Gabon trip
Jul. 26th, 2007 10:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
qatarperegrineBelow are my notes on our trip to Gabon during the first two and half weeks of July.
We went there to visit Justin's friend Kendra, who did conservation work in Gabon for two years through the Peace Corps and who still spends every other semester or so there, researching elephant-farmer interactions. The other folks on the trip were Justin's parents, Kendra's parents, and Kendra's brother-in-law.
Casablanca
Our trip to Gabon began with an eight-hour layover in Casablanca, since (strangely enough) no airline flies to both Doha and Libreville and thus we had to fly with non-linked tickets. Eight hours in Casablanca: boo hoo.
We caught a train into town and checked out the two sights American guidebooks say to see: the Ancienne Medina ("Old" in French and "City" in Arabic, a tres Moroccan juxtaposition of languages), and the Hassan II Mosque, which is the world's second largest place of worship. The choice of these two sights made us realize that traveling on the advice of American guidebooks is not always helpful when you are not traveling from the United States. American guidebooks gush over "exotic" sights that seem commonplace to us (like Casablanca's souqs) and totally fail to mention the sights that will cause us to ooh and ahh (like Casablanca's trees). The old city was fun to wander around, though, and the mosque is quite pretty. We enjoyed people-watching, and I decided that Moroccan jellabas are my favorite jellabas; they have lovely tasseled hoods that make all the women look like Hogwarts students.
Casablanca is a fascinating mix of Arabic and French. People start conversations by confidently breaking out in one or the other, and we completely failed to ascertain how they decide which one to use. Does everyone speak both? In what contexts would each be spoken? No idea. Another interesting language moment came when the man in front of us at the airport ATM couldn't figure out how to use it, and we were unable to help him because we spoke no languages in common. As much as we travel, it's actually surprising how infrequently that happens.
In all, I think eight hours was the right amount of time to spend in Casablanca; for all the romance that surrounds it in Western perception, there's not actually that much there. I hear Marrakesh is a different story, though.
Libreville
Most of our time in Gabon was spent in remote national parks, but in between each expedition we returned to the capital city of Libreville. We were unfortunately there on weekends and not much is open on Sunday, so our days in Libreville were mostly spent playing cards in hotel rooms, with intermittent trips to grocery stores or internet cafes.
Gabon is largely Christian, but Libreville has a notable Muslim population: our first hotel was right across the street from Hassan II mosque (much smaller than its Moroccan namesake!); the vendors at the artisan market sat reading Qur'ans when no customers were around; many of our cab drivers had prayer beads or CDs of the Qur'an dangling from their rear-view mirrors, just like here. (Justin said ma'a salaama to one cab driver when we got out, and the rather surprised driver said wa aleikum.) We also ate often at a very good Lebanese restaurant called, amusingly, L'Emir.
My favorite thing to do in Libreville was visiting the market; it was crowded and chaotic, but a fun place to people-watch. Vendors carrying platters of fruit on their heads, women with babies tied on their backs, men calling out the price of their wares. Lots of people in traditional dresses, with either colorful geometric designs or portraits of President Bongo, who after 40 years of presidency seems to have taken on a mythic quality. Also lots of people in modern dress of various kinds, including plenty of hijab. I saw a man whose shirt read "Exstacy smuggler" -- another, "Let me show you my potty" -- and resolved never to buy a shirt decorated in a language I don't speak.
Least favorite aspect of Libreville: a corrupt and somewhat power-hungry government. On one day, one of our taxis got stopped by police twice. Evidently they stop people and ask them for their travel documents; if you don't have yours, you have to bribe the police officers. For all my complaints about Qatar, at least you don't have to carry a national ID card at all times, or bribe police officers. Human rights violations here tend to be a result not of government interference but of government failing to enforce laws that should prevent people from exploiting each other.
Sette Cama
Our first week was spent in Sette Cama, a village on the north end of Ndogo Lagoon. Getting there was a notable experience. I slept through most of the plane ride from Libreville to Gamba, but when I woke up and looked out the window I was astonished: forest as far as the eye could see. Whenever I fly over the U.S. or Europe I am depressed by the extent of human impact on the environment; no matter where you are, you can see some signs of human habitation, whether it's a city or a highway or just a power line. Here it is just forest -- Gabon is 80% rainforest. Gorgeous. After we arrived in Gamba, there was a nearly two-hour boat ride across the lagoon to Sette Cama. Apparently many of the villages here are reachable only by boat.
