This is day 2 of our family expedition. It’s early morning, and we leave the Albert Schweitzer hospital after a peaceful night. The 7 of us hop on a small motor boat and get introduced to the captain, Jean-Rémy. We are going to navigate on the mythical Ogooué river until Omboué, some 120 nautical miles away. That is no less than 230 km!
We have heard all kinds of stories about this trip. Like engines breaking down in the middle of the trip, with boats arriving after 10 hours on water at night time to Omboué, passengers using their smartphones to shed a few centimetres ahead of the boat, hoping no hippos would surge out of the dark waters. So the first thing we check is that Jean-Rémy has 2 working engines.
The Ogooué is the longest river in Gabon. Its source lies down South in Congo. 900 km later it ends in a swampy delta down Port-Gentil. Back in the 19th century, European explorers used the river to discover the depths of the country and its tribes. Then, under French colonisation, it was widely used by the burgeoning wood industry in the 20th century to bring enormous quantities of okoumé, ebony and dozens of others kinds of Gabonese wood to Port-Gentil so they could be shipped to Europe and the Americas. And of course, it has been for long the easiest way for all the villagers living along the river to reach the Albert Schweitzer hospital.
Today, we are lucky to have grey skies above us, which keep the heat at a bearable level. Along our trip we’ll see lonely river villages, a few motor boats coming from Port-Gentil, a couple of enormous rafts full of wood or cars or trucks or construction material towed by small but powerful tugboats, a fantastic-looking church built God knows how in 1898 by missionaries from Alsace, dozens of egrets and herons. But most of the time, we are gliding alone along the river, surrounded by the some of the wildest and thickest vegetation we have ever seen.
Jean-Rémy does not need a GPS or anything. He knows the river by heart. At some point, after some 3 hours of navigation, he takes a left turn on a narrow river branch. That’s a shortcut, and a well-kept secret – according to Google Earth, there is no water here and we should be in the forest. One hour later, suddenly the landscape becomes a hundred times wider: we have reached the Nkomi lagoon, which is only separated from the ocean by a 2-kilometer stretch of road. The last instants of the trip seem to last forever… the sound of the engines is buzzing in our heads and we badly need to stretch our legs. But there we are, after 5 hours on the river: Omboué, at last. A perfectly unspectacular and friendly little place.
Tanad stories from Gabon 