DAVID CHOE: I'd spent the early part of my childhood
traveling a lot.
Train hopping, hitch hiking, doing all these things.
The sense of adventure, the sense of wonder, I don't know.
I guess it's real childish, but I wanted to see and go
places where no one's been before.
I've been reading about this dinosaur in "National
Geographic" and online.
And I didn't give a shit.
I just wanted to go to this crazy place and see what I can
find, you know?
The Congo is the heart of darkness.
There's an area of thick, dense, untouched rainforest
about the size of Florida.
It's the only area that survived the last ice age, and
it's the lastly place on Earth believed to have living,
breathing dinosaurs .
The one the locals talk about the most is
[FOREIGN LANGUAGE].
In Pygmy language, it means one who
stops the flow of rivers.
And it's fucking huge.
It's supposed to be several times bigger than an elephant.
Scientific expeditions come out every couple of years from
all over the world.
The British army saw glimpses of it. "National Geographic"
found something.
The consensus is that it lives deep in the rainforest near a
lake called Lake Tele, so that's where we went.
And it was a hell of a ride.
We're in Brazzaville, Congo today.
I haven't been here for 10 years.
I've been with my group, Roch and Stephane for three days
now, and there's a growing dissent within our group.
Other people in the group want to, like, pursue other
stories, like, I guess albinos are treated as gods out here.
Another guy in our group is obsessed with trying to get
Pygmy porn.
This is not what we came here for.
We came here for the fucking dinosaur.
We've talked to experts.
We've talked to scientists.
We've talked to local sorcerers, and everyone's seen
this fucking thing.
JOSEPH HARVEY: What I know is that before we came, first in
1992, I grew up with family friends who were
missionaries here.
Gene Thomas and his wife, Sandy, who was a nurse, they
were going through this area where the river became a
little bit wider.
It was almost like a pond, or a lake.
And he saw this huge thing raise up out of
the water, and he--
it sounds so dumb, because this is
what happens to everybody.
He went to get his camera, and he couldn't get it in time,
and it submerged.
MARK BIEDLINGMAIER: I ask you just to be very open mind in
your travels.
It isn't the United States.
It's not New York.
It isn't Washington, DC.
Infrastructure is very challenging.
DAVID CHOE: Right.
MARK BIEDLINGMAIER: I don't know if they told you, but
where you're going has very, very limited
electricity, water.
DAVID CHOE: Has basically nothing.
MARK BIEDLINGMAIER: Exactly.
DAVID CHOE: And every animal and poisonous insect, and
every disease we can imagine.
MARK BIEDLINGMAIER: So consider yourself sort of on
the wilderness, and on the frontier of Africa.
But I wholeheartedly support your venture here, and I wish
you the best of success.
DAVID CHOE: Thank you.
MARK BIEDLINGMAIER: Thank you very much.
DAVID CHOE: Nice meeting you.
MARK BIEDLINGMAIER: Super.
DAVID CHOE: We've got our team together, our Pygmy force to
take us into the jungle.
We've got our guide here.
He's got a nice Photoshop shirt of the
dinosaur with the president.
He's sort of like the Charles Grodin, Philip Seymour Hoffman
guy of the group.
Over here we have a Ben Kingsley, sexy beast guy of
the group, and then over here we have the Richard Grieco,
Terrence Howard, Benicio Del Toro guy of the group.
And this is our force to go into the jungle.
We were wandering in the jungle for a while.
It was dark and light, and disorientating.
We got lost a couple times, and even
with the Pygmy guides.
We would have been dead without them.
Like, there were some areas that we can't even get
through, because we're so tall, and they're the only
ones-- them and children are the only ones, midgets are the
only ones that could get through there.
My team looks like they're about to die.
We're sweating like dogs.
I've noticed the Pygmies, they don't sweat
and they don't fart.
I think they don't fart because they
don't eat any food.
So once we got to the village, the chief and his henchmen,
they kept asking us what we wanted to do
while we were there.
Did we want to go to the waterfalls?
Did we want to go shoot pigs?
We just said we wanted to see the dinosaur.
And then they kept saying, do you want to see the dinosaur?
Do you want to see this dinosaur?
Yes, we want to see the dinosaur.
Do you really want to see this dinosaur?
Yeah, we want to see this dinosaur.
So we had to do this ritual, and this ritual involved lots
and lots of alcohol.
DAVID CHOE: So they pour us this clear liquid.
It tastes like gasoline, and I guess it's made from
[INAUDIBLE] husks, and I don't know what else.
Tastes like fucking acid.
It put me on my ass right away.
I feel really crazy right now, huh?
During all this, looking over at Ben, he was doing this
weird thing with branches, and I was like, fuck, man.
Is he like, reading my mind right now?
Does he know what a fucking scumbag I am?
He was giving me this weird look, like he knew me.
That's a skinny dog.
[DRUM MUSIC]
I don't know what was in that stuff.
They did not stop.
Not to take a break, not to eat, and they just keep going,
and they just keep going.
And then, like, some kind of dream or something.
This thing just came out, and the people just screamed.
And it was, you know, obviously it was a dude
dressed up like something.
He had all these leaves, and, you know, they were either
saying he's an evil spirit, or it's the dinosaur.
And I'm like, oh, I guess that's the dinosaur.
And as fucked up as I was, you know, I was
believing it at the time.
It felt like there was a hole in my stomach.
I kept staring at my feet.
I thought my face was eating at my own face.
And I thought of eating my own feet.
I thought I was fucked, and I knew I was
fucked while I was fucked.
Laying there, going, shit.
This is going to be really bad.
[FOREIGN LANGUAGE]
DAVID CHOE: I didn't come all this way to see a guy dance
around in a dinosaur costume and participate in fucked up
rituals for the chance of maybe catching a blurry shot
of a fuzzy dinosaur head.
We didn't even get close to the beginning point of where
the dinosaur was.
I think we're in Lake Tele, but I don't know.
It's been so long since I've eaten anything, or showered,
or anyone's spoken any word of English.
You have to really be careful when you're in the jungle.
You have to always, like, cloud your thoughts, because
you never know where there's going to be a sorcerer, "Harry
Potter" type Pygmy ready to psionically mind fuck you.
So I don't know.
Who knows?
We might have come back.
We'll see.