Nile explorers 'strengthened by tragedy'

Two New Zealand explorers and a British colleague are claiming to have discovered the real source of the world's longest river after an expedition that killed one of their team.

Former Queenstown man Cam McLeay, Wellingtonian Garth MacIntyre and Briton Neil McGrigor continued their arduous 80-day journey to the source of the Nile last November after surviving a rebel attack in northern Uganda in which British teammate Steve Willis was shot dead.

Mr McLeay said the team had planned to dedicate the find, deep in Rwanda's lush Nungwe rainforest, to Willis' memory, but his widow asked that the tribute be kept low-key.

"The tragedy gave us a lot of strength to continue because I know that's what Steve would have wanted," Mr McLeay told NZPA from Rwanda last night.

"So from a personal point of view I feel very strongly that it was for Steve's memory and for the friend I knew."

Mr McLeay said the team faced other challenges on the journey, including crocodile-infested waters, testing climates with temperatures up to 50degC, massive rapids and "bogs up to our knees".

Mr McGrigor said history had been rewritten by the find.

"This is the end of an 80-day amazing and exhausting journey," he said.

The expedition, dubbed Ascend the Nile, travelled more than 6700km in three boats, tracing the Nile from the Mediterranean through five countries to what they say is its origin.

During the last leg of their journey, they abandoned their tiny boats and trekked 70km for seven days through thick forest with the help of a team of trackers and slashers.

They were led by a bare-footed, 75-year-old native Rwandan pygmy.

The team, which used a global positioning system (GPS) and inflatable motorboats, believes the Nile is at least 107km longer than previously thought.

Mr McLeay said one of many highlights was coming across a cattle camp of about 500 "brilliant white cattle" beside the world's largest swamp in southern Sudan.

"Each one was tethered to a stick and its owner sleeping alongside the beast.

"And they're these huge, tall, six foot five to six foot eight Dinka people, a lot of them naked, especially the children and they rub themselves in ash and cow dung to keep the mosquitoes away."

Debate over the real source of the Nile has raged since the late 1850s, when British explorers such as John Hanning Speke began staking their reputations, fortunes and health on finding it.

It was not until the 1864 expedition by American journalist Henry Stanley -- when he found missing Briton David Livingstone in 1871 and circumnavigated Lake Victoria and Lake Tanganyika for the first time -- that much of the area was mapped and many questions answered.

But not all experts are convinced by the team's discovery.

"Their claim to have found a new source for the Nile just depends on what counts as a meaningful source," Pasquale Scatturo, who documented his descent of the Blue Nile in the IMAX film Mystery of the Nile, was quoted by National Geographic's website as saying.

Robert Collins, the author of the book The Nile, was quoted by National Geographic as saying: "They're talking about a difference of a few miles... these chaps are really just out for adventure and I'm all for that."

Mr McLeay runs an adventure tourism business in Uganda.

He said the team was already planning its next trip -- a diving expedition searching for shipwrecks off the east coast of Africa.

Planning was likely to take more than a year.

- NZPA