Odzala-Kokoua

Odzala-Kokoua is one of the oldest national parks in Africa — the French drew it in 1935 — and one of the wildest still: thirteen and a half thousand square kilometres of the north-west of the Republic of the Congo where the rainforest of the Congo basin meets its last savannas, run since 2010 by African Parks and visited through three camps that are the whole of its tourism. Ngaga, in the marantaceae forest on the park's edge, is the gorillas' camp: here the Spanish primatologists Magdalena Bermejo and Germán Illera spent years habituating groups of western lowland gorillas — the shy cousin of the mountain gorilla, which lives in the lowland forest and is seen almost nowhere else —, and each morning the trackers lead a few visitors through the thickets to sit an hour with them. Lango sits on a bai, one of the mineral clearings where the forest's animals come out to feed, and its walks go through the streams and the savanna with the water at the waist; Mboko, on the Lekoli river, is the savanna camp — the boats at dusk among the elephants and the hippos, the buffalo, the spotted hyenas that hunt the grasslands. Mbomo is the village and the park's headquarters; the charter from Brazzaville lands on the airstrip in two hours over unbroken forest.

The traveller flies into Brazzaville, takes the charter north on the appointed day, and moves through the three camps in the order the operator sets — six or seven nights in all: at Ngaga, the two mornings with the gorillas and the walks in the forest that hums; at Lango, the bai walk with the water rising to the waist and the forest elephants somewhere ahead, the platform over the clearing at dusk; at Mboko, the boat on the Lekoli, the savanna drives, the night sounds; and between them, the transfers by road, by river and on foot that are part of the safari and not a break in it. The table is the camps' — good, and set on decks over the forest —; the nights are under nets, and the dawn is birds.

The Guide's honesty: Odzala is a serious journey bought as one — the camps, the flights and the guides come as a package through the operator, the price is that of a Congo basin safari and there is no cheaper door; the Republic of the Congo asks a visa and yellow fever papers, and its troubles have been in the Pool region far to the south, not here, but the prudent traveller checks conditions all the same; the gorillas are seen at seven metres, masked, for one hour, and the permits are few; the humidity, the mud and the sweat bees are total, and the walking is real; and the reward is the Congo basin as it was — a gorilla family in the marantaceae at nine in the morning, a bai full of elephants at dusk, a river with nobody else on it — which is why the Guide keeps this page with a steady hand.