We stayed at a community-based ecotourism place, and the eight of us were the only tourists there, staying in a nice 6-bedroom bungalow. Our dinners were cooked by the local women, and were traditional Gabonese fare, which is to say: manioc, manioc and more manioc. A typical meal consisted of boiled manioc root (like potatoes but stringier and less flavorful), boiled manioc leaves (like spinach but more bitter), and fermented manioc root (like glue, I swear), plus a fish or chicken dish for the meat-eaters. Manioc is notable for several reasons: according to Wikipedia, it provides more calories per acre per day than anything else people cultivate besides sugarcane, but, on the downside, it is extremely bland, nutritionally devoid and, oh yes, chock full of cyanide. It has to be boiled into submission in order not to kill you. It's what tapioca is made of, incidentally. Almost all Gabonese dishes consist of some subset of manioc, plantain, fish, tomato paste, palm oil, onion, and a pepper-oil sauce called piemont. Kendra calls them "the ingredients."
We spent most of our time in Sette Cama on hikes through the forest, which is strangely less foreign than I expected. The trees definitely look different and I'd never walked through a swamp before, but otherwise it wasn't all that far removed from walking through a forest in northern California. (The forest near my home in California contains a zoo, so even hearing monkey and chimp calls in the distance wasn't too foreign an experience!) It was a little unnerving, though, to begin our hikes with safety precautions on what to do when charged by a wild animal. (If it's a gorilla: imitate a disinterested, submissive gorilla by dropping to all fours and pretending to forage or groom yourself. Male gorillas will charge as a show of force, but they don't really want to attack you. If it's an elephant: get the hell behind a big tree, or for preference inside one whose roots we can slip between but elephants can't. Elephants are cranky and will charge.)
Less than an hour into our first hike in Africa, we saw what I most wanted to see in Gabon but was afraid even to hope for: gorillas. It was a troop of 4-6 but I only saw two: a smallish one, I'd guess an adult female, sitting quietly in a tree, and large male, who came down the tree to tell us off for getting too close. He didn't come towards us, though -- just stood at the bottom of the tree shouting -- so the guide told us to hold our ground and hold perfectly still. I was petrified, but it was amazing.
That afternoon we visited the village and nearby historical sites; this was an important trading post 150 years ago. We bought some placemats from a local weaver and learned that weaving is a dying art, as young women aren't learning the craft. Nor are young people staying in the villages, actually. It's a problem.
At night we went off in a boat in search of crocodiles. One of our guides, Kassa, caught a baby and brought it on board for a minute. It was very cute, but I felt a bit sorry for it! On the way home the boat motor died and we were stranded for quite a while, so I took a nap. At that point I started reflecting on Things I'd Been Stuck In in Gabon. In Libreville I'd been stuck in an elevator and, briefly, a bank that closed for the siesta; in Sette Cama I'd gotten stuck in a bathroom with a broken doorknob, and now a boat. Luckily the trend ended there, but it brought home for me that patience is required more often in Africa than in the States. Unrelatedly we realized it was July 4, so I started singing "God Bless the USA" like they always do at the Weaverville fireworks, albeit more tunelessly and ironically.
Our second day in Sette Cama was our longer hike: 7 Km through the forest in the morning, a lunch and siesta on the beach, and then 5 Km on the beach back to the boat. Since it's the dry season we didn't see huge numbers of animals in the morning -- mostly red-capped monkeys -- but the hike itself was very enjoyable. Kassa taught us about some of the forest plants and their uses. We also learned other important life skills, such as: picking your way through a swamp without sinking, and, not stepping on lines of army ants. As we walked back down the beach in the afternoon animals were emerging from the forest to forage in the meadows, so we saw two pairs of elephants and several forest buffalo. We also found a rather unhappy freshwater turtle in the ocean, so one of our guides carried it back to the lagoon.
Our final morning in Sette Cama we went hippo watching. Hippos surprised me: I knew they liked water, but I didn't realize that they spend pretty much all their time totally submerged, like dolphins. They come up every 2-3 minutes to take a breath; Wikipedia says this is such an automatic process that they do it in their sleep. With their round little ears bobbing out of the water they look placid and cuddly, like Moomins. This is rather misleading.
