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"Gift of the Gabon" by Melanie McGrath
| When you book with Easyticket Ltd. you are buying total peace of mind. From the moment you step abroad the plane it only gets better from them on. |
| NUDE, NAKED AFRICA (GABON) |
|
Published Sep 10, 2007
Gabon has an astonishing variety of wildlife - the only place in the world you
can see gorillas, hippos surfing the waves and whales in the same day. And
now it aims to become the Costa Rica of Africa. Melanie McGrath reports
"Of all the rooms at Loango Lodge," says Serge, fussing with the shutters of
an immaculate okoumé wood bungalow overlooking Iguéla lagoon in the small
central African republic of Gabon, "this is Mr Rombout's favourite. He's
coming here you know, very soon, they say. You may even get to meet him."
Serge leaves me to admire the view of sharp blue waters softening to treacle
at the banks where trees and jungle lianas dip down to meet them. In the
reeds below the bungalow, a large black and yellow ornate monitor lizard
suns itself and a clutch of African grey parrots clatters in the shade of an oil
palm overhead. Loango Lodge is Rombout Swanborn's dream. It is also his
great gamble. From his favourite room overlooking Iguéla, it's easy to see
why he took it.
Son of a Dutch Shell employee and a teacher, Swanborn spent much of his
childhood in Gabon during the oil boom years of the 1970s which made this
highly urbanised, sparsely populated and still largely forested country one of
the richest and most stable in sub-Saharan Africa. Swanborn struck gold at
an early age by inventing a device to separate oil from water out on the rigs
and in 2000 he established a fishing lodge on the edge of an area of coastal
forest in the south of the country in a region known as Loango.
Two years later, with his eye on the diminishing oil reserves, President Omar
Bongo signed over 28,500 sq km of Gabonese rainforest, savannah and
coastline to create the country's first national park system and, he hoped, a
new tourist economy. Rombout Swanborn seized the moment, sinking $7m
into Operation Loango, which now constitutes the largest and most
impressive of the joint ventures dreamed up by government, private
enterprise and the Wildlife Conservation Society, among others, to kick-start
eco-tourism in this lovely, emerald-forested gem of a country.
It's probably no coincidence that about 11% of Gabon is now national park,
a percentage matched only by Costa Rica. All the talk at Loango is of Gabon
as the future Costa Rica of Africa, an unspoiled, high-end eco-tourist
destination. The comparison isn't as strange as it might sound. Aside from
their fabulous natural heritage, both countries are the stable, relatively
wealthy exceptions in unstable, impoverished regions; both have
governments supportive (at least for the moment) of tourist development;
and both believe in harnessing private enterprise to fund national
environmental and conservation initiatives. Already, Operation Loango has
funded primate research and a beach clean-up.
Swanborn's Operation Loango, the plush fly-in lodge with those immaculate
bungalows, plus a series of smaller lodges and bush camps strategically
placed around Loango national park and a couple of research camps, is
currently a prototype for the kind of eco-tourist development Bongo and
Swanborn would like to see developed in Gabon's 12 other new parks and,
for the visitor at least, a good place to start. According to Dr Lee White, the
British head of the Wildlife Conservation Society in Gabon, Loango is "the
most beautiful park in Africa".
He may well be right. Serge and I took a boat trip around the park's whisky-
coloured rivers and blue lagoons, into the still, musty gloaming of the
rainforest and then out once more into the blaring sun, across an estuary
towards the Atlantic and Loango's 100km of empty, soft-sanded shoreline.
Every so often we moored up, surprising a herd of red river hogs, with their
tufty ears and Star Wars' Yoda faces, or stopping to watch a group of forest
elephants that had come down to the shoreline to graze on ibago, a
hallucinogenic root. Loango is the only place in the world where you can see
gorillas, chimpanzees, buffalo, turtles and humpback whales within a stone's
throw of one another; the only place in the world where forest elephants
come down on to the beach and hippos surf the waves. This variety was one
of the reasons I'd come. The other was to try to spot one of the country's
35,000 Western Lowland gorillas.
Gorillas were part of the reason Bongo decided to create the parks, after
listening to a presentation by Lee White and Mike Fay. Fay is an American
naturalist who completed a 2,000-mile, 456-day trek called the
"Megatransect" of the great Congo basin jungle which comprises the largest
area of undisturbed rainforest in Africa and of which Gabon is a part. During
his trek, Fay came across populations of so-called naive gorillas and
chimpanzees, apes that had never come across human beings and so had no
fear of them. It seemed like a good time to act.
