La Lopé, Gabon

2019-09-12/14:

Elephants, buffaloes, chimpanzees, gorillas, mandrills etc. A national park that has unfortunately not kept its promises but where we still spent two beautiful days in the savannah and the equatorial forest.

Wednesday, September 11, 2019.

About fifteen kilometers after having crossed the equator we leave the beautiful national to take on the left the road towards the national park of Lopé. We cross the Okano River by a hazardous steel bridge and then find a road that is not one despite its pompous denomination of N3. It’s a terrible track, not very difficult but very uncomfortable and dusty where we very rarely can exceed 20 km / h.

Departure of the track to the Lopé national park.

The N3, an uncomfortable and dusty track.

I'm aiming for a wild bivouac barely 27 km as the crow flies. It is 15:45. The 27 km as the crow flies becomes 38 km on the road. We take 1h45 to go through them. It is 5.30 pm when we cut the engine a bit off the track. I've got my boots full of them! 

Our bivouac a little off the track.

Thursday, September 12, 2019.

 

Replacing the brake pads at the bivouac before starting.

After having replaced Gandalf's brake pads at the bivouac, we hit the track again. A track that doesn't really amuse me. It is very, very uncomfortable and we swallow a lot of dust there, especially when we pass the supply trucks which are tumbling down too fast for my liking.

Improvement work on the track which is in great need!

 Fortunately some beautiful landscapes and beautiful views of the river console us a little.
After two and a quarter hours of grueling driving for just 38 km, we arrive at the entrance to Lopé National Park on the other side of a 200m bridge over the Ogooué River. But we have not yet arrived, a sign indicates Lopé, our objective, 30 km away.

Entrance to Lopé Park after crossing the Ogooué by a 200 m bridge.

The Ogooué river

The ordeal continues, now skirting the railway line which links Libreville to Franceville. After a last small bridge over a tributary of the Ogooué, we finally arrive in Lopé. It is 4:45 pm and we have just covered 73 km in almost 4 hours!

We continue to swallow dust.

 

And still no elephant!

The fuel warning light has been blinking for a while. We do have a reserve of 20 liters which should be enough for us for the return trip, but I would be quieter with 20 liters more. So we join a small garage that iOverlander says sells fuel. But the information seems outdated because the young people who work here respond negatively to my request. Luckily we find a truck a few tens of meters ahead on the edge of the track filling up from drums loaded on a pick-up. I ask and they agree to sell us 20l for 15,000 CFA. It is of course more expensive than at the pump but reasonable (750 CFA per liter instead of 655 CFA).

In-flight refueling!

This done, we reach the Motel Lopé Okanda (Chez Paul) near the station, recommended by Luc and Pascale on iOverlander (the French couple in a Renault truck we met in Ziguinchor / Senegal in January). We only find a young girl there. The boss, her father, is away, traveling to Lambaréné to make purchases, and will not return until Sunday, she explains. His children call him and give him to me. He immediately agrees and asks me how much I'm willing to pay, 5000 CFA per night, for 3 nights with access to showers. Ok, I can even give more if I feel like !! he tells me. Of course! :-)

Brenda, a young son of Paul, guides us to Saturnin's, one of the guides, not to say "the guide", of the park. Once there, his wife explains to us that he is not there because on safari with a group.
I managed to contact him by WhatsApp and he joined us  Chez Paul at around 7:00 p.m. Saturnin tells us about the different activities he offers. We opt for the hike to the top of Mont Brazza above Lopé tomorrow morning and the 4x4 safari in the forest and savannah tomorrow afternoon from 4:00 p.m. with the hope of finding buffaloes, elephants and possibly a few monkeys. These two excursions cost 40,000 CFA (€ 62.82) per person.
For the day after tomorrow he suggests a continuous walk in the forest. Departure 8:00 am, return around 2:00 pm with picnic. For 45,000 CFA (€ 70.67) per person.

 

Friday September 13, 2019.

Mont Brazza:

The alarm goes off at 6:00 a.m. as scheduled and I get up 10 minutes later. The night was rather warm, we have 28 ° C in the cabin of the motorhome.
Saturnin picked us up at eight o'clock sharp, as planned, with a South African Toyota Land Cruiser specially equipped for safaris and driven by Keita.
We go to the park entrance where we have to register before we can enter. The general secretary of the park administration will accompany us. She was actually hired as a guide, but as she also has training as a secretary, the park decided to give her the administration secretariat.

Mont Brazza from the entrance to the park.

 

On the way to the foot of Mont Brazza.

 

Keita leads us in 900 m to the foot of Mont Brazza. The ascent can begin. It is done in three stages with a short break to recover and admire the panorama before each new section of ascent. The last one to the top is particularly steep with a hundred meters of vertical drop in 300 m that we need about twenty minutes to cover.
 

