“Elephant!” A single word, a raised hand and we stopped. All I could see beyond my guide, Franc, was a tightly woven tapestry of branches and lianas. I breathed out and felt my feet sink into the moist leaf litter. The word almost seemed to swell in the sultry air of Loango National Park’s rainforest, deep in the south-west of Gabon, until it hung there, full of anticipation.

Franc turned to me, his face beaded with sweat, and gestured towards a scant path that led into the forest.

“If he comes, you go this way,” he said, plotting an escape route through the tangled green chaos.

It was then that we heard a branch snap and spied a movement in the leaves ahead. A wrinkled grey hide flashed among the mottled shadows, then a yellow sheen of ivory appeared against the moss-covered bark. Slowly but silently, a bull elephant morphed from the forest, his ears fanned open, his unblinking amber eyes seemingly staring straight at us. He couldn’t have been more than ten metres away. Then his trunk squirmed as he caught our scent.

“Go! Go now!” Franc stood his ground while I slowly backed away. The shrill pulse of cicadas seemed to rise an octave as I crabbed through the undergrowth. But I never let my gaze slip from the elephant. He simply stood there – lord of the forest, shrouded in his cloak of leaves. It was a hard-earned sighting, which fell right at the end of my trip. But Gabon is not a typical safari destination. I had learned quickly that wildlife encounters here require time and patience.

Best-laid plans

Navigating Gabon is no easy task. Straddling the equator on Africa’s west coast, about 88% of the country is covered in forest. But I had known little about its natural gifts until the early 2000s, when I read about biologist Mike Fay’s 3,219km MegaTransect expedition in 1999, which took him from the Congo basin to Gabon’s Atlantic coast, where the rainforest meets the sea. The photographer Michael ‘Nick’ Nichols had documented Fay’s trip, sharing images not only of elusive forest elephants, but also western lowland gorillas and ‘surfing’ hippos. This journey was instrumental in persuading Gabon’s government to set aside around 10% of the country’s land to form a network of 13 national parks, earning it the moniker ‘The Last Eden’. It also ensured that Gabon surged to the top of my list of must-visit wildlife destinations, and it stayed there.

My itinerary was as slippery as a mudskipper in one of Loango’s mangrove swamps. A landslide had closed the Trans-Gabon equatorial railway line – my only realistic means of reaching Ivindo – while early rains had turned the road to Lopé into a quagmire.

With both of these national parks effectively inaccessible, I tweaked my plans. A three-day expedition to Loango would remain the climax of my ten-day trip, but I would spend the week beforehand exploring wildlife hotspots closer to the capital.

My first foray took me south-east of Libreville, driving a road that burrowed through forest that was frayed at the edges with small plots of plantain, oil palm and cassava. We left the main road and followed a rutted track deep into Crystal Mountains National Park. It was a rollercoaster ride with moments of pure exhilaration whenever we crested a rise and saw layer upon layer of forested ridges receding into the distance. Four hours after leaving Libreville, we arrived at the park HQ, a cluster of single-storey buildings decorated with colourful murals of local wildlife. One showed a gorilla with a butterfly on its finger. I turned to Cabrol, my guide and translator for the trip, for explanation.

“Yes, there are gorillas here” he told me. “But it’s very difficult to see them.”

A local ranger led us on a short hike beside a feisty mountain river. The forest pressed around us in a tight green knot of unyielding wilderness. This was the oldest forest in Gabon, Cabrol explained as we emerged on river-polished rocks next to a roaring waterfall. Few places in Africa have a greater diversity of trees – an astonishing 97 species per hectare. I lingered in the cooling spray, wrapped in exuberant biodiversity and wondering if a lowland gorilla or forest elephant was watching us somewhere nearby.

Retracing our route to the main road, we continued south-east to Lambaréné. At Isaac Market the stalls were piled with black and gold, the charred bodies of smoked fish. White egrets loitered on fish-drying racks, watching the men unload their catch from wooden pirogues. We found a small eatery next to the silver slick of the Ogooué River. Crocodile, porcupine and monkey were on the menu du jour, but I chose catfish – two of them, curled in a bowl, staring at me through a chilli broth.

The following morning, we resumed our journey, but no roads probe the vast watery maze of Bas Ogooué. Instead, we clambered into a skiff with Heather Arrowood and Cyrille Mvele – the founders of a local conservation organisation that operates river trips to a small eco-camp found deep in the wetlands.

Within minutes of travelling downstream from Lambaréné, the rainforest had drawn a green veil across the town. Palm-nut vultures circled over gangly kapok trees that towered in leafy exclamation marks above a jumbled scribble of riverside vegetation. We slalomed through narrow channels, spooking a solitary hippo that dived head first into the tea-coloured waters. High in the treetops, a troop of red-capped mangabeys watched us pass. According to Heather, they were one of at least a dozen primate species found here, so I followed up with the same question that I’d asked Cabrol back in the forests of Crystal Mountains.

“Sure, you get lowland gorillas,” she replied, but one look at the landscape told me that the chances of spotting one today was slim. Like in Crystal Mountains, the lowland ‘flooded forest’ of Ogooué seemed impenetrable.

“At least four metres of the trees are underwater at the moment,” Heather explained. “During low-water season, you might see forest elephants on exposed sandbanks.” At this point I’d have leapt at the sight of a rogue elephant, but for now, I had to be patient.

Coast with the most

A couple of days later, I was back in Libreville and pondering my wildlife checklist: one hippo, six red-capped mangabeys, but no elephants or gorillas. And no surfing hippos. Not that I was disappointed. A wildlife trip in Gabon is about slow immersion – you have to give it time.

“Wait until you get to Pongara National Park,” Cabrol told me as we stuttered through rush-hour traffic to the city’s marina and our next jaunt.

