Ash Dykes has returned home from his 435-mile Congo Basin expedition and is pushing back at viewers who rooted for disaster.
The British adventurer, who kayaked the Sangha River with local guide Obed Temba Tuyumvire and videographer Will Perez, said before departure that he was “prepared for the worst.” The Congo Basin, which Dykes calls “the baddest place in the world,” hosts deadly hippos, crocodiles and silverback gorillas. He came within five metres of a silverback during the trek yet finished physically unscathed.
The wildlife that dominated his fears turned out to be less threatening than the conditions. Dykes reflected: “I don’t mind openly admitting that I went out there expecting all of it to be there and I’d be dodging it.”
“I think maybe we got a bit lucky and unlucky. So it’s very bittersweet,” he added.
The seasonal timing helped. “It’s the wildest place in the world. The Congo Basin is the baddest place. But we picked a really good season whereby if it was the dry season, maybe the risks would have been higher and one of us wouldn’t have made it home,” he explained.
What nearly broke the expedition was infrastructure failure, not animals. Midway through, Dykes’s water filters stopped working, leaving the team boiling river water and relying on chlorine tablets that could not neutralize all parasites. “We’re currently sorting the water situation out, which has left us in a doomed state,” he reported at the time. The group eventually reached Ouesso and purchased three 16.5-litre water bottles to carry them through.
TikTok audiences followed along through daily updates and livestreams, tension spiking when Dykes lost nearly 24 hours of contact after his satellite kit lost power. Some viewers branded the journey “boring” for its lack of dramatic animal encounters. Others floated what Dykes called the “ridiculous” claim that his disappearance was staged for publicity.
He addressed the hostility directly. “I think there was a lot of people following for ill intentions. A lot of people were wanting one of us to die and that’s their entertainment,” he said. “When you go so viral you can’t have 100 percent support from everyone. And that’s fine, I get it,” he noted.
The ordeal viewers never saw came at the end. “The day before we finished, we came across a military base camp and they bribed us,” Dykes claimed. “They took our passports away from us and said that we’re not giving you them back unless you pay us.” The team surrendered money to recover their documents and depart.
Beyond that confrontation, Dykes described interactions with locals including Baka community members as overwhelmingly positive.
Now recovering at home, Dykes is preparing the second expedition of Project 6. He has ruled out returning to the inflatable kayak and hinted at a dramatic shift: extreme cold, a new skill to learn, and a location announcement due next week. “It’s going to be different. And the thing I’m doing, I don’t know how to do that…” he teased.
