The Gabon experience takes you back to the Seventies. It’s costly but rewarding, if only for the expansive rainforests
Savannah Sefor
The hardest thing to find in Gabon are the Gabonese. It’s not the only strange contradiction in the tiny West African state where forests cover more of the land than people. It’s one of those pecularities about Africa: everyone seems to want to be anywhere else but in their own country. The strange thing is that all the somewhere elses are usually not much different from the place they have just left.
A trip to Gabon, however, is a thrilling journey down a kind of memory lane.
The expansive forests are a reminder of humanity’s ancestral past, as much as the capital Libreville is an ode to the past century’s architectural African heyday of the Seventies.
Overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, Libreville is the “almost” Las Vegas of Africa. Its iconographic Seventies architecture and design are everywhere, while the original Seventies decor is enough to make a collector weep.
We stayed at the so Seventies-named Okoume Palace Intercontinental hotel with its orange and beige lobby and its period piece Blue Note bar (a karaoke bar filled with drunken, out-of-tune Orientals). But downtown the modernist Chambre de Commerce (a homage to Frank Lloyd Wright), and the cylindrical concrete, fin-bedecked Ministry of Minerals are the tour de force in a landscape of buildings shaped like unexploded rockets and bullets.
Look no further than the oil boom of that decade – when oil-rich Gabon doubled its wealth – for the sudden surge of opulence and its unchanged relics. Gabon is one of the few West African countries that has managed to maintain political stability since its independence in 1960. It’s not surprising then that Libreville, home to two-thirds of the population, is one of most expensive cities in the world.
A Coke, a beer or a coffee at R15 costs the same as it does in London – considering the latter is the centre of European finance and Gabon is in the middle of the African Third World. Don’t even think of having a basic lunch or dinner out for less than R120 per person excluding drinks. A Margarita will cost you R60.
Gabon’s true wealth lies in the fact that approximately 80% of the country is still tropical rainforest. Although home to four-fifths of Africa’s remaining gorillas and chimpanzees, sightings are rare due to the lack of tourist infrastructure. Tourist offices and information are not only scarce, but finding out where you can go and what you can do is a tedious exercise if the helpful person at the hotel desk is not on duty. Outside of Libreville, forget about paying with credit cards, or any of the other niceties of modern economy, while accommodation is rustic to say the least. But, perhaps because of this, there’s a lack of environmental damage that’s the very reason for the rich wildlife.
Primates aside, the forest, which starts just beyond Libreville and the name of which no-one seemed to be able to tell me, is also home to an astonishing variety of bird and plant life. It has an amazing 250 species of tree. Gabon’s 23- million hectares is the second largest tract of tropical rainforest after the Amazon.
No number of Discovery documentaries can prepare you for the wonder of walking through the dense forest. It’s an overwhelming, beautiful world of thick boughs and dense canopies letting in filtered light. So dense that it is continuously damp, filled with an other- worldly calm, it takes your breath away. Then once you’re inside it and have a sense of the sheer scope of it, one recalls the repeated warnings about wandering off.
One hapless Canadian tourist, we were told by our guide on a tour that we organised through the hotel, defied these instructions and was never seen again. The forest is so “environmentally efficient” that his body was conceivably eaten by ants and birds within days.
The country’s sense of mystique is aided by French being the predominant language. Well, the predominant everything is French. Most of the country’s food and goods are imported from France, which puts Libreville up there as fourth most expensive city in the world. The local supermarket, Mbolo, is an eclectic collection of African fabrics, Wellington boots, Coke bottled in Cameroon and South African wine. It also contains one of the most impressive cheese counters I have ever seen. Fruit and vegetables are French and expensive as almost nothing is grown in the country itself. Even fresh milk is hard to find, although, as you’d expect, baguettes and croissants abound. Getting around by taxi, none of which are driven by Gabonese, is another worthwhile experience if you haven’t had enough of South Africa’s nightmare rush-hour. The red and pink decorated white taxis, incidentally, are another thing straight out of the Seventies, but you need to yell out your destination, in French, and agree on the usually cheap price before you get in. Taxi drivers are quite snobbish when it comes to deciding if your destination fits theirs. Join the groups standing by the roadside and yell as the cab pulls up.
If you have a strong enough stomach, local fare can offer you slugs, tortoises, squirrels and monkeys as well as palm honey and palm nuts, chillies and an assortment of unidentifiable yet beautiful forest fruits.
All these can be found at the roadside fruit and veg market – where the vendors will not have their photos taken as they believe you are taking a part of them away and regularly practice religious ceremonies in the forest where fetishes hanging from trees are commonplace.
Travelling back from the forest by hotel minibus, we stopped at the market, where roadside coconut vendors are quick to point out, to any man willing to listen, the wondrous effects of fresh coconut milk on virility.
Unfortunately, the coconut shells are also one of the main pollutants of the otherwise beautiful local beachfront.
Getting off the plane, the first thing that strikes you, literally ( a clich you might think until it hits you), is the heat. Walking off the Air Gabon plane – another adventure – at 10pm into 30_C heat is a shock to the system. The temperature rarely falls below 28_C and the humidity is so severe that it feels like walking under a wet blanket all the time. This makes any kind of maintenance costly and, as a result, most of the buildings and cars suffer from mould, rust and rot.
Like them, I suppose, I managed to return with my own reminder: the requisite case of dysentery. What kind of world are we living in when eight out of 10 people in Johannesburg thought it was a good thing? Could dysentery be the fad diet of the millennium?