The jungle of the Congo basin is the setting for Joseph Conrad's novel,
Heart Of Darkness. Its hero, Marlow, describes his experience as "like
travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world". This is what attracted
Swanborn and his millions to this former French colony, as it attracted the
fictional Kurtz before him. Gabon really is the Africa of black water rivers and
misty, primeval swamp forest; the Africa of pygmies and mythical dinosaurs;
the Africa which, 100 years ago, lent the Dark Continent its mystique and its
name. Serge, his fellow eco-guide Basile and I wandered across Loango for
days without seeing another human being. Only a few washed-up plastic
bottles on the beach and, out at sea, a necklace of oil rigs served as
reminders of the times.
The only large predator species in Gabon are leopards, shy nocturnal
creatures, and crocs (all three African species - the Nile, the African dwarf
and the slender-snouted - live at Loango) so punch-drunk on fish they'd be
unlikely to bother with human beings. A rather nasty snake, the Gabon
viper, lives in the forest and there are the real but limited dangers presented
by elephants, hippos and gorillas, but the attitude towards these animals is
relaxed, or reckless, depending on your view. In our search for gorillas,
Basile and I were caught out while kayaking on a backwater creek too narrow
for comfort or, as I realised all too late, for safety, by a gnarly hippo, who
tried to bring the kayak down. Basile immediately steadied the boat and we
were fine, though shaken. Back at the lodge, the incident was met with a
Gallic shrug, as if to say, well, yeah, you know, merde happens.
The upside of this randomness is the freedom to do your own thing,
including gorilla-spotting. There are no expensive licences to be bought, no
medicals to undergo, no time-limits as there generally are in the gorilla-
watching parks in Uganda or Rwanda. Serge, Basile and I just hung out.
We were meandering in the savannah one day when from the edge of the
forest a lone silverback suddenly appeared only 15 metres ahead of us.
Coming face to face so unexpectedly with this fantastically muscular hulk in
all his terrific, shaggy wildness was stupendously exciting. He sat and
watched us for a while, weighing the risk of crossing a patch of open ground
to reach the forest on the other side. Finally he ventured out, then lost his
nerve and knuckle-cantered back to his previous spot. Two minutes later he
gathered his courage, made a second foray and this time reached the other
side and disappeared into the trees, stopping only for a final look back at us.
Researchers working at Operation Loango later told us our silverback was
almost certainly M'bolo (Old Man), as they'd called him. He had crossed that
way before. You can tell it's him, they said, because he smells of sponge
cake. They are hoping to habituate M'bolo, initially to their presence, then to
that of visitors like us. At which point, gorilla watching in Gabon may well
become as expensive and as regulated as it is in Rwanda or Uganda. And for
M'bolo's sake, let's hope it does.
One of those rooting for Gabon to go Costa Rica's way is the South African
tourism manager at Loango Lodge, Edward Truter. "Gabon has the potential
to become the Costa Rica of Africa, but it'll take 10 years," he says. For
those who can come equipped with some French, flexibility and a willingness
to endure a little roughness around the edges, the place has a great deal to
offer: high canopy primary rainforest, savannah, mangrove and white sand
beach around which live 60,000 forest elephants, 64,000 chimpanzees, six
species of whale, including, during June and July, around 3,000 humpbacks,
three species of marine turtle, supertroops of rare mandrills, manatees and,
of course, those gorillas.
On my last night at Loango, Basile took me on a moonlit walk along the
beach looking for nesting turtles. We saw only a few recent turtle nests, a
few forest elephants, some cat and mongoose tracks, bats and a Nile croc,
but it was warm and the forest was singing with night things, and way out at
sea the Mordor-like flares of the rigs which first brought Rombout Swanborn
to these shores glowed tangerine. I thought of M'bolo and hoped Gabon
would Costa Rica-fy quickly enough to protect him but imperfectly enough to
leave the country feeling as wild and old as it does now.
The next day, the Lodge's Cessna having suddenly become unavailable,
reserved, I suspected, for Swanborn's imminent visit, I left Loango for Port
Gentil, a four-hour boat journey along the M'pivie river with its red-black
water and slowly whorling papyrus islands. We stopped briefly to admire St
Ann's, an obscure mission designed by Gustav Eiffel, now elegantly colonised
by hornets. I brushed the sweat from my eyes and in the doing of it flushed
a colony of epauletted fruit bats from their perches. For a moment, I felt just
like Kate Hepburn in The African Queen, waiting for my Bogie.
Way to go
Getting there
Nude 'n' Naked Africa ( http://www.nude-n-naked.com ) arrange all inclusive
trips to Gabon starting from USD 3,600 pp (£ 1,780) for seven nights in the
Libreville and Loango national park, including full-board, all excursions in the
park, all internal flights and transfers, but excluding international flights.
Royal Air Maroc ( www.royalairmaroc.com ) flies from London Gatwick to
Libreville, Gabon, via Casablanca twice weekly from about USD 900 ( £450 )
return including all taxes.
Further information
Country code: 00 241.
Flight time London-Libreville via Casablanca: 24 hours, including an overnight
stopover.