The climb to Mont Brazza. Christine and Nadège.

Halfway pause.

 

Arrival at the top: Saturnin, Christine and Nadège.

In all, we will have taken almost an hour to make this climb of 1.3 km. From up there, the panorama is immense on almost 360 °. It is from here that the mosaic of landscapes is best observed, the forest and the savannah sharing the terrain in an interesting patchwork on both sides of the Ogooué River. The Lodge of the Lopé hotel, superbly located on the banks of the river, stands out very well here with its beaches and swimming pool. A little behind we can clearly distinguish the village to the south of the railway line and the station.

The forest and the savannah share the landscape.

The Ogooué river, the forest, the savannah and the Lopé hotel on the banks of the river.

Except in the small private gardens where a few villagers insist on wanting to cultivate a little, there are no cultivated fields around the village, for the simple reason that the crops are systematically devastated by the animals of the park. There is indeed a government plan to create an associative zone protected by electric fences to allow the villagers to do some farming, but for the moment nothing is coming.

Aerial view of the region with Mont Brazza at the bottom left.

Saturnin explains to us that the depression in front of us where the Ogooué flows was, a few million years ago, completely locked by mountain ranges and that a large lake had formed there. It was a volcanic eruption that breached the mountain barrier and allowed the lake and river to flow west. It is in this narrow passage that the Ogooué is deepest, the river bed is 60 m below the surface! The savannah fires that we see all over the area are controlled fires. Saturnin explains to us that their aim is to protect the savannah against the advance of the forest. Apparently the rainfall is increasing in the region and favors the expansion of the forest.

Christine at the top of Mont Brazza.

This patchwork landscape has its origins in the Ice Age when the colder and drier climate caused large swathes of the rainforest to disappear some 18,000 years ago. At the end of the Ice Age, 12,000 years ago, the forest gradually regained land. But areas with too little rainfall, less than 1,500 mm per year, could not be recaptured.
We stay at the top for about ten minutes before tackling the descent via a much less steep path. We see a few buffaloes in the distance, at the edge of the forest where we heard earlier, during the climb, an acoustic fight between chimpanzees. A fight certainly provoked by a young chimp questioning the position of the dominant male, explains Saturnin.
The descent is much easier and Christine takes the opportunity to discuss with Nadège, the young secretary of the park. She is 34 years old and has worked in the park for two years. She has four children from a relationship with a Senegalese from whom she is now separated. So she brings up her children alone here with her aunt. Her mother is from the village. It is for this reason that she decided to leave Libreville to come and settle here after the separation.

In the descent, Nadège, Christine and Saturnin.

Keita comes to pick us up at the foot of the mountain, he drops Saturnin off at his home and then brings us back to our camper van where we will wait for the 4:00 p.m. safari.
The afternoon will be dedicated to a little recovery nap before the safari. It is hot, the temperature rises to 33 ° C in the motorhome.

Gandalf in the "parking lot" of Paul's Motel

Safari

While waiting for Keita to pick us up for the safari.

Keita collects us as planned a little after 4 pm. Two Romanian tourists will accompany us for this safari, Dan and Dania.
The safari will last about three hours. We are unfortunately not going to be very lucky with the animals. The buffaloes are not a problem, they are numerous enough and we will easily discover three small groups. This is the second group that we find the most interesting, about ten buffaloes are quenching their thirst at a waterhole.

Safari in the Lopé park.

Herd of buffaloes.

Greater spot-nosed monkey

 

As for the monkeys, we'll have to settle for a small group of greater spot-nosed monkeys barely visible in a large tree in the distance.

The search for elephants in the savannah and the forest will be very long. We start to despair in earnest when we finally find one with its calf at a waterhole. We are going to approach it a bit on foot to observe them from a distance, I did well to take my 600mm telephoto lens!
The forest elephants that we find here are, like buffaloes elsewhere, much smaller in size than those of the savannas of West Africa (Senegal, Ghana, Togo).
The sun is setting in the west and the full moon is rising in the opposite direction. According to Saturnin it is too hot today and there is too much ash in the air from the savannah fires, it irritates the elephants who prefer not to show themselves.

Finally ! An elephant and her cub.

 

The wife of Saturnin and Nadège.

Dan and Dania, our Romanian safari companions.

 

We drive back in the the semi-darkness by the light of the Toyota headlights. We have decided to keep the Romanians company for dinner tonight at the restaurant "La Maison-Mère".

We return at dusk by the light of the headlights.

We find them there, a dozen Romanians in all. We add a table to join them and order a sea bass and grilled chicken with rice. For beer we have to cross the street to buy it from the little shop across the street, I pay 1000 CFA for two cans of Castel.

"La Maison Mère" and its grill.

