I started explaining why the long silence on the blog – and then started dreaming about that refreshingly deliciously divine showers at the end of long and dusty road....
Dust and hard travel and exhaustion and bush camping for weeks on end – with that in mind, need I say more? When you look at the photographs of the roads we have been on and the places we have been to, did you think it looked like we have had the luxury of internet for the last month? If so, I have not been describing our conditions and situation nearly adequately enough!
We all loved Gabon – we loved the hours of driving through the most lush and green, misty and soft and dreamy countryside of rainforests and green rolling hills as well as the beautifully crafted mud houses in the picturesque villages scattered amongst all this lovely nature. There was a sense of purpose in Gabon too. We never saw any of its mining activity – this is a country rich in iron ore, manganese, chrome, gold and diamonds – and of course logging is big here too, but the activity we did see was in the agricultural field, and albeit on a very small rural scale, there was this sense of 'busy-ness' everywhere. Perhaps it was the fact that everyone seemed to be involved in sowing seed. Normally one would only see the women 'hand-ploughing' the fields – bent over double as they use the short-handled hoes to dig up the furrows needed for sowing. I could never understand why no one uses donkeys or oxen to do the ploughing for them. It may sound like an arrogant remark for you might think: D'oh! Could it be because they don't have donkeys or oxen? But we did see donkeys everywhere in Gabon and large herd of cattle. Yet, we saw no more than three or four farmers using animals to plough the fields – and other than that, every little plot of land that was tilled, was done with this short-handled hoe – by the women. But in Gabon, during the days that we drove through the country, entire families seemed to be out on their fields. The man would be up front with the hoe, turning the soil in the furrows over again to expose the softer soil from underneath the clay crust that has been baking in the sun. Behind him would follow his family – usually the one wife sowing the seed in the fresh soil while the second wife – or the children following her, would sweep the soil over the seed – a light swift movement of the foot in a beautiful rhythm. Once there was a large field where it seemed the whole village population was busy in this process and, standing around, watching over them, militia armed with their rifles. Whether there had been a problem in the area, we were not aware – but somehow the armed soldiers just seemed so incongruous with the rest of the Gabonese pastoral beauty.
Although we did drive through large areas that were included in “protected regions”, we did not stop in any of the 13 game reserves in Gabon; more than 10% of the country had been proclaimed conservation areas and protected land in 2002 by the previous president, Omar Bongo – in what was described at the time as a 'conservation coup'.This brought in eco-investors and started off what could have been amazing ecotourism and revenue for the country, but sadly today a few of these reserves are only accessible by air, as there are very few passable roads in the country – and consequently only accessible to the rich tourist, while the rest of the reserves have never really been developed or maintained.
Gabon was the first country where it became more and more noticeable that there are hardly any wild animals of any kind left in the western side and in central Africa. Even the bird-life – in a country with such abundance of rainforests and lush flora – seems to be almost non-existent. Apparently it is lack of food that has driven the people in the countryside to trap and hunt and kill anything that is edible – even down to the smallest of birds. “If it moves too slow or flies too low,it gets eaten” is the saying here. We have heard that a few times now, but still, as a child of Africa who grew up with an abundance of wild animals and bird-life around me at all times, to not see or hear animals and birds when in the bush, is simply totally unthinkable. Of course we only travelled through the country on the only reasonable road – from north to south, and it would be ridiculous for me to make such a generalisation, but it does seem strange that you can drive for days and days, often not seeing habitation or people for many many kilometres – only virgin bush and vegetation, and never see even as much as a hare or a rabbit, a small antelope – let alone the occasional troupe of monkeys, and never see or hear the occasional birds – of any size or any kind – that is dumbfounding.
I have mentioned this before and no doubt will do so again – as we have noticed the same in the Congo Brazzaville as well as in the DRC – where we have travelled much more extensively across the countries, but I do find it very very strange to be travelling through 'unspoilt' African countryside and not see any animals! And we know there are some out there, not many, but some, for from time to time we do get a glimpse of the sad evidence – bushmeat on sale in the villages alongside the road – small crocodiles, small buck, rodents large and small and once chimpanzees. So, for a country where more than 10% of the land has been set aside as protected area, one would have expected to see the occasional live wild animal. Apparently the most recent president – the son of Omar Bongo – the young and hip Ali '09, as he became known from his election campaign posters, hoped to make ecotourism the main source of income once the Gabonese oil runs dry, but I wonder how he intended to do this if there are no animals left in the ecosystem that is supposed to bring the tourism...
The only place we stopped and spent a little time in Gabon was at Lambarene – the famous home of Albert Schweitzer (– of whom I - and The Tokoloshe made mention before –) but then, all too soon, we continued on our way again and the misty rainforests and mystique of Gabon was behind us.
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