Concluding thoughts on Gabon

@ the Equator

The Gorilla sightings in Mouklaba-Doudou Park were a bonus and somehow it seemed that I was destined to see them before I left Gabon. It meant that I had seen all the big four mammals, i.e. Forest Elephant, Gorilla, Chimpanzee and Forest Buffalo. I would have preferred a little more time with the Gorillas and slightly more up close experiences but I won’t complain. In fact, I hope to get that opportunity some day if I visit Central African Republic or Congo. And perhaps someday I maybe even get to see the Highland subspecies if I even visit Rwanda and Uganda.

Manioc...Gabonese love them

The next morning, the pickup left for Libreville and I was accompanied by Romain, a French national living in Gabon for a long time. It was he who helped me with my excursion into the Mouklaba-Doudou Park. Roman worked for a NGO and was heading to Libreville himself to present his synopsis on the status of tourism in the Mouklaba-Doudou Park.

I reached Libreville after crossing the Equator one last time and the journey took almost 12 hours with a lunch break in the historical town of Lambaréné. Normally, when I am on my home stretch, my mind begins to relive the whole journey and I being to unwind but since I still had the small matter of finding alternate flights back to Liberia I could not quite yet reflect on my journey.

Upon getting into Libreville I check if there were any flights for that day to anywhere that would ultimately connect me to Liberia but I could not find any. There was one flight early next morning that would take me from Libreville to Lomé and then to Monrovia but it involved staying a night in Lomé. Moreover, both the flights were booked. Since that was the only option available, I put myself on waiting and showed up at the airport next morning with the hope that my seat would be confirmed. I had to wait till all passengers had boarded when they finally confirmed my seat and I was eventually leaving Libreville and Gabon. As I boarded the plane, I was glad I was leaving Libreville as spending another day/night in Libreville did not enthuse me.

Typical house in the interior...notice the planks

There were a lot of frustrations, planning nightmares, delays, lost vacation days, vehicle breakdowns, etc over the entire trip but now that I look back I think all those things retrospectively give more depth to the travel and make the whole journey that much more rich.

The thing about Gabon is that it is the REAL Africa…the REAL deal. So few tourists set foot here, either due to the high cost or its obscurity that it seems as though the people and the country are somehow oblivious to tourism and vice-versa. The country is now promoting itself as an eco-tourism destination as its oil reserves dries up so I do expect things to change in the future. Pretty sure Gabon in a few years won’t be the Gabon I visited.

Local coffee fix in Libreville

I remember when i told my mother that was going deep into the jungles of Central Africa, she was fearful of the snakes, the animals. Infact she had heard that even the trees in these forest can entangle and kill humans. I can safely confirm that nothing like this exists....sorry Mom!.

As for the people, I had read and heard that they were generally unfriendly but I have a different take on that. I can go back to several people who helped me in several ways, be it arranging a trip, accommodating me for the night or just being respectful and offering help whenever needed. Perhaps there exists two classes of people in Gabon; one is the aristocratic types like the ones who work with or in the government or public and service sectors. They are comparatively wealthy and might have had in some way benefited due to Gabon’s huge oil exports in the past and interactions with foreigners. They can perhaps come off as being arrogant.

Gabonese love the big bottles. Even
Heiniken comes in a big one

Then there is the majority of the poor-lower middle class group who I think have not had a lot of interaction with the outside world so a tourist is novelty to them. Their reaction to a tourist ranges from being indifferent to being curious which are both good in my view. Perhaps that’s the reason I found most Gabonese to be genial and non-touristy.

As a nation, I wonder why the wealth from the oil exports has not tricked down to the majority of Gabonese. Barring Libreville, most other places I visited were pretty underdeveloped. Surely with all that oil revenue a nation of only 1.4 million people ought to have a better standard of living. It also seems as though the authoritarian government still has the population under firm control.

Libreville from the air as I wave goodbye

The president however seems to be winning over the people by his progressive actions after a disputed election handed him power. It’s very easy to look at the negatives and ignore the positives of those in power so I will have to give some credit to the fact that Gabon is one of the most stable nations in Africa and is fortunate not to be ravaged by the strife that most nations in the continent suffer from. The fact that a lot of the country is wild and protected is also credit to the late President Omar Bongo.

Gabon however, is defined by its vast wilderness and if anyone is looking for a Wild and Untamed experience then its tropical jungles are just the place!