Loango: 'Africa's Last Eden'

By WD:

Coolbox-gate: Alf finally crumbles and agrees that leaving the coolbox in Abuja was a crime worthy of death. We replace and then stock up with Castel - a local brew that is enough to not be absolutely awful and then hit the road. 6 hours later we all pucker up when Rodders starts to squeal like a piggy. But why? We stopped to look at it. We shook various things. Drove forward and backwards. Why wasn’t Rodders happy? We still don’t know. We pressed on until dark and ended up asking a local, Roy (the Boy) if we could make camp in his garden. He says that his brother has a much better place just down the road - everything is relative. We head down the road and get invited to the local bar for a drink, obviously we are paying and get a few Regab’s in for the bar. They seem a mostly friendly bunch though we begin to realise that Roy the Boy is a few sandwiches short of a picnic so we call time at the bar after 2 and return and cook some dinner - something tinned, of course. Roy the Boy gets on our nerves and we hit the hay at a reasonable hour.

We race away from Roy the Boy in the morning before he has enough time to get his buzz on again and we reach Loango, ‘Africa’s last Eden’, 1 hr later. We drive into the lodge and try to figure out how to get across the lagoon into the park but it turns out Loango may as well be on a different planet as it is the hardest tourist destination to reach I have ever come across.

We meet a Frenchman call Mathieu who realises we are too poor to stay at his lodge and kindly gets a guide of his, Yuri, to spend the night with us on the other side. Top man. this is not strictly street legal and we end up incurring the wrath of ‘The Conservateur’, ‘The Brigadier’ and ‘Bob’. No joke. this rumbles on for a day or two and somehow we manage to not pay a bribe. Remarkable. Yuri invites us for dinner at his preceded by a few pina coladas - Alfie starts strong but fades quickly. Poof. 

The next day we ended up going on a cruise to see some elephants etc. and I went up to my knee in what Putnam believes is faeces while wearing my only pair of trousers and

in the middle of stalking buffalo on foot. They spy us. We try not to snigger like schoolboys. It’s too hard and they scarper. On our way back we are spotted by the stand-in Brigadier who was eager to seize his moment of importance and wants to bring up our illicit trip to the park with Yuri, no doubt to extract a ‘tax’. He imposes his authority by ordering us to wait whilst he visits the little boys room to drop off the Gabonese Paras. He returns in the fashion of an all conquering emperor with one of the most infuriatingly slow walks I have ever witnessed. The topic is covered in 10 minutes but there is the typical Africa repetition so we end up being there for about an hour before we stand up and leave saying we will call The Conservateur the next day.

We hit the road as the sun goes down and find a nice spot where we light a fire and put some tins of ravioli on the heat. We eat out of the can sitting on the floor (Alf forgot the camp-chairs, silly billy). Almost as soon as our forks our down we all simultaneously declare our need to poo and do so immediately. Put Put is done first and takes on the role of lead photographer (I must remember to delete these before I show the grandparents). We all congratulate each other on a job well done and prepare for bed as we have an early start to (hopefully) head back to Libreville to pick up Chopper.