Time difference: +1hr.
USD 1 = 480 CFA francs.
£1 = 953 CFA francs.
Gabon has an astonishing variety of wildlife - the only place in the world you
can see gorillas, hippos surfing the waves and whales in the same day. And
now it aims to become the Costa Rica of Africa. Melanie McGrath reports
"Of all the rooms at Loango Lodge," says Serge, fussing with the shutters of
an immaculate okoumé wood bungalow overlooking Iguéla lagoon in the small
central African republic of Gabon, "this is Mr Rombout's favourite. He's
coming here you know, very soon, they say. You may even get to meet him."
Serge leaves me to admire the view of sharp blue waters softening to treacle
at the banks where trees and jungle lianas dip down to meet them. In the
reeds below the bungalow, a large black and yellow ornate monitor lizard
suns itself and a clutch of African grey parrots clatters in the shade of an oil
palm overhead. Loango Lodge is Rombout Swanborn's dream. It is also his
great gamble. From his favourite room overlooking Iguéla, it's easy to see
why he took it.
Son of a Dutch Shell employee and a teacher, Swanborn spent much of his
childhood in Gabon during the oil boom years of the 1970s which made this
highly urbanised, sparsely populated and still largely forested country one of
the richest and most stable in sub-Saharan Africa. Swanborn struck gold at
an early age by inventing a device to separate oil from water out on the rigs
and in 2000 he established a fishing lodge on the edge of an area of coastal
forest in the south of the country in a region known as Loango.
Two years later, with his eye on the diminishing oil reserves, President Omar
Bongo signed over 28,500 sq km of Gabonese rainforest, savannah and
coastline to create the country's first national park system and, he hoped, a
new tourist economy. Rombout Swanborn seized the moment, sinking $7m
into Operation Loango, which now constitutes the largest and most
impressive of the joint ventures dreamed up by government, private
enterprise and the Wildlife Conservation Society, among others, to kick-start
eco-tourism in this lovely, emerald-forested gem of a country.
It's probably no coincidence that about 11% of Gabon is now national park,
a percentage matched only by Costa Rica. All the talk at Loango is of Gabon
as the future Costa Rica of Africa, an unspoiled, high-end eco-tourist
destination. The comparison isn't as strange as it might sound. Aside from
their fabulous natural heritage, both countries are the stable, relatively
wealthy exceptions in unstable, impoverished regions; both have
governments supportive (at least for the moment) of tourist development;
and both believe in harnessing private enterprise to fund national
environmental and conservation initiatives. Already, Operation Loango has
funded primate research and a beach clean-up.
Swanborn's Operation Loango, the plush fly-in lodge with those immaculate
bungalows, plus a series of smaller lodges and bush camps strategically
placed around Loango national park and a couple of research camps, is
currently a prototype for the kind of eco-tourist development Bongo and
Swanborn would like to see developed in Gabon's 12 other new parks and,
for the visitor at least, a good place to start. According to Dr Lee White, the
British head of the Wildlife Conservation Society in Gabon, Loango is "the
most beautiful park in Africa".
He may well be right. Serge and I took a boat trip around the park's whisky-
coloured rivers and blue lagoons, into the still, musty gloaming of the
rainforest and then out once more into the blaring sun, across an estuary
towards the Atlantic and Loango's 100km of empty, soft-sanded shoreline.
Every so often we moored up, surprising a herd of red river hogs, with their
tufty ears and Star Wars' Yoda faces, or stopping to watch a group of forest
elephants that had come down to the shoreline to graze on ibago, a
hallucinogenic root. Loango is the only place in the world where you can see
gorillas, chimpanzees, buffalo, turtles and humpback whales within a stone's
throw of one another; the only place in the world where forest elephants
come down on to the beach and hippos surf the waves. This variety was one
of the reasons I'd come. The other was to try to spot one of the country's
35,000 Western Lowland gorillas.
Gorillas were part of the reason Bongo decided to create the parks, after
listening to a presentation by Lee White and Mike Fay. Fay is an American
naturalist who completed a 2,000-mile, 456-day trek called the
"Megatransect" of the great Congo basin jungle which comprises the largest
area of undisturbed rainforest in Africa and of which Gabon is a part. During
his trek, Fay came across populations of so-called naive gorillas and
chimpanzees, apes that had never come across human beings and so had no
fear of them. It seemed like a good time to act.
The jungle of the Congo basin is the setting for Joseph Conrad's novel,
Heart Of Darkness. Its hero, Marlow, describes his experience as "like
travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world". This is what attracted
Swanborn and his millions to this former French colony, as it attracted the
fictional Kurtz before him. Gabon really is the Africa of black water rivers and
misty, primeval swamp forest; the Africa of pygmies and mythical dinosaurs;
the Africa which, 100 years ago, lent the Dark Continent its mystique and its
name. Serge, his fellow eco-guide Basile and I wandered across Loango for
days without seeing another human being. Only a few washed-up plastic
bottles on the beach and, out at sea, a necklace of oil rigs served as
reminders of the times.