I didn’t know what transport to expect for the 10km boat ride to Pongara – a motorised pirogue, a small ferry? I certainly wasn’t prepared for the sight of chiselled Frenchman Kevin Lusardi sitting astride a sleek RIB with twin 350-horsepower engines. Twenty minutes after leaving the capital’s gridlocked waterfront, we roared onto a deserted beach. Wheels unfolded from the hull and we drove ashore, with Kevin parking in the shade of a coconut palm before ushering us onto two black ATVs. It was beginning to feel like we’d ransacked the prop shed of a Bond movie.

Within minutes we were hurtling through the grasslands, sandwiched between beach and forest. We stopped at a lodge to pick up my guides: Ghislain Bouassa, a giant of a man with a deep, soft voice, and Marcelle (or Savoh, to use his traditional Baka, or Pygmy, name), who was a good 60cm shorter. Between them, there was little that they didn’t know about Pongara’s wildlife.

As Kevin – silent behind his designer shades – led us on an ATV safari, weaving from dusty savannah to loam-scented forest, Ghislain and Marcelle rattled off sightings. We stopped to track white-crested hornbills and moustached monkeys feeding in the canopies of okoumé trees. Next was a herd of forest buffalo, who wallowed in the mud while being fussed over by egrets and oxpeckers. Ghislain even spotted a sitatunga, a rare, marsh-dwelling antelope, while Marcelle focused our gaze on a manilkara tree festooned with fruit bats.

Swapping our ATVs for kayaks, we explored coastal lagoons, paddling channels lined with mangroves, their thickets of arching prop roots threaded with flashes of blue from darting malachite kingfishers. We watched mudskippers squirming through the sultry swamp, then beached our kayaks and walked over sand dunes to a driftwood-strewn shore where ghost crabs played chicken with the surf.

At midnight, we returned to the beach on the trail of bigger things. After parking the ATVs and wading across a thigh-deep river channel, we found fresh hippo tracks leading from the dunes to the sea. We swept our torches across the waves and spotted a hippo – surfing maybe – but no sooner had Ghislain started explaining his theory of how these heavyweights harness the waves to carry them to fresh grazing grounds, we spotted a dark shape emerging from the sea. Not a hippo, but a green turtle. Switching to red torchlight, so as not to disturb it, we saw the creature haul itself into the dunes and dig a nest, tossing sand over its carapace with each sweep of its flippers.

Last Eden

The next morning, after returning to Libreville, we flew 30 minutes south to Port-Gentil, our twin-propeller aircraft bucking in the turbulence of the brooding thunderclouds. Then a four-hour drive south plunged us back into the wilderness as we navigated to Loango’s HQ. From there a boat whisked us across Iguela Lagoon to where another 4WD vehicle was waiting to transfer us to Louri Camp – one of very few places to stay in the 1,550 sq km reserve.

Like Pongara, Loango is a biodiverse blend of forest, savannah and wild shore, only on a vast scale. From my safari tent (raised on a wooden deck overlooking a coastal lagoon), I listened to the staccato piping of frogs against the deep-bass rumble of the Atlantic breakers. I imagined surfing hippos and pictured leatherback turtles heaving themselves ashore. I also thought of the gorillas to come. With a single boat trip, Gabon’s only habituated troop of western lowland gorillas would be within walking distance.

“The most important thing is not to visit them when we’re feeling sick,” briefed Dutch primatologist Koro Vogt the next morning as we arrived at De Gaulle, the remote basecamp for gorilla treks in Loango. Only after we’d provided negative Covid tests were we allowed to remove our surgical masks; then Koro introduced us to our tracker, Emile, and we set off into the swamp forests.

I wondered what the gorillas would make of us as we slipped through the mud, dripping in sweat and swatting mosquitoes as we went. The answer, it seemed, was not much at all, at least judging by the reaction of Kamaya, the silverback, who barely gave us a second glance. Squatting on his haunches, he contemplated his domain and uttered the odd soft grunt to maintain contact with the rest of the Atananga group.

Everywhere we looked, there seemed to be gorillas: young males shinning down trees, juveniles tumbling across the forest floor, a mother cradling her infant. Koro and Emile led us quietly from one riveting encounter to the next. Sometimes we had to back away slowly, such as when a boisterous youth infringed on the strict minimum viewing distance (7m).

As Koro explained: “This is about experiencing a brief moment in their lives, not about gorilla-human interaction.”

It took six years to habituate the Atananga group. Gabon likely contains at least 30,000 or more western lowland gorillas, and work is underway to acclimatise a second family in Loango. In the meantime, just four permits a day are issued to visitors for gorilla trekking.

Forest elephants (which number at least 85,000 in Gabon) are equally elusive, but Loango is a stronghold for them. Driving out to the coast in a 4WD, we watched a large breeding herd emerge from the salt-laden haze before they slowly drifted back into the forest, leaving the beach stamped with their tracks. Removing my boots, I couldn’t resist walking barefoot in the platter-sized oval prints.

Later, back in our vehicle, we came across an adult with its newborn calf, which tottered through the coastal scrub waving its spindly trunk in the air. As we drove back to camp in the soft light of dusk, we glimpsed other elephants, ghostly grey and wading through patches of open savannah.

The following morning left time for one last walk in the forest before my long journey back to Libreville. We spent three hours seeing nothing but trees. Not that it mattered. Over the past ten days, The Last Eden had slowly, almost stubbornly, revealed its wildlife to me. And the wonderful thing about Gabon is that its forests weave a spell around you. Just when you’re least expecting it, you hear a branch snap, a movement in the bush… and a bull elephant appears, shrouded in his cloak of leaves.