Our final expedition in Sette Cama was a trip to a village of eight inhabitants on a lake further up the river. The villagers were all off working in the forest, but we wandered around the outsides of their buildings, which are constructed using more traditional building materials than Sette Cama's. (Bark walls, not corrugated tin.) A satellite dish seemed a little out of place in the center of this isolated village, but it's not, really. Technologies we still think of as luxuries -- satellite dishes, cell phones -- are an essential means of communication with the outside world in remote Gabonese villages.
Langoue Bai
The second place we spent most of our time was Langoue Bai, at a small camp run by the Wildlife Conservation Society, with whom Kendra used to work. Bai is the pygmy word for a clearing, and Langoue Bai is a large clearing in the jungle of Ivindo National Park. Since many forest creatures come to graze on the grass and/or drink and bathe in a muddy pool, a research camp was built nearby so biologists and conservationists can monitor animals and tourists can tag along and see them too.
That's the objective description of Langoue Bai. The subjective description is: Paradise.
You get there via a seven-hour train ride from Libreville, followed by a two-hour Land Cruiser ride over unpaved forestry roads and a two-hour hike from the end of the road to the camp. Really lovely hike, though the first half-hour was a bit steep. The camp is amazing. Everything has to be ported in that two-hour hike, so it's very self-contained, and beautiful in its austerity. Our rooms were actually large tents on raised, covered platforms; outside each was a bucket of water with an attached faucet, so we could wash our hands and clothes with the provided biodegradable soap. The toilet is self-composting; all the lighting is powered by solar panels, which means you have electricity all day and not just when the generator is on at night, as in the other places we stayed. They have a camp cook who makes amazing food, especially considering that it's chiefly made of canned goods. Or maybe after a week of manioc, anything tastes good!
Shortly after arriving we hiked to a nearby waterfall. Just before we got to the river we saw swinging vines and heard familiar oo-oo noises: there were gorillas nearby! So instead of hiking straight to the bottom of the waterfall we hiked out onto the river at the top of the falls, in time to see two gorillas run by at the base. Upon returning to camp happy but sweaty we discovered that there are showers -- buckets again, but filled with hot water! I emerged from the shower to find our friends sitting in a gazebo sharing a bottle of wine. As I sipped my glass, two civets came out -- fascinating creatures, looking in turn like cats, like ferrets, like hyenas, like raccoons. It was a truly glorious moment.
We spent two days at the bai. Each morning we left at around 7:15 for the two-hour hike from camp to the bai. There's a three-story viewing platform at the edge of the forest, sort of tree-house like, and we sat there from 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., looking out through telescopes when animals were doing interesting things, and reading books when things were quiet.
The hike itself is beautiful. It follows natural elephant paths, so on the way you get to see a lot of the trees whose fruit elephants eat. Also, the steeper bits have sort of natural stairs formed by elephant footprints made in the wet season when the path is muddy. On the second day, we ran into some elephants on the path. A mother and calf were just out of sight on the left side of the trail, but she had another calf on our right. We were thus forced to break the first rule of Not Getting Stomped On By Elephants: we had to come between a mother and her calf. We tried to tiptoe, but she caught us, trumpeted, and started crashing through the undergrowth. We all dived behind a tree (photo to left!), but she didn't charge. After a few tense minutes we left the area two by two.
Before we left for the bai the first day, we were excited to hear that Modeste -- the head researcher -- had seen an elephant and a gorilla each of the last two days. Perhaps we too would see an elephant and a gorilla! Little did we know what the bai had in store for us. On the first day we saw fifteen elephants, including a very cute baby that loved rolling in the mud; numerous sitatungas, a type of antelope; and a red river hog, which has the most cute/ugly face.
At dinner we joked that since Modeste had arranged such a spectacular conference of elephants, we'd like a similar convocation of gorillas the next day -- and the gorillas obliged. When we reached the bai the next morning there were four elephants at the water hole and a large gorilla family in the meadow. The silverback is named Paduk (after the tree), and he was accompanied by, IIRC, five females, two toddlers and one tiny baby. Their antics kept us all entertained for a whole hour, especially the two toddlers who never stopped roughhousing. Later that day two elephants came out and had a fight (neither was injured), and about 55 red river hogs came out and milled around the water.
