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  Arrival in Gabon .
There are few places in Africa that have fired my imagination more than the Loango coastline of Central Africa. This stretch of coast is roughly described by geographers as extending from just below the mouth of the Congo northwards to where Libreville is located. The name - Loango - derives from a Kingdom that existed up till the mid 1800s, one that was directly affected and almost totally depopulated by the slave trade, and Gabon's tiny population today is a direct consequence of that slavery.
My first inkling of the regions potential for interesting wildlife and wilderness came about in 1985 -when I saw a painting by South African wildlife artist Paul Bosman. The painting was one of many illustrating a book that came about after he and biologist Anthony Hall-Martin made a journey through Africa in search of all the diverse elephant habitats. The book, a lavish production, contained many beautiful images but one of these stuck a chord with me that has continued to ring in my consciousness to this very day. It depicted a herd of forest elephants cavorting along a stretch of Gabon beach in an area that fell within the Wongu-Wongu Presidential Hunting Reserve.
"Some day," I thought to myself on seeing that image for the first time, " I will go to that place!"
In March of 2002 I finally made it, organizing the trip to the Iguela reserve, situated on the Loango coastline south of Wongu-Wongu, through Mistral Voyages in Libreville. Initially, the travel arrangements were that my wife and I would spend 3 weeks at a remote research camp in the Igeula Reserve called Tassi. In reality our plans were rather vauge. We had no idea if there would be any wildlife at Tassi, or even if there were any beach loving elephants in the locality. However, I decided I had to get the Bosman images out of my system and the only way to do that was to go and do it. Secretly I prayed for success!.
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Libreville was only a short four-hour flight from Johannesburg, and after overnighting in the Intercontinental, we set off the next morning on a series of short flights that would take us to Omboue, where we were met by Rombout and Ahab, the former a
businessman/conservationist and the latter an NGO official who was working for a U.S. conservation agency, both of whom were involved in a new project aimed at protecting the Gamba area of Gabon, as well as upgrading the Iguela lodge, an establishment which Rombout had just bought........NEXT PAGE >


Nkoni lagoon

Loango map


Below - Omboue
Omboue - Gabon