We spend a pleasant evening with this friendly group. They take the train back to Libreville this evening around 10 p.m. They will then spend a few days in Sao Tome and Principe, then 4 or 5 days in Angola before returning home.
We take our leave around 9 pm and walk back to our hotel.
It is still quite warm in the motorhome, but it will quickly become bearable after opening the windows.

Satrúrday, September 14, 2019.

We are ready at eight o'clock and we are waiting for the Toyota in front of the motorhome. A man who passes by there approaches us and comes to discuss with us a little. This is Jean-Pierre, a train conductor. He stopped his freight train from Libreville at Lopé station to wait for a passenger train coming from Franceville in the opposite direction. He explains to us that he has family in France, one of his brothers, in Lille if I remember correctly. One of his aunts is married to a French man. He photographs us in front of Gandalf because his French uncle apparently also owns two motorhomes.

Lopé station, heads and tails.

Keita and Nadège pick us up around 8:15 am. We then go to Saturnin's to embark him. Three quarters of an hour and 12 km later Keita drops us off at the edge of the forest into which we will enter for our excursion. He will come back to pick us up between 2 p.m. and 2:30 p.m. 

On the way to the forest.

The Lopé Park is one of the oldest national parks in Gabon. It has been listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2007. Its 5000 km² of equatorial forest and savannah are home to some fifty different mammals, including more than 5000 elephants. It is also home to large colonies of great apes such as gorillas, chimpanzees or mandrills but also a lot of small apes. The park is known worldwide as the place with the highest concentration of primates. 

We go deep into the equatorial forest.

With a little luck we will be able to meet all these animals during our excursion in the forest. It is of course much more likely that we will only encounter a few of them. And if we're having bad luck we might not see anything at all.
Unfortunately for us the results will be more of the 3rd type: only a few gray-cheeked mangabeys at the start of the course, a small colony that we disturbed. Saturnin is on the lookout and listening for the smallest clues to find the great apes, his main objective. The chewed stems of a certain plant that chimpanzees use to make their mattresses (the same plant we already know from the Mfou sanctuary in Cameroon) for example. 

Saturnin explains how chimpanzees chew certain plants.

We can tell by the smell of the recent passage of some elephants. Saturnin sets off for a few minutes to reconnoitre, asking us to wait for him where we are. When he returns he tells us that elephants are grazing a little further in the meadow. But instead of leading us there, he directs us in a parallel direction. We think he just wants to take a detour so he can approach them better. But no ! He pulls us aside. We don’t understand right away, but it is confirmed when he stops for a break near a torrent at 10:45 am. We are apparently not chasing elephants. 

Elephant Footprint ....

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

... and another indication of the passage of elephants

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nadège and Thierry in the forest.

Break near a torrent

The break lasts about twenty minutes. We are pleasantly seated at the edge of the stream tasting apples and oranges when we see an elephant and its calf passing about fifty meters away on the other side of the stream. It only lasts 3 or 4 seconds, they disappear in the thickets behind an embankment. But here again, Saturnin does not take the initiative to lead us to them to observe them. On the contrary, we pick up our bags and turn back to where we came. Either he wants to avoid any risk with elephants, or he has another priority: the great apes!

We will learn much later that the guides actually avoid any encounter with elephants in the forest. It's far too risky because the elephants have a decisive home advantage there.
We therefore return to the forest to take another break a quarter of an hour later sitting on a lying log. It is 11:20 am and Saturnin explains to us that this is the time when the monkeys are resting. The forest is surprisingly calm, only the birds can be heard.

New break during the monkeys nap.

We start again at 12:00. The monkeys don't seem to want to wake up, it is always the great silence in the forest. We're going to turn around for a long time, Saturnin still listening for any clue. The only monkeys we end up glimpsing in the distance in the trees are a few gray-cheeked mangabeys, monkeys with brown-black coats and graying cheeks (hence their name) typical of the rainforests of Congo, Cameroon and Gabon., as well as satanic black colobus with atrophied thumbs, better adapted to life in trees.
We leave the forest at 2:05 pm quite disappointed, even if we do not regret because these seven kilometers in the dense virgin forest were a rich experience.

Keita is not there. We will wait for him almost an hour, until 3:00 p.m.

Keita has finally arrived.

Back to the motel.

 

We return to Lopé in 30 minutes.
Paul, the owner of the Motel, returned from Lambaréné a day before he told me on the phone the day before yesterday. He greets us quickly but we are all a little too busy to discuss for long.
One of his daughters (12 years old) will show us how to prepare plantain, in fries, boiled and in cakes. What an honor for her to use the motorhome kitchen with all its comforts (running water, stove, fridge, etc.). She likes to show the equipment to her sisters and friends who are parading. Because of course we are the attraction of the neighborhood.

Preparation of the plantain in the camper van with one of Paul's daughters.

Paul and his children with Thierry.