The sea, the savannah, the forest, beaches and lagoons. Put these together and you have a very unusual ecosystem called Loango, Gabon’s most famed national park. But because it’s Gabon and because Loango is hard to get to, “fame” is a very relative word, and as a visitor you get the privilege to have these 155,000 hectares of pristine nature all for yourself.
Our Toyota blazes through the park on sandy paths, in search of animals. And we do see a lot of them: brown buffaloes, majestic elephants, funny bush pigs, frail sitatungas. All of these are fast and do not like to be approached too close, so our guides are careful to leave some distance so that we can spend time contemplating them.
Once though, we find a few elephants stand across the road. Among them, a mother and her baby elephant. We stop the car some 50 meters from the mother, and then starts a fascinating face-to-face that will last for almost 10 minutes, after which the mother moves towards us and decides to charge with loud trumpeting. Our eyes meet hers, and she is not happy. Goosebumps and screams. An unforgettable scene.
Even when there are no animals, we are absorbed in the scenery, which can get very surprising and mysterious in some marshy spots.
We make an interesting stopover at a remote and no-frills scientific camp. There, Gabonese and European experts study in deep details the gorilla community. They spend their days in the forest tracking them and registering all of their movements and behaviours. They have made a map and given a name to each individual. What a job! We spend time discussing with a young German biologist and veterinary who has been in the park for 6 months already. She is almost entirely covered with bites of all sorts, but she wears the smile of someone having the time of her life.
We will neither meet Louis, Chinois, Iboumbou nor Tchikaka. The gorillas are too deep in the forest, the permit to get there is super expensive, and kids below 16 are not allowed anyway. At our night camp facing the beautiful Louri lagoon, we will not see from our tent the hippos either – but we are rather happy about it. The sound of insects at night is wild enough.
Tanad stories from Gabon 