READER STORY
Want to explore virgin rainforest, magical mangroves and a coastline where hippos ride the waves? Do as Judy Mann did, and book a ticket to Gabon…
Rainforests, mangroves, forest elephants... Travel to Gabon on the trip of a lifetime.
It’s time for a safety briefing. “Three animals charge us – elephant, buffalo and gorilla,” says our guide Jean-Alain Pambo, armed with a panga. “For elephant and buffalo, we go behind a tree. For gorilla, we look down. Okay? We go!” With that, he tramps off into the forest in Loango National Park. When you tell someone that you’re going to Gabon, their response is usually: “Oh, that’s nice,” followed by a pause. “Where is Gabon?” Gabon is one of those African countries that has somehow managed to remain below the international radar. Indeed, many people have never even heard of it. It’s a francophone country and finding a guidebook in English is difficult. It’s not easy to get to either; it’s difficult to travel around and it’s relatively expensive. However, despite these challenges, it’s probably one of the best-kept secrets in ecotourism. Gabon is in West Africa, on the equator, directly above the Republic of the Congo and below Cameroon and Equatorial Guinea. It’s a sparsely populated country, home to fewer than 2 million people. Large tracts of tropical rainforest remain untouched – as much as 70 % of the country. Flying over magnificent climax forest for two hours and seeing only one or two roads was truly wonderful. Late president Omar Bongo Ondimba made the news in 2002 when he proclaimed his Green Gabon programme: 26 000 km² of wilderness protected in 13 national parks. Most of the major ecosystems in the country are under some sort of conservation protection. The reason for this visionary act can be traced to the relative oil wealth of the country, and the influence of legendary explorer Mike Fay and Michael Nichols, who was the first to photograph Gabon’s surfing hippos. Fay also coined the phrase “Africa’s
last Eden” to describe Loango. Gabon’s forests are part of the Guinean-Congolian rainforest of the Congo Basin – the biggest intact forest region in Africa and the second biggest in the world after the Amazon. With an annual rainfall of more than 2 000 mm, there’s biodiversity in bucketloads. Take the Gamba complex, for example, a small area in the south of the country: This patch of earth is home to thousands of insect species, more than 75 different amphibians, 80 species of freshwater fish, 455 bird species, 84 reptile species and 80 mammal species. Those are just the ones that have been identified! New species are regularly discovered. Charismatic animals like forest elephants, forest buffaloes, gorillas, chimpanzees and mandrills are all found in Gabon. In terms of known plant species, the list now exceeds 7 000 and is growing on a weekly basis. Then there’s the coastline, which stretches for about 900 km along the Atlantic Ocean. The beaches are home to important nesting sites for leatherback, loggerhead, olive ridley and Kemp’s ridley turtles. Humpback whales regularly pass by during their migration. More than 21 species of sharks have been recorded and who knows how many fish species. (Marine research is still in its infancy in the region.)
When my husband Bruce asked if I wanted to visit Gabon on a fishing trip to celebrate my 50th birthday, my answer was easy to guess. We booked the trip through Tourette Fishing. It was effortless: no visas required for South Africans and uneventful flights via Addis Ababa. Arriving in Libreville, the capital of Gabon, was slightly more challenging. Gabon was previously a French colony and French is still the most widely spoken language. Very few people speak English. To help navigate the urban jungle, Tourette sent English-speaking guide Habiba Diaz to meet us at the airport. We spent our first night in a flat in a suburb close to the airport, which enabled us to catch a charter flight to Gamba the following morning. Getting checked in with all our fishing and photography gear took hours, but eventually we were ready to board. Our group of eight included six fishermen, from the UK and South Africa, and two enthusiastic photographers. There are no roads from Libreville to Gamba. We flew in a Cessna Caravan down the coast and it was spectacular. The forest canopy was a deep shade of green, crossed with rivers and odd, grassy clearings. As we approached Gamba, the impact of oil drilling became more evident with large areas of cleared forest and pipelines. Gamba is a town built to support the oil industry, and Shell is a major player in the region. The airport mostly serves oil workers going to and fro; fishermen are the exception rather than the rule. Landing at Gamba gave us a taste of things to come as we watched forest elephants lumbering away from the landing strip…
Big river
We disembarked. The heat was intense. Mark Murray and Ewan Kyle from Tourette Fishing met us in their trusty Land Cruisers. After a quick visit to a research centre established by the Smithsonian, to give us an insight into the biodiversity of the region, we boarded sturdy fibreglass boats equipped with 100 hp four-stroke motors, for an hour-long ride to Sette Cama, which would be our base for the next week. When South Africans think of a big river, they think of the Orange or maybe the Zambezi. The Ndogo River is something else. At times, the banks were many kilometres apart and the water was scattered with forested islands. It felt more like a massive lake than a river. Skimming along the water, we saw birds like pelicans, kingfishers and terns, and along the shore we caught glimpses of small fishing villages south of the national park.