Reign forest
Glorious Gabon gives Karin Wright the wildlife adventure of a lifetime
Trying to identify animal tracks in the wild is always exciting – and these were unmistakably a hippo’s. If we were attempting to spot one of Africa’s most dangerous beasts from the safety of a game-viewing vehicle in broad daylight, this would have been fun. But we were on foot. On a beach. At 2am.
Suddenly, seeing one of Gabon’s fabled “surfing hippos” didn’t seem very sensible.
But, after scanning the waves with his torch, eco-guide Ghislain said: “Let’s go.”
I’d seen him pad through the bush barefoot, stare down an elephant, and now shrug off a possible encounter with a hippo in the dark…
“The animals know that I come in peace,” he said.
There are certainly enough animals in this country on the west coast of Central Africa to test that mantra. More than 85% of Gabon – slightly bigger than the UK, but with just
2.3 million people – is covered in forest, which is home to an estimated 30,000 lowland gorillas and chimps, 90,000 forest elephants, buffalo, mandrills, bongo and sitatunga antelopes, leopards, golden cats, red river hogs… and humpback whales can be seen offshore from July to September.
The vastness of the country’s forests mean exact numbers are difficult to determine – and most of the animals actually live outside the designated national parks.
It also has one of the world’s most important nesting sites for leatherback turtles – which is why I was on that beach in Pongara National Park in the middle of the night, the forest looming on one side, the Atlantic surging on the other, while thousands of translucent ghost crabs scurried about.
Under the cover of darkness, the turtles painstakingly flipper their way up to the high-water mark to lay their eggs.
We didn’t find any leatherbacks that night, but we were lucky enough to find two endangered green turtles. French-speaking