The Last Dinosaur of the Congo with David Choe

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 ***. 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 *** 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 ***. This is not what we came here for. We came here for the *** dinosaur. We've talked to experts. We've talked to scientists. We've talked to local sorcerers, and everyone's seen this *** 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 *** acid. It put me on my *** 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, ***, man. Is he like, reading my mind right now? Does he know what a *** 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 *** 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 ***, and I knew I was *** while I was ***. Laying there, going, ***. 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 *** 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 *** you. So I don't know. Who knows? We might have come back. We'll see.