Lope
Our last stop before heading back to Libreville was Lope, which is a more savannahed area. Unfortunately I got a multi-day migraine beginning on the train ride to Lope, so I didn't get to see much. Our hotel was gorgeous, though; we stayed in a little bungalow overlooking a beautiful river with little undeveloped beaches.
One evening we drove to Makoghe, a small village inside the national park, which is starting to try to reach out to the few tourists who come out this way. They provided us a nice traditional dinner (manioc, manioc, and manioc with fish) and then performed dances that would traditionally be performed at initiation and other religious ceremonies. There were iboga bushes growing all through the village, presumably to provide the necessary hallucinogens for the real ceremonies. The dancing was fun, very stomp-y. (Videos will be posted soon.) As I was watching I thought about how strange it must have been to be a British explorer or trader in this region a few hundred years ago. These dances would have seemed very wild to a Victorian Englishman, especially when performed in the middle of the night under influence of iboga.
Leaving Lope turned out to be difficult; we spent most of one night on benches in the train station, since our 1:20 a.m. train showed up at 10 a.m.
All in all, I absolutely loved Gabon. It is an amazingly beautiful country, and though it's not really set up for tourism (yet), there is a great deal to see. This was my first time visiting Africa (Egypt doesn't count), and I very much hope it will not be my last.
Many more pictures, and a couple videos, are available here.
We went there to visit Justin's friend Kendra, who did conservation work in Gabon for two years through the Peace Corps and who still spends every other semester or so there, researching elephant-farmer interactions. The other folks on the trip were Justin's parents, Kendra's parents, and Kendra's brother-in-law.
 |
| Kendra, Marjorie, Justin, Jeff, Lorraine, Steve, Trudi, Guy, Chef Mokoukou (chief of Makoghe), and Don -- the folks we were traveling with. Well, we didn't really travel with the chief of Makoghe. |
Casablanca
Our trip to Gabon began with an eight-hour layover in Casablanca, since (strangely enough) no airline flies to both Doha and Libreville and thus we had to fly with non-linked tickets. Eight hours in Casablanca: boo hoo.We caught a train into town and checked out the two sights American guidebooks say to see: the Ancienne Medina ("Old" in French and "City" in Arabic, a tres Moroccan juxtaposition of languages), and the Hassan II Mosque, which is the world's second largest place of worship. The choice of these two sights made us realize that traveling on the advice of American guidebooks is not always helpful when you are not traveling from the United States. American guidebooks gush over "exotic" sights that seem commonplace to us (like Casablanca's souqs) and totally fail to mention the sights that will cause us to ooh and ahh (like Casablanca's trees). The old city was fun to wander around, though, and the mosque is quite pretty. We enjoyed people-watching, and I decided that Moroccan jellabas are my favorite jellabas; they have lovely tasseled hoods that make all the women look like Hogwarts students.
Casablanca is a fascinating mix of Arabic and French. People start conversations by confidently breaking out in one or the other, and we completely failed to ascertain how they decide which one to use. Does everyone speak both? In what contexts would each be spoken? No idea. Another interesting language moment came when the man in front of us at the airport ATM couldn't figure out how to use it, and we were unable to help him because we spoke no languages in common. As much as we travel, it's actually surprising how infrequently that happens.
In all, I think eight hours was the right amount of time to spend in Casablanca; for all the romance that surrounds it in Western perception, there's not actually that much there. I hear Marrakesh is a different story, though.
Libreville
Most of our time in Gabon was spent in remote national parks, but in between each expedition we returned to the capital city of Libreville. We were unfortunately there on weekends and not much is open on Sunday, so our days in Libreville were mostly spent playing cards in hotel rooms, with intermittent trips to grocery stores or internet cafes.
Gabon is largely Christian, but Libreville has a notable Muslim population: our first hotel was right across the street from Hassan II mosque (much smaller than its Moroccan namesake!); the vendors at the artisan market sat reading Qur'ans when no customers were around; many of our cab drivers had prayer beads or CDs of the Qur'an dangling from their rear-view mirrors, just like here. (Justin said ma'a salaama to one cab driver when we got out, and the rather surprised driver said wa aleikum.) We also ate often at a very good Lebanese restaurant called, amusingly, L'Emir.
