Loango

Loango is the stretch of Gabon's coast where the rainforest walks down to the Atlantic and its animals come with it: forest elephants on the beach at dawn, buffalo grazing above the tide line, and — in the photograph that made the place famous — hippos surfing the breakers, which is not a figure of speech. Fifteen hundred square kilometres of lagoon, savanna, forest and a hundred kilometres of empty sand, it was one of the thirteen national parks that Omar Bongo declared in a single day in 2002, after Michael Fay had ended his Megatransect here — four hundred and fifty-six days walking from the Congo to this beach — and called it the last Eden. The lagoons are the roads: Iguéla in the north, where the Loango Lodge sits on the shore and the boats go out; Louri to the south, with its wilderness camp between the water and the sea; Ndogo beyond, toward Sette Cama and Gamba; Akaka inland, a camp on a river in a floodplain the elephants fill when the water rises. Off the coast the humpbacks pass from July to September; on the beaches the leatherbacks nest from November to February; and in the forest behind, since 2016, a group of western lowland gorillas — the Atananga group, habituated by the Max Planck researchers over ten years — lets a handful of visitors sit with them each morning.

The traveller flies from Libreville to Port-Gentil and comes on by boat or by charter to the lagoon, and gives Loango what it asks, which is time: a morning on the water among the hippos and the kingfishers; a walk through the forest to the beach and along it, with a guide who reads the tracks — elephant, buffalo, sitatunga, sometimes leopard —; the boat to Louri and a night in the wilderness camp with the sea on one side and the lagoon on the other; the hour with the gorillas, earned by an early start and a wet walk; the whales from the boat in the season, and the turtles at night in theirs; and, if the water is high, the run inland to Akaka, where the river bends among the elephants. Rain falls between the seasons; the equator is a hundred kilometres north; and nothing here is done fast.

The Guide's honesty: Loango is bought as a package — the lodge, the camps, the flights and the guides come together, the price is that of a serious safari, and it is worth it, because there is nowhere else on Earth like it; Gabon asks an e-visa, yellow fever papers and malaria prophylaxis, and the country changed hands in August 2023 without a shot fired, the parks kept working, and the prudent traveller checks conditions all the same; the beach animals are wild and the guides' distances are the law; the gorilla permits are few and are booked far ahead, and the hour is spent at seven metres with a mask; the humidity is total, and the rewards — an elephant walking into the surf at sunrise, the whales blowing beyond the breakers, the forest coming to the sea — are the reason the Guide keeps this page among its dearest on the continent.