NATASHA DRAGUN Wrote “Time for Tehran,”
Having spent more than a decade plotting her trip to Iran, Dragun finally made it there last June, traversing the country from north to south over the course of three weeks. “It’s hard not to fall in love with Iran’s colorful mosques, flavorful cuisine, incredibly beautiful people, and mind-blowing history,” she says. “There are obvious crowd-pleasers, such as Shiraz, Isfahan, Persepolis, and Yazd, a desert city made from mud bricks. But what surprised me the most was how much I enjoyed the capital Tehran.” DestinAsian’s contributing editor, the Sydney-based writer was befriended by a local arts student turned cook on her wanderings around the busy capital, exploring atmospheric neighborhoods, lingering in coffee shops, picking up paintings in art districts, and checking out some of the city’s newest architectural creations. “There’s so much more to Tehran than the bazaars, palaces, and mosques it is rightly known for. Small wonder it’s becoming a hub for the country’s creatives.”
a tent sheltered underneath a thatched roof. Tsam Tsam is a grassroots business—its proceeds fund sister charity Organisation Ecotouristique du Lac Oguemoué (OELO), which works on environmental education in local schools, sustainable fishing, and promoting alternatives to the illegal bushmeat trade. “Eating most animals is traditionally part of our culture,” Cyrille says. “Hippos are almost extinct in Gabon because people have a taste for them.”
Hippos, however, have never lived in Lake Oguemoué. “Each lake has a genie and this one doesn’t like hippos,” Cyrille tells me. “So you can swim here, because although we do have a few slender-snouted crocodiles, they never attack humans.” Diving into the bath-warm water, I’m glad for the supernatural protection.
Each day Cyrille’s nephew, Prince, paddles over in a dugout pirogue to a lakeside village, returning with fresh dishes—smoked tilapia soup, grilled catfish, delicious fried plantains—cooked by the local women. We spend our time between meals canoeing through flooded forests or hiking through stands of towering hardwoods with Cyrille and Prince. Late one afternoon, we approach a clearing where hundreds of rosy bee-eaters fill the sky, shooting like pink fireworks out of their nesting holes in the ground. Nighttime is no less thrilling. On a moonlit boat ride I stare out at a thousand red eyes glinting at me from a tangle of silver: crocodile nests hidden in the mangroves.
Another evening we’re told that the residents of a nearby village are performing a Bwiti dance. The Bwiti cult is recognized as a religion in Gabon; during initiation ceremonies, people eat the root of iboga, a hallucinogenic forest plant, which they believe enables them to commune with their ancestors. “Iboga takes you on a long, arduous journey, but the end is profound. You get to know yourself as well as the world beyond,” Cyrille explains.
It’s late by the time the dancers suddenly appear, some wearing feathered headdresses and amulets. They snake into the Bwiti temple to a frenzy of drumming. White kaolin clay is chalked on their faces and daubed in dots and stripes across their chests. They dance over a sacred fire, swirling their clothes through the flames, a few entering trances as they become possessed by spirits.
Most of the other villages we visit, however, are near-deserted. “Many people have left for Libreville to find work,” one man says. “We can’t hunt antelope like before or cut wood to build our houses. It’s all very well creating the parks, but the people here need replacement livelihoods.”
They also need education and healthcare, two other things that are virtually nonexistent in rural areas. For all its oil wealth, Gabon is still a country of significant disparity, not to mention levels of corruption that have straightjacketed conservation efforts.
But Lee White is bullish. When I meet him later in Libreville, the British-born director of Gabon’s National Parks Agency tells me that additional ecoguards have been hired from local villages, providing much-needed jobs and bolstering the country’s fight against poachers. His agency is also building more electric fences to protect elephants and prevent them from crossing over into human settlements. And ecotourism facilities are gradually being developed. “New satellite camps are about to open in Loango, and others will follow in parks throughout Gabon,” White says.
For now, though, visitors can expect to have this near-pristine country practically to themselves. It may not quite be Eden, but it’s the closest I’ve come to it.