My favorite thing to do in Libreville was visiting the market; it was crowded and chaotic, but a fun place to people-watch. Vendors carrying platters of fruit on their heads, women with babies tied on their backs, men calling out the price of their wares. Lots of people in traditional dresses, with either colorful geometric designs or portraits of President Bongo, who after 40 years of presidency seems to have taken on a mythic quality. Also lots of people in modern dress of various kinds, including plenty of hijab. I saw a man whose shirt read "Exstacy smuggler" -- another, "Let me show you my potty" -- and resolved never to buy a shirt decorated in a language I don't speak.
Least favorite aspect of Libreville: a corrupt and somewhat power-hungry government. On one day, one of our taxis got stopped by police twice. Evidently they stop people and ask them for their travel documents; if you don't have yours, you have to bribe the police officers. For all my complaints about Qatar, at least you don't have to carry a national ID card at all times, or bribe police officers. Human rights violations here tend to be a result not of government interference but of government failing to enforce laws that should prevent people from exploiting each other.
Sette Cama
Our first week was spent in Sette Cama, a village on the north end of Ndogo Lagoon. Getting there was a notable experience. I slept through most of the plane ride from Libreville to Gamba, but when I woke up and looked out the window I was astonished: forest as far as the eye could see. Whenever I fly over the U.S. or Europe I am depressed by the extent of human impact on the environment; no matter where you are, you can see some signs of human habitation, whether it's a city or a highway or just a power line. Here it is just forest -- Gabon is 80% rainforest. Gorgeous. After we arrived in Gamba, there was a nearly two-hour boat ride across the lagoon to Sette Cama. Apparently many of the villages here are reachable only by boat.We stayed at a community-based ecotourism place, and the eight of us were the only tourists there, staying in a nice 6-bedroom bungalow. Our dinners were cooked by the local women, and were traditional Gabonese fare, which is to say: manioc, manioc and more manioc. A typical meal consisted of boiled manioc root (like potatoes but stringier and less flavorful), boiled manioc leaves (like spinach but more bitter), and fermented manioc root (like glue, I swear), plus a fish or chicken dish for the meat-eaters. Manioc is notable for several reasons: according to Wikipedia, it provides more calories per acre per day than anything else people cultivate besides sugarcane, but, on the downside, it is extremely bland, nutritionally devoid and, oh yes, chock full of cyanide. It has to be boiled into submission in order not to kill you. It's what tapioca is made of, incidentally. Almost all Gabonese dishes consist of some subset of manioc, plantain, fish, tomato paste, palm oil, onion, and a pepper-oil sauce called piemont. Kendra calls them "the ingredients."
We spent most of our time in Sette Cama on hikes through the forest, which is strangely less foreign than I expected. The trees definitely look different and I'd never walked through a swamp before, but otherwise it wasn't all that far removed from walking through a forest in northern California. (The forest near my home in California contains a zoo, so even hearing monkey and chimp calls in the distance wasn't too foreign an experience!) It was a little unnerving, though, to begin our hikes with safety precautions on what to do when charged by a wild animal. (If it's a gorilla: imitate a disinterested, submissive gorilla by dropping to all fours and pretending to forage or groom yourself. Male gorillas will charge as a show of force, but they don't really want to attack you. If it's an elephant: get the hell behind a big tree, or for preference inside one whose roots we can slip between but elephants can't. Elephants are cranky and will charge.)
Less than an hour into our first hike in Africa, we saw what I most wanted to see in Gabon but was afraid even to hope for: gorillas. It was a troop of 4-6 but I only saw two: a smallish one, I'd guess an adult female, sitting quietly in a tree, and large male, who came down the tree to tell us off for getting too close. He didn't come towards us, though -- just stood at the bottom of the tree shouting -- so the guide told us to hold our ground and hold perfectly still. I was petrified, but it was amazing.
