from Heathrow to Kinshasa via Nairobi with Kenya Airways from £630 return.

Health Yellow fever, hepatitis A and B jabs and malaria pills are essential.

Take pencils and notepads for the children; footballs, Roxy Music albums and lipstick for the grown-ups.

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