With friends like these...

Dateline: Gabon, September 20 2011

The logistics of travelling in Gabon are never easy and always uncertain, it seems. AndI have not learned my lessons very well because always I schedule a little too tight for comfort. The objective this time was the little village of Iguela, on the north side of a lagoon that marks the northern boundary of Loango National Park. This park is on the coast of Gabon and one of the most diverse that I have seen: beaches, swamps, gallery forest, strips of savannah, rivers and lagoons, and some fairly extensive continuous forest. I was travelling here with Ghislain, the Gabonese man who is learning how to do all of the acoustic monitoring work for the Wildlife Conservation Society with whom I collaborate.

For about a month I have been setting up the timing of this trip, although nothing certain was really much agreed before I actually got to Gabon. But the dates of our mission got set and I had arranged for places to stay before and after entering the park. The first change was that we had to leave by plane from Libreville to Port Gentil Tuesday afternoon instead of Wednesday morning. This required quickly figuring out where to stay overnight because our boat-taxi through the delta of the Ogooue River to a town north of Iguela travels only on Wedesday, Friday, and Saturday (in that direction). Fortunately, I had become friends with a French couple who had once managed the Loango Lodge, a sometimes tourist destination on the edge of Loango N.P. They own a hotel in Port Gentil and have a sort of inconveniently placed room at this hotel that normally they don’t rent out and instead make available at no cost to researchers traveling to and from Loango. So I called him and he said ‘no problem’, you can stay at my house (which I thought he meant as the hotel – his English is excellent, but occasionally there are words used in a bit different way). “Call me when you get to Port Gentil.”

So we arrived and made our way to the hotel, where I requested at the desk about the room being reserved for us. No such reservation, so I called Philippe. Turns out he was going to put me up at his home after all. But when he joined us, and asked our plans, he said that the boat-taxi was not going the next day because ‘there were not enough packs’. Basically this outfit cancels any trip if there are not a quarum of passengers. I had made the mistake of trying to do this trip, both going and coming, in the middle of the week when there are often not enough passengers!

Fortunately for us, Philippe knows many people in Port Gentil and called to confirm that the Olako boat was almost certainly not going and was able to make arrangements with one of the petroleum companies working in the delta to take us on one of their boats going south with materials.

I had a wonderful evening with Philippe and his family, good conversation, and began developing some ideas to use acoustic monitoring on a pet project of his. He was leaving early the next morning for Libreville, but made arrangements for a colleague to get Ghislain and me to the right place with our gear (Ghislain knows some people in Port Gentil and opted to stay with them instead of at Philippe’s house).

What I also found out was that he had arranged to purchase some huge piece of machinery like a caterpillar tractor, was arranging to take this south through the delta to the same place we were going (Omboue), where he was going to let the town use it in garbage cleanup and maintenance! He has a piece of property between Omboue and Iguela, on the beach, where he hopes to encourage some research and perhaps some tourism, but he also is very motivated to work with and for the people who live locally in the area. He genuinely wants to help them, and in turn, they help him – and people like me are fortunate beneficiaries.
Find out more of what Philippe and Sylvie are doing in gabon: www.fondation-liambissi.org (and polish up your French!).