That afternoon we visited the village and nearby historical sites; this was an important trading post 150 years ago. We bought some placemats from a local weaver and learned that weaving is a dying art, as young women aren't learning the craft. Nor are young people staying in the villages, actually. It's a problem.At night we went off in a boat in search of crocodiles. One of our guides, Kassa, caught a baby and brought it on board for a minute. It was very cute, but I felt a bit sorry for it! On the way home the boat motor died and we were stranded for quite a while, so I took a nap. At that point I started reflecting on Things I'd Been Stuck In in Gabon. In Libreville I'd been stuck in an elevator and, briefly, a bank that closed for the siesta; in Sette Cama I'd gotten stuck in a bathroom with a broken doorknob, and now a boat. Luckily the trend ended there, but it brought home for me that patience is required more often in Africa than in the States. Unrelatedly we realized it was July 4, so I started singing "God Bless the USA" like they always do at the Weaverville fireworks, albeit more tunelessly and ironically.
Our second day in Sette Cama was our longer hike: 7 Km through the forest in the morning, a lunch and siesta on the beach, and then 5 Km on the beach back to the boat. Since it's the dry season we didn't see huge numbers of animals in the morning -- mostly red-capped monkeys -- but the hike itself was very enjoyable. Kassa taught us about some of the forest plants and their uses. We also learned other important life skills, such as: picking your way through a swamp without sinking, and, not stepping on lines of army ants. As we walked back down the beach in the afternoon animals were emerging from the forest to forage in the meadows, so we saw two pairs of elephants and several forest buffalo. We also found a rather unhappy freshwater turtle in the ocean, so one of our guides carried it back to the lagoon.
Our final morning in Sette Cama we went hippo watching. Hippos surprised me: I knew they liked water, but I didn't realize that they spend pretty much all their time totally submerged, like dolphins. They come up every 2-3 minutes to take a breath; Wikipedia says this is such an automatic process that they do it in their sleep. With their round little ears bobbing out of the water they look placid and cuddly, like Moomins. This is rather misleading.Our final expedition in Sette Cama was a trip to a village of eight inhabitants on a lake further up the river. The villagers were all off working in the forest, but we wandered around the outsides of their buildings, which are constructed using more traditional building materials than Sette Cama's. (Bark walls, not corrugated tin.) A satellite dish seemed a little out of place in the center of this isolated village, but it's not, really. Technologies we still think of as luxuries -- satellite dishes, cell phones -- are an essential means of communication with the outside world in remote Gabonese villages.
Langoue Bai
The second place we spent most of our time was Langoue Bai, at a small camp run by the Wildlife Conservation Society, with whom Kendra used to work. Bai is the pygmy word for a clearing, and Langoue Bai is a large clearing in the jungle of Ivindo National Park. Since many forest creatures come to graze on the grass and/or drink and bathe in a muddy pool, a research camp was built nearby so biologists and conservationists can monitor animals and tourists can tag along and see them too.
That's the objective description of Langoue Bai. The subjective description is: Paradise.
You get there via a seven-hour train ride from Libreville, followed by a two-hour Land Cruiser ride over unpaved forestry roads and a two-hour hike from the end of the road to the camp. Really lovely hike, though the first half-hour was a bit steep. The camp is amazing. Everything has to be ported in that two-hour hike, so it's very self-contained, and beautiful in its austerity. Our rooms were actually large tents on raised, covered platforms; outside each was a bucket of water with an attached faucet, so we could wash our hands and clothes with the provided biodegradable soap. The toilet is self-composting; all the lighting is powered by solar panels, which means you have electricity all day and not just when the generator is on at night, as in the other places we stayed. They have a camp cook who makes amazing food, especially considering that it's chiefly made of canned goods. Or maybe after a week of manioc, anything tastes good!Shortly after arriving we hiked to a nearby waterfall. Just before we got to the river we saw swinging vines and heard familiar oo-oo noises: there were gorillas nearby! So instead of hiking straight to the bottom of the waterfall we hiked out onto the river at the top of the falls, in time to see two gorillas run by at the base. Upon returning to camp happy but sweaty we discovered that there are showers -- buckets again, but filled with hot water! I emerged from the shower to find our friends sitting in a gazebo sharing a bottle of wine. As I sipped my glass, two civets came out -- fascinating creatures, looking in turn like cats, like ferrets, like hyenas, like raccoons. It was a truly glorious moment.
We spent two days at the bai. Each morning we left at around 7:15 for the two-hour hike from camp to the bai. There's a three-story viewing platform at the edge of the forest, sort of tree-house like, and we sat there from 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., looking out through telescopes when animals were doing interesting things, and reading books when things were quiet.
