Loango National Park is a stretch of the Atlantic coast of Gabon where the rainforest comes down to the sea, and it is a park because of one long walk. Between 1999 and 2000 the naturalist Mike Fay crossed more than 3,000 kilometres of the Congo Basin on foot to reach this shore, documenting untouched wilderness the whole way. The photographs he brought back, hippos in the surf among them, reached Gabon's president, who in 2002 set aside thirteen national parks at once — close to a tenth of the country. What that protected is a mosaic of forest, savanna, lagoon and beach pressed together. At dusk forest elephants step out of the tree line onto open grassland to feed, sometimes with buffalo beside them, and there is no road, fence or crowd anywhere in sight of you.
Trackers lead small groups on foot through dense forest to a habituated family of western lowland gorillas, under a silverback the guides call Kamaya. He is used to people and often carries on feeding a few metres from the path while you stand and watch. A boat takes you along the Iguéla lagoon, where the rainforest leans over the water and hippos surface between the reeds, with kingfishers and herons on the banks and crocodiles basking on the mud. The sea in front is as busy as the forest behind it. From July to September humpback whales gather offshore to calve after their migration up from the south, breaching and tail-slapping within sight of the sand. From November, leatherback and olive ridley turtles heave out of the surf on dark nights to dig nests high on the beach. The camps are simple tents standing alone where savanna, lagoon and ocean meet, the only shelter for many kilometres, and you fall asleep to the surf and the night calls of the forest. The elephants walking that beach are what all of it comes down to. Forest elephants were confirmed as a separate species in 2021, critically endangered after ivory poaching emptied much of Central Africa, and Gabon still holds well over half the survivors.