The only large predator species in Gabon are leopards, shy nocturnal
creatures, and crocs (all three African species - the Nile, the African dwarf
and the slender-snouted - live at Loango) so punch-drunk on fish they'd be
unlikely to bother with human beings. A rather nasty snake, the Gabon
viper, lives in the forest and there are the real but limited dangers presented
by elephants, hippos and gorillas, but the attitude towards these animals is
relaxed, or reckless, depending on your view. In our search for gorillas,
Basile and I were caught out while kayaking on a backwater creek too narrow
for comfort or, as I realised all too late, for safety, by a gnarly hippo, who
tried to bring the kayak down. Basile immediately steadied the boat and we
were fine, though shaken. Back at the lodge, the incident was met with a
Gallic shrug, as if to say, well, yeah, you know, merde happens.
The upside of this randomness is the freedom to do your own thing,
including gorilla-spotting. There are no expensive licences to be bought, no
medicals to undergo, no time-limits as there generally are in the gorilla-
watching parks in Uganda or Rwanda. Serge, Basile and I just hung out.
We were meandering in the savannah one day when from the edge of the
forest a lone silverback suddenly appeared only 15 metres ahead of us.
Coming face to face so unexpectedly with this fantastically muscular hulk in
all his terrific, shaggy wildness was stupendously exciting. He sat and
watched us for a while, weighing the risk of crossing a patch of open ground
to reach the forest on the other side. Finally he ventured out, then lost his
nerve and knuckle-cantered back to his previous spot. Two minutes later he
gathered his courage, made a second foray and this time reached the other
side and disappeared into the trees, stopping only for a final look back at us.
Researchers working at Operation Loango later told us our silverback was
almost certainly M'bolo (Old Man), as they'd called him. He had crossed that
way before. You can tell it's him, they said, because he smells of sponge
cake. They are hoping to habituate M'bolo, initially to their presence, then to
that of visitors like us. At which point, gorilla watching in Gabon may well
become as expensive and as regulated as it is in Rwanda or Uganda. And for
M'bolo's sake, let's hope it does.
One of those rooting for Gabon to go Costa Rica's way is the South African
tourism manager at Loango Lodge, Edward Truter. "Gabon has the potential
to become the Costa Rica of Africa, but it'll take 10 years," he says. For
those who can come equipped with some French, flexibility and a willingness
to endure a little roughness around the edges, the place has a great deal to
offer: high canopy primary rainforest, savannah, mangrove and white sand
beach around which live 60,000 forest elephants, 64,000 chimpanzees, six
species of whale, including, during June and July, around 3,000 humpbacks,
three species of marine turtle, supertroops of rare mandrills, manatees and,
of course, those gorillas.
On my last night at Loango, Basile took me on a moonlit walk along the
beach looking for nesting turtles. We saw only a few recent turtle nests, a
few forest elephants, some cat and mongoose tracks, bats and a Nile croc,
but it was warm and the forest was singing with night things, and way out at
sea the Mordor-like flares of the rigs which first brought Rombout Swanborn
to these shores glowed tangerine. I thought of M'bolo and hoped Gabon
would Costa Rica-fy quickly enough to protect him but imperfectly enough to
leave the country feeling as wild and old as it does now.
The next day, the Lodge's Cessna having suddenly become unavailable,
reserved, I suspected, for Swanborn's imminent visit, I left Loango for Port
Gentil, a four-hour boat journey along the M'pivie river with its red-black
water and slowly whorling papyrus islands. We stopped briefly to admire St
Ann's, an obscure mission designed by Gustav Eiffel, now elegantly colonised
by hornets. I brushed the sweat from my eyes and in the doing of it flushed
a colony of epauletted fruit bats from their perches. For a moment, I felt just
like Kate Hepburn in The African Queen, waiting for my Bogie.
Way to go
Getting there
Nude 'n' Naked Africa ( http://www.nude-n-naked.com ) arrange all inclusive
trips to Gabon starting from USD 3,600 pp (£ 1,780) for seven nights in the
Libreville and Loango national park, including full-board, all excursions in the
park, all internal flights and transfers, but excluding international flights.
Royal Air Maroc ( www.royalairmaroc.com ) flies from London Gatwick to
Libreville, Gabon, via Casablanca twice weekly from about USD 900 ( £450 )
return including all taxes.
Further information
Country code: 00 241.
Flight time London-Libreville via Casablanca: 24 hours, including an overnight
stopover.
Time difference: +1hr.
USD 1 = 480 CFA francs.
£1 = 953 CFA francs.