The hike itself is beautiful. It follows natural elephant paths, so on the way you get to see a lot of the trees whose fruit elephants eat. Also, the steeper bits have sort of natural stairs formed by elephant footprints made in the wet season when the path is muddy. On the second day, we ran into some elephants on the path. A mother and calf were just out of sight on the left side of the trail, but she had another calf on our right. We were thus forced to break the first rule of Not Getting Stomped On By Elephants: we had to come between a mother and her calf. We tried to tiptoe, but she caught us, trumpeted, and started crashing through the undergrowth. We all dived behind a tree (photo to left!), but she didn't charge. After a few tense minutes we left the area two by two.Before we left for the bai the first day, we were excited to hear that Modeste -- the head researcher -- had seen an elephant and a gorilla each of the last two days. Perhaps we too would see an elephant and a gorilla! Little did we know what the bai had in store for us. On the first day we saw fifteen elephants, including a very cute baby that loved rolling in the mud; numerous sitatungas, a type of antelope; and a red river hog, which has the most cute/ugly face.
At dinner we joked that since Modeste had arranged such a spectacular conference of elephants, we'd like a similar convocation of gorillas the next day -- and the gorillas obliged. When we reached the bai the next morning there were four elephants at the water hole and a large gorilla family in the meadow. The silverback is named Paduk (after the tree), and he was accompanied by, IIRC, five females, two toddlers and one tiny baby. Their antics kept us all entertained for a whole hour, especially the two toddlers who never stopped roughhousing. Later that day two elephants came out and had a fight (neither was injured), and about 55 red river hogs came out and milled around the water.
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LopeOur last stop before heading back to Libreville was Lope, which is a more savannahed area. Unfortunately I got a multi-day migraine beginning on the train ride to Lope, so I didn't get to see much. Our hotel was gorgeous, though; we stayed in a little bungalow overlooking a beautiful river with little undeveloped beaches.
One evening we drove to Makoghe, a small village inside the national park, which is starting to try to reach out to the few tourists who come out this way. They provided us a nice traditional dinner (manioc, manioc, and manioc with fish) and then performed dances that would traditionally be performed at initiation and other religious ceremonies. There were iboga bushes growing all through the village, presumably to provide the necessary hallucinogens for the real ceremonies. The dancing was fun, very stomp-y. (Videos will be posted soon.) As I was watching I thought about how strange it must have been to be a British explorer or trader in this region a few hundred years ago. These dances would have seemed very wild to a Victorian Englishman, especially when performed in the middle of the night under influence of iboga.
Leaving Lope turned out to be difficult; we spent most of one night on benches in the train station, since our 1:20 a.m. train showed up at 10 a.m.
All in all, I absolutely loved Gabon. It is an amazingly beautiful country, and though it's not really set up for tourism (yet), there is a great deal to see. This was my first time visiting Africa (Egypt doesn't count), and I very much hope it will not be my last.
Many more pictures, and a couple videos, are available here.
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Date: 2007-07-27 03:03 am (UTC)Photoshop tips
Date: 2007-07-28 01:32 am (UTC)Re: Photoshop tips
Date: 2007-08-03 11:04 am (UTC)Yeah, I did so for a lot of the pictures at the bai, especially of the elephants, but I've been loath to do so for the gorillas because they're so dark and I don't want to lose any detail. I should play around with Curves though and see if I can get it to work. :-)
Very nice account
Date: 2007-09-04 05:37 pm (UTC)I got the link to your blog from Jeff, and I am glad I did. Very well written account of your stay in Gabon, and best of all, I could easily follow in your footsteps as me and my wife visited the same places on our honeymoon in 2006. Such a magical place. Thanks for sharing.
p.s. video clips and slideshows of our stay in Gabon on our website: http://www.onime.com
cheers, Marko & Rita
makoghe
Date: 2010-01-12 02:48 am (UTC)forgive me for disturbing you but i read about your trip to makoghe which is a place i wish to travel to later this year to embark on iboga rituals. my question is even though u didnt do one of these ceremonies yourself, do you know if the village is open to taking tourists through the iboga ceremonies. ive been informed these ceremonies can assist in helping with mental illnesses.
thanks
Graz